reading endings, writing endings, both happy and sad

[lobelia321]

cathexys asked me a question, and my answer ended up as a philosophical ramble about fic endings.

I know the ending of my HP opus now. In fact, I know two endings: one happy, one not, and it will affect the tone of the rest whether I opt for comedy or tragedy. (Comedy in the Dantean sense: something that goes from bad to good, not in the sitcom sense.)

I'm quite excited about my ending; the opus didn't have an ending before, it just sort of fizzled out -- and I believe in strong endings, big climaxes, and love it when I happen upon the perfect last line. Which I haven't yet but I've got the ending (two endings).

And no, I will not post both endings.

I realised that I didn't like the two-endings post-modern approach to posting when zarah5 did it some two years ago with a lotrips fic (especially as I really liked the rest of the fic). I like to relax into a story. I like to feel in the capable hands of the author. I may not know where the fic is heading but the author knows. I don't like to come up against indecision; to me, that is a cop-out and a breaking of the contract between author and reader. I as reader don't want to have to make up my mind about the ending! That's the author's job! I love getting an insight into the working process; it's what I've loved about the online writing life, that you see how things are made as well as the final product. But when it comes down to it and when the final posting is made, I want the author to have expended enough serious thought on the fic to know the ending. She can always put the alternative ending in a DVD commentary or something if she feels the need to.

As to my own two endings, thinking about them has sharpened my perception about the fic and about the characters. I can't have two alternative endings. Two alternative endings would mean two alternative fics as the ending should (I think) arise logically and seemingly inevitably out of the characters and what they have done up to the ending. Otherwise, the ending is not aesthetically satisfying.

So my choices are two:

1) Write the happy ending. This makes most people happy and will gain me more readers. This also makes me happy. I started sifting through all my fics in my head and they all have happy endings. (Except for one of my unfinished WIPs.) Happy endings are satisfying and moving and make me want to re-read, and they lend a happy glow to life.

On the other hand, if you have a triangle story, it will have to end unhappily for somebody. So it becomes a decision about whom to sacrifice. T'HP opus is a triangle story. A Perfect Day was a triangle story, and a lot of readers were dismayed that one of the pairing-characters lost out to the other pairing-character. So even though for me and for the guys that got each other that was the right and the happy ending, it wasn't so happy for they guy who didn't get the guy.

2) So I could write the sad ending. Sad endings resonate and have a certain gritty reality factor. They seem more 'real' than the happy endings. They make readers shout and plead and react. They make readers continue the stories in their heads in order to force a happy ending later down the line. I have loved some sad-ending stories but I tend not to re-read them because they are too upsetting.

Otoh, the two characters whom I want to bring together for my happy ending are not beloved of most readers, so readers may actually think that the sad ending (where this particular pairing is torn asunder) is the happier one!

See? It's not simple! But it's interesting. And it makes me ponder the characters. Because in the end only they can tell me how they're going to act and what the ending is going to be. And the way they're going to act arises from the way they are, and they are that way from the first line of the fic. And I can't have two alternative beginnings as well!

Well, I could but I'm not writing When on a winter's night a traveller -- which is, btw, one of my top ten novels and omg, it was the inspiration for one of my other top ten novels, as I found out only today.

Comments

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. But you're so keen on reading narrative experiment - why not write it? Or is it just double endings you shy away from? I mean, it's not as though, say, John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman is not firmly under authorial control, or that both endings don't arise naturally out of the characters' motivation and interaction...?

And, if it's a triangle epic, the HP I mean, well, you already have two endings, a happy for the OTP, and a sad for the unpaired Mr X.

(My guess is Crabbe gets Dudley and they live happily ever after, while Goyle, after a brief (but extremely highly-sexed) dalliance with Draco Malfoy, is left to hurl himself into the arms of the Whomping Willow.)

