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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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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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Mediocre Fiction: Why Is There so Much of It?

March 28, 2022

Writing

capitalism, fiction, literature, society, writing

Mediocrity is one of the things that occupy much of my time – on the blog and otherwise. We’re surrounded by mediocrity, and there are clear, simple reasons for this, which I’ll talk about in this post. More importantly, for the topics of the blog, what concerns me is mediocre fiction.

The whole concept is somewhat tricky. After all, I’ve claimed that:

You get the idea…

So, if literature is very hard to approach objectively, how can we speak of mediocre fiction? To put it another way, what makes mediocre fiction… mediocre?

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