Them Pesky Books

[thebitterguy]

Hmmm. There's a thread over on RPG.net called "... but he's not very good at endings."

This post was made in the course of the discussion:

This is so completely wrong that I don't even know where to begin. Done telling the story = the story is completed and while there may be lots of secondary things going on that you could keep investigating, they are not the story you were telling.

I think that's actually wrong. If there's all these secondary things that are significant enough and presented in such a way that people are left wanting them explored, not exploring them is kind of not finishing the book. That's sort of what editors are supposed to do, right?

I mean, it's always possible for there to be stuff left for further investigation, especially if it's a franchise, but overall the main and sub plots should be wrapped up well enough that there's satisfaction on the reader's part, right?

I guess it's just the concept of "lots of secondary things" sounds like a fairly cluttered and sloppy story.

Comments

[innocent-man.livejournal.com]

It's also worth remembering that an RPG is not a book, or a movie, or a TV show, or a video game. It's an RPG, and that means the story structure works a little differently.

Case in point: Little plot hooks do get dangled around and possibly ignored and never followed up, if the players aren't interested.

By narrative standpoints, most of the games I've played in or run are sloppy. I actually prefer that - if a game is too tight, it usually means the GM isn't giving us enough breathing room.

[thebitterguy]

Yeah, but this is a Tangency thread about novels, not a gaming thread.

[innocent-man.livejournal.com]

See, now, I didn't click on the thread, and I had a fleeting moment where I thought "He is talking about games, yeah? Ah, probably."

Shows what I know.

[indefatigable42.livejournal.com]

Part of good story-crafting, if what you want to create is a complete story, is tying up loose ends. Or, alternately, not creating loose ends and sideplots that the reader will get caught up in but that you never mean to follow up on.

The last Harry Potter book led me to believe that J.K. Rowling wants her fans to write fanfic, because the ending was just that unsatisfying and full of blanks begging to be filled in.

[thebitterguy]

I believe JKR likes fanfic because she could have orbital laser beams vapourize every HP Fanfic writer within 48 hours if she wanted to.

[vampyrehunterm.livejournal.com]

I tend to get annoyed when the book ends but there's still all this stuff that the author just decided not to bother doing any thing else with. I always get the impression that the writer just got tired of writing the damn thing and said, "screw it, I'm done, and I don't care if there's anything left hanging."
Or sometimes the ending just comes across as a cop-out.
Unless the author plans on a sequel, and specifically lets it be known that there's another part of the story in the works, then it's marginally less annoying.

[shara.livejournal.com]

I don't know, I'm with the OP. A good, well-crafted world will have 3-dimentional characters with lives in them - not necessarily the kinds of things which can all be packaged up neat and tight within the scope of the book. Some of the worst books out there are the ones where the authors obsess over all these trivialities... who winds up with who, revealing everyone's ghosts and demons, full revelation of all background elements. That kind of thing is not always relevant. In a well-done world, there are always more questions. The story is not the full scope of the world.

That's not to say major sub-plots should be abandoned - but I don't think that's what the OP was saying. It's more that, to use the obvious Harry Potter reference, if we never knew about Snape/Lily's past, we would be no worse off for it. For the ZOMGsuperotaku it's a neat reveal, but it's not actually necessary to the story.

Wanting these neat, contrived and all-knowing stories just seems to be a hallmark of fandom and badly-edited fantasy pulp.

[brand-of-amber.livejournal.com]

You seen No Country For Old Men?

[thebitterguy]

Not yet.

[koipond.livejournal.com]

I'm of the belief that if you create a world, even something based of the real world, there are interesting things happening all the time that you can't fully explore. Particularly if they're not the focus of your story, this makes for loose ends when you're done. When a story has none I get bored because I can't talk about it afterwards, it's all finished wrapped up in a neat little box.

Blech. Boring.

Now, that's not to say you can't overdo it. It's a fine line between having intentional loose ends and loose ends because you tried to do too much. I think that may be where you're coming from. The well crafted story has loose ends that leave you hanging but don't detract from the finality of the story you're telling. A poorly crafted story has loose ends for the sake of having loose ends.

I'm rambling and it's late, but that's what I've got.