The author Dan Brown said that when he writes his thrillers, he has staff who read the manuscript and write down every promise he's made to the reader. But what are promises made to the reader?
In my previous blog I mentioned the inherent promise that genre writers make to their readers. For a romance novelists, the promise can be as simple as following the formula. For writers of murder mysteries, there's the implicit agreement that all the necessary clues will be provided, along with misleading ones and that once the mystery is revealed, all will make sense. And for readers of fantasy, the magic acquired, used or misused, will follow specified rules.
What promises does literary fiction make?
I think it’s fair to say that every story promises a journey. It can be a physical journey like Jack Kerouac’ On The Road, a journey through life like A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, or a journey into the psyche as in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. In other words, every story takes us someplace. And in the process of of journeying, the main character, and potentially others, is changed.
Inherent in the promise of a journey is the promise that the journey will be worth it. So many authors focus so much time and effort on the opening of their book that they forget that the reader is actually there to find out the end. I’m sure that I am not the only reader who got bored halfway through a book and skipped to the end. It’s never a good sign when readers start skipping paragraphs, then whole chapters. It’s a sign that the writer has failed the promise of making the journey worthwhile.
And now we come to the last pages of a novel. This is where the opening promise is either fulfilled or winds up leaving the reader feeling that they’ve been gypped. Literary fiction does not require a happy ending nor does it require a totally resolved ending. Some of the best novels leave the end open to interpretation or suggest that there is another story to come.
When I started writing my Angels series, I knew the story was too big for one book so I decided to break it into a series of stories. Each book had to be part of a bigger story and still leave the reader feeling that one leg of the journey had been completed. It’s a technique we're all familiar with. That’s why the last episode in an on-going series reaches a climax while simultaneously ending with a cliff hanger. The ending of one story is the promise of another.
If you have a book, movie or series that you found particularly satisfying or unsatisfying, drop a note and tell us why.