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

This is interesting because I was pondering just this yesterday: why am I not writing more experimentally? The most experimental fic I've written was that insect one . It was phenomenal fun to write and I really, really liked it when I'd finished it. I think I liked it too much because I went into a downward spiral along the lines of: 'I can never write anything this good again.' (This was also about the time that my depression started so the downward spiral had a sort of Pavlovian effect.) I then, totally mistakenly, went on to spin out the arthropod series into what became the never-ended, never-posted, tormented Karl/Dom saga, and I think that twisted sequel to arthropods had an averse effect on my experimentation lust. And then someone said, well, you'll lose readers if you're too experimental, and someone else said this was a dead-end if I wanted to continue writing affectative fiction (now I'm not even sure what that person meant by that term).

Anyway. My HP opus is certainly very conventional, prose-wise. I've been timid, partly also because it is a new fandom. Thanks so much, though, for chiming in with a tiny little thought I've had myself! Perhaps I will try and go back to being a bit more dare-devil. Otoh, I also wanted to see if I could just write a straightforward plot -- I've not been very good on plot so far. And one thing I admire in the Calvino and especially in David Mitchell and in the third star on my fictional firmament, Anne Marie McDonald, is the way they forge plots like complex pieces of architecture.

I haven't read French Lieutenant's Woman and I'm not sure I want to as I read Fowler's The Magus which I thought was a pile of pretentious crap. The thing is if the novel bears a dual ending as a germ in its beginning: then that's fine, that's not a cop-out, that is authorial control. But my HP opus isn't like that. I have the sense that the ending bears the key to the secret of the characters.

*laughs about Crabbe, Goyle and Dudley*
Crabbe and Goyle feature only as secondary characters in this fic. The triangle is Harry/Draco/Dudley. Now which pairing out of those would be 'happy' to you, and which 'sad'? *g*

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

Oh, The Magus is dire. The French Lieutenant's Woman is a much better book, mostly because it marries genuinely credible Victorian characters, setting and (love-triangle) plot, written in the style of a less self-censoring Thackeray, with twentieth-century musings on our construction and falsification of the Victorians and lots of social history. Most fun to be reading what appears to be an unexceptional paragraph of a Victorian novel, only to have it delve into the sexual history of the hero in much frankness, or to footnote the various forms of birth control available at the time of the story's setting (sausage skin condoms...)

Your insect fic was a joy. I got off entirely on the phallic mosquito's proboscis. Did you get much fb on that, or did it blow minds all over LJ?

I'm just amazed you're writing Harry - I don't think of you as being at all a Harry person. Maybe I'm exaggerating your Strange Pairings thing. I would've said you were all about Filch and the Fat Lady, or a Crookshanks/Dementor/Whomping Willow threesome.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I have read a lot about the Lieutenant's Woman as if seems every Tom, Dick and Harry needs to cite it when writing 'How to write a novel' manuals, and none of it has grabbed my attention. I fear what you write also just turns me off -- footnotes in a novel, yuk. I suppose if I hadn't already read the Magus I'd feel more open-minded... I've had it in my hand a few times but it seemed stodgy and very male in a bad way.

Thank you for comment on insect fic. May I take that as feedback?? *desperate to grab at any fallen crumb* Much fb: well, I can tell you exactly in true academic pedantry. And also because I am an anal fb archivist. I got 24 fbs. This is respectable for me, and I am happy with it for that fic. It was the last in a (mini-)series, and a series tends to get some fb simply on the merit of having collected some loyal readers. The people who'd read the series up to then tended to like it and no, haha, it didn't 'blow minds all over LJ'. Heh, I wish... I don't have that kind of clout. My loyal Friends list read it.

But it sort of pushed me into a dead-end, as I said. I hardly dare re-read it now.

And you are right, I am not a Harry person. I have tampered so much with the characters that to me they feel like orig almost. I've tampered with fanon and canon. The fic started life as a Karl/Dom (I seem to remember) but that pairing didn't work, so I tried a few others and suddenly, wham, it was Harry/Ron and my mind went click-click-click. I'd never considered HP-fic until then. So I wrote the first chapter and Harry/Ron felt wrong, wrong,wrong. Also, I needed Draco. So I inserted Draco, and then I discovered that Draco was me (my Sue!) and then Harry started to feel wrong, and I can't even remember how, but before I knew it, there was Dudley. Maybe I just can't help it; I gravitate towards the rare.

