To resolve or not to resolve… that is the question

August 21, 2012

Here’s an interesting tweet I saw yesterday.

If I'm reading a crime novel I expect the ending to resolve all plot points, not to create a new plot for the next novel.—
Rowan Whiteside (@DilysTolfree) August 20, 2012

This hearfelt plea came after the reader had finished a book only to discover it had a cliffhanger ending and then, just to rub things in apparently, the first chapter of the next book as a come-on to keep reading. Is that acceptable? Should readers really be treated like this?

In my view… no, but with reservations. Let’s deal with the pre e-book situation first. Before digital came along most of us produced one book a year maximum. If you put a cliffhanger at the end of one book you were saying to the reader, ‘OK. You have to wait twelve months before you can even think of discovering where this one is going.’

That really pushes everyone’s patience. It’s impractical and  downright cheeky. My Costa books are standalone stories with an underlying tale beneath the surface, that of the relationship between the people involved. I think they need that underlying thread because without the sense of some dynamic at a personal level they’d all be puppets trapped in amber. But a continuing personal story is a long way from a ‘who did it, what comes next’ cliffhanger.

That was then. Today, in the digital age, books come out much more quickly. Is a cliffhanger acceptable if the gap between books is six months, not twelve? I still don’t think so frankly, though others may disagree. But…

What about digital books that appears in serial fashion? One long story, perhaps with sub-stories, told month by month, or even week by week? That could be interesting and I’m sure there are plenty of people working on it already.

At the same time I think we can take the resolution issue a bit too seriously. I agree that most things should resolve at the end of a story. But not all.

As Sacheverell Sitwell wrote (and I quoted in Carnival for the Dead), ‘It’s the mystery that lasts, not the explanation.’ We’ve rather lost that attitude today. If every plot point has to be neatly tied up at the end of the tale it can feel as if you’re reading a business plan, not a work of fiction. Life doesn’t resolve and is frequently quite inexplicable. Why should fairy stories that pretend to represent it be any different?

Some of the most compelling stories are made stronger by their refusal to buckle down to resolution. One of my favourites films, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, leaves any number of threads wide open. It’s the better for that too, though if Hitch was making it for cinema today I bet some teenage producer would demand he tie up rather more than he had to back in the 1950s.

The visual media are less hung up about resolution than we are in books. One of the issues I faced when I was writing The Killing lay in this area. On TV we discovered at the end who killed Nanna Birk Larsen. But we never did find out why. I felt a book needed that information, which was the principal reason I gave my version of the story a completely different ending.

But there are still a few dangling threads and really, I don’t mind them. We’re writing fairy tales for the mind, not narrative spreadsheets in which every column must add up perfectly. At least… I am, or trying to.

2 Responses to “To resolve or not to resolve… that is the question”

1. Pat August 21, 2012

   I don’t need every plot point tied, which is just as well, because most stories don’t seem to tie ends these days.
   The worst ‘cliff-hanger’ I experienced was with Philip Pullman when I read His Dark Materials YA trilogy and got quite cross. Northern Lights didn’t finish properly, but it did have a reasonable ending. The Subtle Knife didn’t finish at all and I had to wait almost a year for The Amber Spyglass.
   But Tolkein did it too. We forget that, because all those books are readily available, but it must have been a nightmare for his readers back then.

2. Christina August 21, 2012

   As for me all th Nic Costa stories are complete, at the end we find out the killer, the reason, some background history of the crime, yes, we’re just left with what’s happening with characters in-between these stories and that’s what makes them series.
   As far as this ‘first chapter of the next book’ is concerned, personally I see nothing inacceptable. Besides it’s for a reader to choose whether to read it or not. I still dislike digital versions, I need to have a book in my hand, to feel it, to see it on the shelf among the others. And though some years ago it was difficult for me to get the next book, still I prefered to read the beginning. It provides some food for thought and imagination. Then it’s interesting to read the book and see how the story differs from what you’ve thought and imagined before.
   And still it seems to me that dangling threads depend on a story. Sometimes you feel it really should be left unexplained, open… but sometimes you understand that a story shoud be completed and everything or at least almost everything should be explained to the reader.

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