Necessary Stupidity

So many of these posts start out as discussions with my wife. We were having lunch today, I was shooting a story idea at her, and we ended up going back and forth about the stupid things that we see fictional characters do. It happens in pretty much all the different genre, but we see it in horror and thriller movies and stories primarily. The worlds where bad things happen.

For my two cents, we all have various degrees of empathy for our fellow human beings. We see them driving expensive cars, read about how many of them have lost their jobs, and see them begging in the streets. We can say to ourselves, 'That's life.' We move on. But sometimes something horrendous happens. The kind of something that shocks us out of our comfort zone.

Because newspapers and sleazy book publishers want to make money (and I can empathize with that, at least), they write about these horrible things, and they put a lot of energy into making us feel them. They give the details that make us cringe and shudder, but it's our reactions that I'll focus on here. I read Yahoo news a lot, and when I read a story where something bad happened, I'll often also read the comments that people post. A huge amount of them pick the story apart, finding little things that the victim did that they imply contributed to it. Some of them even post assumptions or guesses that do the same. Victim blaming? Yes. But why?

Back to scary books and movies. Nine times out of ten, the innocent people do something dumb. We see them go into the old, dark, house. They pick up the spooky artifact or read from the ancient book that's lying out. They split up. Again, why?

The characters in these horror stories may be dumb, but I don't think the people writing or producing them are. They want you to buy their product, so they put some thought into making it something that you would want to buy. Similarly, we can complain about how dumb people are in general, but most don't usually make dumb decisions that would put them in harm's way, and we know that.

Remember when I described how people create their own worlds in their heads? In order to be able to get up out of bed in the morning and fall asleep at night, most people convince themselves of something: that the world is basically a safe place, and that if they just play by 'the rules,' they'll be safe. Nothing bad will happen to them. They have to believe that.

Now maybe some writers do it on purpose, maybe some do it on instinct without being consciously aware of it, and maybe some do it just because that's what everyone else does. But the fact that so many people do it, leads me to think I'm on the right track when I say there is a reason for the stupid choices that victims in horror stories make. That gives our audience something to grab hold of and say, 'That person isn't me. I would never do something that dumb. The horrible things that I'm seeing can't happen to me.'

I advocated for the dumb heroine in an earlier post, comparing the mistakes we see that stereotype character make to what might happen in real life. But, as I pointed out at the end, she doesn't exist in real life. She's a part of something we read or watch for entertainment, and when that entertainment is horror a lot of us need a buffer between what happens to her (or him) and them. That way it stays entertainment, and doesn't become something to worry about. That way, it's something that we buy, and might remember later when we see something else by the same writer.

So now, let me go write something like that.

The ending is where you hit, or miss

If I write all the way up until it's time to go to bed, I won't be able to sleep. So I try to knock off in time to be able to watch a movie most nights before I need to crash. Lately I've been giving Netflix it's day in court, trying to find out if their stable of horror movies is up to par. Part of the reason I don't watch more movies than I do is because I hate getting my hopes up and then seeing a finale that makes me think the director suddenly realized he only had ten more minutes of film.

So what are some of the elements that make a good ending? It should end the story, it should give us resolution. We should know what happened to all the major characters, and, if they're still alive, we should have a good idea of what they'll be doing in the next few weeks, or months.

(I'm including the denouement in this discussion. That's where we usually get hints of the future)

The questions and issues that have been brought up during the story need to be answered. The ending is where the reader gets the return on their investment of emotion in all the characters and places that we've created, and as such, needs to speak to the reader's needs and feelings.

Most of us have ideas about how the universe/fate/God's will should behave. Even if we believe it doesn't work like that, we know it should. These are the feelings that the end of a story works on, and what makes us think about it with a smile when we're driving to go see someone we like, or snicker about it with our friends while we're doing grunt work at our day jobs. If the character whom we all love makes it to the end with a few scars, we'll feel our bond with him was justified if we already believe that a person like that should be able to survive. If the sleazy dope-peddler gets eaten alive by rabid maggots, then that makes our feelings of inherent justice in the universe feel vindicated. The old Twilight Zone episodes were good at this.

Question to ponder: are we limiting ourselves by using stereotypes like the sleazy drug dealer? The reality is that people who make their livings like that are human beings, with their own complications, their own hopes and dreams. We might wonder how they can sleep at night, but the obvious answer is that they sleep pretty much just as well as the rest of us, or they wouldn't be able to get up day after day and keep selling. When John Grisham writes about sleazy lawyers, he also writes about young, honest lawyers who fight the good fight. We've seen all the tropes used over and over again. I wonder if someone could make a sympathetic protagonist out of a character that would normally be a villain?

Which brings me to one more thing I want to say. A good ending doesn't have to stay neatly within people's beliefs. I've felt for a long time that most of us don't sit down and reconcile all the millions of individual things that we believe, ideas that would be single notes in a bullet point outline of our psyche. If the ending of a story points out a small contradiction or two, and ideally recommends a resolution, then we're happy. That's an ending that gives us something new that we want to believe in, which I think would be one we all would like.

Do I need to come out and say that all of the above is my opinion? Hopefully not, any more than I need to say that you're welcome to express your own.

Still writing.