But I don't just like the rare for its weirdness value. The rarest thing I've written was Kiran Shah (do you remember that? the stunt-double for Frodo), and what Iearned from writing that is that I don't like writing the rare for sheer weirdness value; I've got to find something compelling and human about them; there's a sort of moral to the rare for me. Everybody writes teh pretty and teh manly and teh hot, and the rare, for me, is an affirmation of the fact that yes, fat people have sex lives, too, and short people and really old people and even orcs have a strange emotional life and can have poignancy.

Also, Dudley's a Muggle and maybe I was just sick of wizards thinking they're the navel of the earth.

Oh, and dementors! They are also nice! In fact, I started a dementor fic the other day. The Kiss of Death! I mean, how slashy is that. And Crabbe/Goyle, I do read any Crabbe/Goyle I can lay hands on.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

see...that's much more what i was thinking of when i suggested the double pairings...in fact, FLW ws very clearly at the top of my mind :-) or even just the knowledge that there were two Great Expectation endings...

it's not like the entire text is Choose your own adventure but that the ones who'll only read happy wendings get theirs and the ones who're willing to take a chance another.

philosophically, I think that fanfic in and of itself is the potentiality of all the different endings...it is by definition repetition with a differnce...but i'm retreading old ground and will shut up now :-)

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

As I said to childeproof above, the French L's Woman does not grab me. I have not read it but I don't want to. It sounds too contrived.

I see your point about the endings but that doesn't work for me. I would need some other examples (that I've read, heh). Ultimately, I as a reader construct one ending. Even if a fic presents me with two, I will discount one of them or value one of them as just that much more likely. In Zarah's fic it was the first ending I read that seemed the 'definitive' one to me, and the other one was a 'version'. Sometimes, especially in films (Rashomon!) I tend to take the final 'version' as the 'true' version, simply by virtue of its coming last. This goes back to Aristotle: every good plot has a beginning, middle and end. And the end is what comes last. If there are alternative endings, one of them will inevitably come last and the others will be part of the 'middle'. Aristotle wisely didn't say that a plot has a beginning, middle and two endings. I agree with Aristotle.

So I don't enjoy reading two-version-endings, and for this fic in particular I can't write one. Because either the characters love each other or they don't. There's no half-way house. And that I can only decide by trekking all the way back through the fic and figuring out what is going on with their emotions subterraneously.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

Ultimately, I as a reader construct one ending and i think that's what usually happens...and that's ok...still, even if you choose one, you can't unremember the other ones :-) again, i think i just love the resonance of different possibilities...just like ff...after all, we take the same darn scene and tell it again

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

and again and again... (sorry, i must have hit enter before i was done :-)

but i can understand why you as a writer might not like it. and ultimately it is *your* decision and *your* desires that are central, right? :-)

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

and ultimately it is *your* decision and *your* desires that are central, right?
Yeah, unless I'm called Roland Barthes and argh.

*dies death of an author*

btw, I love Barthes, I love Foucault, I taught them today, but doing the narratological analysis made me realise that all those theorists have a lot to say about the reader but precious little about the writer. And an allround febulous theory (are you getting the allusion? are you?) needs to account for the writerly process as well. Gads, I can't even quite remember my arguments about that now but I had some once...

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

oh, would love to hear your argument :-)

of course, i'm more invested in the reader, b/c i feel that for too long the author was the only interpreter of his work...but again, that's why ff is so fabulous! b/c it totally exemplifies barthes' readerly and writerly texts, doesn't it? readers become writers become readers...

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Pogrebin's Walking Shadow!! (Note my rec pimp post! *g*) Now there the multiple endings *work*, because they are -- I'll just say this in German, shall I? Die sind schon im Anfang angelegt. They're woven into the texture from the very beginning. That's not what happens in my fic, though, so this type of ending is not an option.

Although.... Hm. I've just had a few ideas. Hah.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

yeah, you're right,...there's the type of fic where it really is just choose your own adventure ending, and then there are fics that thematize the inability to provide closure, the various levels of narrative, truth and fiction, the entire pomo bladibla...and there it fits... *gotta think some more about the difference :-)*

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

the ones who'll only read happy wendings get theirs and the ones who're willing to take a chance another.
Again, I think I see what you mean but I'm the one who has to be satisfied first and foremost. I tend to be happiest with a happy ending which is why I'm thinking that maybe the happy ending is wrong for this fic. It's what I desperately want for this pairing but perhaps it's not what the fic needs. So thinking through these two endings is helping me to control and curb my rampant desire for moosh.

