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Multiple Endings: a How-to Guide

April 18, 2022

affect, creativity, ending, fiction, literature, writing

Remember my post on narrative endings? I there argued that narrative endings and physical endings are not necessarily one and the same. In reality, there are more than one ways to end a novel. And having multiple endings is a great way to increase the affective impact of your narrative.

So, what do we I mean by “multiple endings”? Let’s start by what I don’t mean: A Clue-like style set of actual different endings (in the form of, say, different chapters). I’m not interested in that, and though I wouldn’t want to deter anyone from trying different things, I’m not entirely sure whether it’d work.

What I mean by multiple endings in a narrative is the presence of interpretatively more than one alternatives; open-endedness; allowing the possibility that things aren’t quite what they seem. Think of the ending of Inception, with the spinning top, and you’d have a simple, masterful example of how a single, mundane object can throw the entire narrative in disarray.

So let’s take a look at multiple endings: what’s their effect, how to gauge whether you need them, and how it all comes together.

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“Turtles All the Way Down”: The Problem of Infinite Regress

April 11, 2022

Philosophy

anthropocentrism, infinite regress, infinity, metaphysics, philosophy, truth

Forget about the existence of God, life after death, the meaning of life. There is only one real question in philosophy – and no, with apologies to Albert Camus, it’s not about suicide. It’s the problem of infinite regress, particularly in a metaphysical framework.

“Turtles all the way down” is a metaphor used to explicate the problem of infinite regress in metaphysics. There are many variants, but the basic idea is that someone (usually a member of a so-called primitive tribe), when asked about the origin or existence of Earth, argues that the world rests on a giant turtle. Faced with the question, but where then does that turtle stand on, he replies: “You don’t fool me, it’s turtles all the way down“.

To us modern Westerners, the problem of infinite regress usually appears when, as children perhaps raised to believe in the existence of God, we wonder: “But who made God?” We were never offered an answer, because there was none. “God was always there”, came the usual non-reply.

But even those of us (such as myself) who don’t believe in a supreme being, are still deeply troubled by infinite regress. It just doesn’t feel right, as we’ll see in this post.

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Adapting to Your Audience In Writing: a Bad Idea

April 4, 2022

Writing

creativity, fiction, intended audience, literature, writing

“Adapt to your audience” is a sentence I’ve seen used by many so-called writing advisors. It’s a bad idea to begin with, for any artistic context. But adapting to your audience in writing is a truly awful idea, for reasons we’ll examine.

Let’s get some definitions out of the way first: What do we mean by “adapting to your audience”? This basically means to take readers’ feedback into consideration and alter the work accordingly.

For advance readers (that is, beta readers) this means modifying your novel to suit the (extrapolated) audience’s desires, even before publishing. Otherwise, it means taking feedback and reviews into consideration and “give people what they want” in the future.

Either option is awful. Let’s see why.

Adapting to your audience is easy if that is an abstract **intended** audience (existing in your head), because the audience is then a homogeneous, controllable – by you – entity. Hardly the case in real life

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