Okay, picture this: You're a contestant on a game show, and your
challenge is to run an obstacle courser. It's a really strange one,
and you've got a crowd of people standing in front of it, and they
will decide whether you win or lose. It's a big crowd, too.
First, you get up on a stage, and you have to get the crowd
interested. So you tell them a scary story about a family living in
a haunted house, and how your heroes were smart enough to solve the
mystery, and kind enough to be gentle to the people who had the best
of intentions when they started it. You've got 'em.
Then you're off. You climb up a narrow beam, carefully balancing
between falling one way or the other. You run at breakneck speed
toward solid walls, nimbly finding some way over, under, or around
them at the last minute. Far above the crowd, you get progressively
farther out on ledges, somehow always able to keep from falling.
Through the whole thing, you've been moving in roughly the same
direction. At the end of the course that you're headed toward there
are two posts with a ribbon tied across them and a big sign above
them that says 'Finish.' You spring over the last obstacle in your
way and dash along the straight, open path. At the last minute, you
come to a dead stop and run off in a different direction. You go to
a tree that no one was paying any attention to, slap it like a kid
playing tag, and take your bows in front of the crowd.
By the way, did I mention my wife and I watched 'Red Lights' on
Netflix last week?
Most of the time when you tell a story, you're going somewhere. Cast
your mind way back to geometry class and see yourself drawing your
story like a line on a sheet of graph paper. You start at a point,
and go in a certain direction for a certain distance. (So it's a ray
illustrating a vector, if you remember all those terms) Even if you
wibble around and don't go in a straight line, your reader can still
see the graph in their heads. They can see where you started, and
where you finished. They'll probably even draw their own simplified,
straighter line to remember the story. So if you curve, have a
reason.
But if you only curve a little (and some curving is a good thing),
your reader soon gets an idea where you're headed before you get
there. If you curve a lot, it takes longer, but most will eventually
figure out the direction that you're going. This is a good thing.
People enjoy having a certain amount of knowledge about how a story
is going to end. Not all of it, but a certain amount. Letting them
pick out the point of the ending, on their own, makes them
emotionally invested. They're gambling with a bit of their own
happiness.
So if you zip along in a straight line at the end and then suddenly
go in a different direction and stop, your audience has invested with
you and lost. How likely are you to keep investing with a broker
that lost your money?
Given that, why would someone change directions at the last minute
like that? Well, imagine you're the one running the obstacle course.
The whole point of this is to please the audience. (You want them to
keep investing with you!) So, right as you step out to wait for the
signal to start the course, you take a good look at them, just to see
if you can judge what they might be in the mood for.
They're all wearing masks; big, plain white ones with tiny holes for
eyes. They don't even have any features. You have no idea if the
people are smiling, frowning, or laughing while you risk life and
limb for their amusement. Because we're using this as an analogy for
making a film or writing a book, we can include the fact that you can
have either test screenings or beta readers. But all that does is
pull one or two people from the audience at those times that you take
a quick break and have those people take off their masks for a minute
while you ask them if they like how things are going so far. You
don't get to run the whole course, and then do it again differently
if most of the people didn't like it. You get one shot per course.
Period.
So you better know ahead of time if the audience will appreciate your
little twist that you think is the coolest thing ever. If you're a
film-maker, you need to watch other films and learn how their
audiences reacted. If you're a writer, you better read other books
in your genre and know if the audience liked them or not. The people
who went to see those film-makers/writers run their courses are the
same ones who will be watching you.
By the way, a bit of research on the web shows that there might
be an alternate ending to 'Red Lights.' I hope so.
Still writing.
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