Lo! There Shall Come an Ending...or Not
As part (well, all, really) of my short-story-a-day plan for summer, I've been reading the last couple of years' worth of THE YEAR'S BEST FANTASY AND HORROR collections. I swear by these. A new anthology comes out every August for short fiction published the previous year. Ocassionally there's a dud, but most of the stories are quite good, and there's always a handful or two in each book that are really excellent. I've read all of last year's and am curently about halfway through the year before's. And I've noticed a trend, a rather disturbing trend. A lot of the stories I've read, even ones that started out excellently, don't seem to come to anything resembling a satisfactory conclusion. They just seem to ... end.* I'm wondering if anyone else -- particularly those of you who read a lot more than I do -- has noticed this lately. Or is it just in the collection I happen to be reading?
*This reminded me of a completely unrelated comment, that I think is attributed to Neil Gaiman. The difference between a story with a happy ending and one with a sad ending is just when the story ends. Any story with a happy ending simply ends sooner; if it continued, it would have a sad ending. Neil (or whoever) certainly stated it better than I, but that's the gist of it. I was thinking of this idea in relation to Romeo and Juliet. If you were to end the story after Romeo and Juliet get married, just before Romeo meets up with Tybalt and the deaths start to pile up, it's a happy ending.
*This reminded me of a completely unrelated comment, that I think is attributed to Neil Gaiman. The difference between a story with a happy ending and one with a sad ending is just when the story ends. Any story with a happy ending simply ends sooner; if it continued, it would have a sad ending. Neil (or whoever) certainly stated it better than I, but that's the gist of it. I was thinking of this idea in relation to Romeo and Juliet. If you were to end the story after Romeo and Juliet get married, just before Romeo meets up with Tybalt and the deaths start to pile up, it's a happy ending.
posted by Kootch | 12:15 AM
1 Comments:
This seems rather pessimistic (the idea that the longer a story is carried out the greater the probability of it turning out "tragic"). I like the basic idea, though, that it is a matter of when the story ends. In Twelfth Night, if it were to end sooner, it would not be a happy ending -- the brother and sister would not meet, Viola would be cast off by Orsino because he would have felt betrayed by Olivia's interest in Viola-as-Cesario. Sebastian would be "lost" as Antonio would most certainly be jailed and probably killed by Orsino. It turns out well because it is given the chance to continue.
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