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly, or the ending of Villette, which Charlotte Bronte softened from straightforward narration of the death of Paul Emmanuel into a kind of quite sarcastic and challenging jigsaw whereby we can either put this together ourselves from the clues she gives us (the banshee wind, the Atlantic strewn with wrecks) or take the soft option of 'leaving sunny imaginations hope'...

Could I possibly read your journal? I went to look up your musings on fandom and repetition with difference (which I think is quite right) but can't read the most recent things. Lobelia will vouch for me that I am not insane, do not flood my friends' list with the unbosomings of a generally bad-tempered academic any more than is reasonable, and that my fic, all LOTRIPS to date, while it may not be to your taste nonetheless does not suffer from misplaced apostrophes or misapprehensions about they're/their/there.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

ARGH! i just had this very engaging, witty, intelligent response to your comment about my RL needs to flock, my now justifications in doing so, fantexts, repetition, multifannishness and academics, throwing in a bit of pimping and trying to find out if you work in fanfic studies...it was long and interesting...and lj ate it.

so i'll just say, of course, i welcome a fellow academic, though i have yet to read any lotrips (and not for lack of fans on my flist either :-) my journal tends to be more meta than fandom specific though my primary fandoms atm are SV, pop, and HP (with a bit of CSI and WW thrown in recently)...but that may change next week...

looking fwd to hear you grouch about students and grading :-)

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

That was prompt.

LJ needs to stabilise its blood sugar; it's getting terribly munchy. I suppose this should make us all Wildean and epigrammatic, but I don't see any signs of it in my case...

Am not currently in fan fic studies of any kind. I work on Big Bad Male Modernists mostly, though have given the occasional graduate seminar on fanfic, textuality and gender - but am addicted to gross generalisation and theorising about any of my pursuits with great pedantry and enjoyment, and look forward to your meta-thoughts. I do read HP, though have not ventured to slide so much as a cardigan from Lupin's shoulders on my own account...

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

well, it was my between class and picking up kids lj time :-)

oh, male modernist:-) i just taught *see icon*...

well, since i don't *write* in any fandom, i can't really say i'm in any thing at all in the purest sense. in fact, it took me years, before i would dare call myself a slasher, b/c i wasn't activiely, y'know, slashing :-)

hp truly is the fandom that ate the world. at times it really scares me, b/c it seems to deny much of what came before and has the voice to do so. then again, i think lj in general allows for more multifannishness and multivocality...

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

I was about to retort 'How can this gorgeous pre-Raphaelite creature in plaits be a male modernist?' but I have looked further and spied your TSE icon. It's somehow an utter scream to see his pained-and-possumish expression on LJ.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

i like a smart woman who can overcome *my* stupidity :-) i was running late picking up my boys and posted without changing the icon...i love my eliot and his hatred of reader-response :-) [i just lost my extended icons and had to throw out 35 icons, but good ole ts definitely had to stay!!!]

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Eeep, I matchmade two academics!

What is it that in a whole huge world of LJ with thousands of users we academics end up gravitating pathetically towards each other, like metal shavings??

Whee.

All I can say is I'm glad I'm not in litcrit. No temptation to breathe even so much as a fannish sigh in t'field of 19th-century painting!

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

that's what *you* say :-) i'm sure there are some lovely, lovely guys immortalized on canvas that could be slashed :D

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

*bursts out laughing*

Actually...

*bursts out laughing some more*

What I meant was not the art, actually. Because that can indeed be rather slasherific. What I meant was that I am not tempted to teach anything fannish. I'm not tempted to have students analyse slash or read Whatsername Penley. No, these are worlds apart: t'slash and t'academe. For me.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Interesting about HP being the fandom that ate the world and cultivates amnesia. I'm wondering whether I haven't posted any HP fic for the reason that I am very intimidated by the fandom. So I welcome this kind of comment to remind myself that there is life outside HP! They can be very arrogant, those HPers, it's true, and they tend to appropriate stuff! Rabid canonishness!

