Cliffhangers, Cheating, and… Dinner
Brandon, I have to disagree with you about the Steward of Gondor Eating Scene being an example of a lull or a breather scene, and thus showing how such scenes can be important in an epic fantasy. (I could only find it in German, but the dialogue is unnecessary to the point here.) First, it’s two scenes intercut with each other, over a total of less than two minutes. It is indeed telling, as you said, but it only works because you have a high-tension scene (the beginning of a charge, orcs drawing arrows) held against the Steward eating in a piggish manner reminiscent of the bloody, meaty work of combat. Watching the guy eat for ten minutes wouldn’t have worked. Verbal conflict plus charging horses, singing, eating, and orcs does work—and it works great—but I don’t think it’s evidence for including low tension scenes in epic fantasy.
If only every dinner in epic fantasy were so exciting—and brief!
Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think every book has to be a thriller. I just think that if epic fantasy meanders, it can go badly off the rails: Entire books where nothing happens. Characters we don’t care about doing stuff that doesn’t matter to the main plot or the characters we do care about. Dinners described because the writer has a huge almanac of medieval recipes he likes. Books hundreds of thousands of words long with only half the cast appearing.
Some of that you can get away with, because readers don’t expect any book to be perfect. But too much, and readers feel cheated.
And this idea fascinates me. What is the contract between an author and her readers?
I’ve been accused of writing cliffhangers—which never fails to irritate me. I hate cliffhangers. I especially hate cliffhanger endings to books. Not long ago, I read an otherwise fully competent fantasy novel that did some things really well, and at the end, the main character was literally dangling off a cliff.
I threw the book across the room and vowed never to read that author again.
My idea of a contract with an author goes something like this: I’ll spend $8, and you give me the best story you can. If I get more than $8’s worth, I’ll sing your praises and help you sell more books. If the story wasn’t that good, Meh, maybe you tried your hardest and you’re just a mediocre writer. Oh well. I take a risk with more than $8 for the cinema and get bad payoffs all the time. But if you give me half a story? It took you 800 pages to tell me half a story? Now to get the rest of my story, I need to shill out more cash? I feel cheated.
Professionally, I think this is not just bad judgment; I think it’s insecure writing. “Please come back for more. Please. Please?” It is a trick, and it does get old. If I’m holding my breath for what’s on the other side of a door, and the answer is “Carpet!” the first time I might think it’s funny. Ya got me, good one. But if you do it again and again, I’m going to slowly lose my trust that the author knows what the heck she’s doing.
Because I hate that cliffhanger allegation enough that I Googled “cliffhanger” so I could say, “Look people, this is a cliffhanger, what I do isn’t.” Then I found that the definition is broad enough to cover what I do. Crap.
So let me offer my own definition. I tend to think of scenes as having hooks and buttons. Every cliffhanger is a button, but not every button is a cliffhanger. Every scene should be necessary in a book; each scene should have parties in conflict. By the end of the scene, someone wins, someone loses, or both lose, or both win. Now, if the winning of this conflict—we’ll send a fellowship of 9 to destroy the ring—leads to more conflict (destroying the ring will be opposed), and especially if it leads to different types of conflict (Arwen doesn’t want you to go), you’ve got a nice button. Rising stakes. Direction.
That solution-of-problem-leads-to-more-problems is what makes a book a fast read, in my opinion. But the button itself can be anything that leads you into reading the next chapter, a particularly beautiful piece of writing, a rhetorical flourish, a revelation about some other character, or a new conflict. George R. R. Martin does this (with his huge chapters) brilliantly.
Book finales are a different beast. I believe each book—even in a big fantasy epic—should tell a complete story. Say, the characters all care about saving the city. (Maybe we care more about the characters and whether the Girl is the Chosen One, but they are out to save the city.) By the end of the book, the city should be saved or lost. The more plotlines you actually wrap up, the more satisfying I think the book is: the guy who wanted to be king gets killed (and now will have considerable difficulty becoming king); the assassin who wanted to leave the business has left it; a new king is in charge. Point is, the story ends. If you thought it was just okay, or not that good, well, at least you got a whole story. You can move on to greener pastures. No trickery, no “I need to see how it ends, guess I’ll pony up another $8, but I’m ticked off about it.”
Now after the city’s saved or doomed, and you learn in the epilogue that the city was small potatoes and that the new king is going to cause serious trouble elsewhere, that—to my eyes—isn’t a cliffhanger. This book was about X, and X got resolved. The next book is going to be about Y.
I do that.
Okay, fine, so it is a cliffhanger, but it isn’t a cheat.
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