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

LOL...shhhh...don't let *them* hear you :-)

check this post...i thought there were some interesting comments :-)

but yes, i cherish the variety and even though i don't read too many, sth like the yuletide project is marvelous, i think!!!

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Oh, and Big Bad Male Modernists? Can you send one of those along, too? With his Big Bad Male Member?

*drools* (in suitably modernist fashion, of course)

[childeproof.livejournal.com]

I suppose you could do a modernist RPG based on the Bloomsbury Group...
Rather polite orgies and Lytton Strachey coming in at intervals, pointing at stains and saying 'Semen?'

I occasionally feel like reinventing my modernism courses with only women, but would need to include Dorothy Richardson and truly cannot face teaching all eleven thousand parts of Pilgrimage, stream of consciousness or no stream of consciousness.

[brightest-blue.livejournal.com]

See, why do I feel that you're lucky to have a choice? Maybe because I don't have a choice with my fic. Although I do see the difficulties. I always vote for happy, when possible, but I think you'll know which ending is the right one when you have it all put together. One or the other will give you greater satisfaction in some way and hopefully that will decide it for you.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

Thank you, for some reason this is really helpful. You're right, in a way I can't know the ending until I've arrived there with the writing. It's kind of exciting, not to know what will happen! (But very good to have an outline of might happen. I didn't have that before.)

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

And eep,you've given away your ending!!! And here I was biting my fingernails in case there was going to be character death!!!

[brightest-blue.livejournal.com]

Who said anything about character death? *g* Just not the happiest ending, unless I do write the sequel, and then all bets are off!

[sheldrake.livejournal.com]

1. I can think of at least one fic I loved that ended horribly sadly (Big Rock Candy Mountain by Basingstoke - although it won't make any sense if you don't know Buffy), but I doubt I could bear to read it again.

2. I'm really looking forward to reading your not-beloved pairing!

3. Thinking about it, I don't particularly enjoy having to make choices when reading. I'm a lazy reader. I want to have all the hard work done for me. Part of why I read is the desire to be taken out of my own life for a while, and having to make a choice about the way I want the story to end just forces me back into my everyday, what-shall-I-have-for-dinner, what-shall-I-wear-today self. Anyway, I hate making decisions.

4. Experimental writing. Interesting. My thoughts: I enjoy experimenting because it seems to keep my brain alive and stop me getting bogged down in my own writing (this is assuming I ever write anything ever again). Sometimes people also enjoy reading it (ie. Arthropods which did blow my mind a bit actually so there). And sometimes they don't (I got some feedback today from someone who said they simply 'didn't get' a fic I wrote, which I'm finding rather interesting. I have yet to decide whether they didn't get it because of a fault in my story-telling, or because it just wasn't the story for them. Hmm...)

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

1. I'll earmark this. Although if it makes no sense... The most horrendous ending I remember reading is mistful's The Dark Side of Light (HP), and although I was very impressed with it at the time and it's stayed with me as something that dares to 'go all the way', I'm not sure I could bear to re-read.

2. If I ever get there.... Grrr. Maybe writing the whole thing experimentally is the answer as it will do away with the need for plot-filling. What would have needed to be done realistically, can be done more efficiently through massaging the prose. At least, that's my deluded hope.

3. having to make a choice about the way I want the story to end just forces me back into my everyday, what-shall-I-have-for-dinner, what-shall-I-wear-today self.
Exactly!!!! That is exactly it. Reading fic is Not-Reality, that is the whole joy of it for me. In a way, the delight of writing fic is total control (which is Not-Reality) and the delight of reading fic is total no-need-for-control (which is Not-Reality). Oh, it's so sub-dom and dom-sub! Wow, *stuns self with philosopical insights at 12.55 pm*

4. Thank you for the gratuitous Arthropods fb thrown in there! *is very happy* What's the fic that the reader 'didn't get', just for curiosity's sake?

[sheldrake.livejournal.com]

What's the fic that the reader 'didn't get', just for curiosity's sake?

Oh, it was the zine fic. Quite frankly, I was just happy to hear someone had read it! :)