posted
I've just finished listening to Terry Prachett's The Color of Magic . The book ends on a true cliff hanger and the story doesn't finish until The Light Fantastic .
So, why did Prachett "get away" with the Color ending?
Could it still work today or are we so enamoured with sequels to tolerate serials? For clarifications, "sequels" to me are stand alone stories with related characters while "serials" are like the old television shows - installments of the same story.
posted
You're distinction of sequel and serial conforms to my experience. The one distinction I would make is that serials predated screenplays. Serial publications, newspapers and magazines, published many prebroadcast-media era novels before they were published in book form. The practice seems to have been at its height during the late colonial era.
I haven't read Terry Pratchett.
[This message has been edited by extrinsic (edited August 05, 2008).]
posted
I think it may be the difference between a published writer with an established fan base, and a new writer - carving a much more difficult, uphill path - who can only rely on the quality of his work.
If JK Rowling chose to write another Harry Potter book, it would be a best seller. Even if it ended with the line "...and then Malfoy pointed the gun at Harry with a smirk and pulled the trigger."
But if that was your ending line for a first publication I'm sure you'd be ordered to rework it, or else be rejected outright.
posted
I think I'm missing the subtext here. Is there a rule against writing a serial with a cliff-hanger ending? GRR Martin essentially does that with every single one of his SIF series.
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I have to point out that 'The Colour of Magic' was his first book (the first that people actually bought, anyway) so he wasn't an established author at that point.
Also, it's not a trick he's employed since: although there are themes and occasionally plot-lines carried over between the books, all of the Discworld novels are stand-alone stories in their own right - you can read them in almost any order without losing the plot (as it were).
At the risk of betraying my ignorance: why do you say 'got away' with it? Is it so bad to have a cliff-hanger ending? I do find them a bit cliché and tbh it's not an ending I've used in my writing, but is it more than that?
The Discworld novels are comic fantasy and, in a sense, because the best thing about them is the way they parody popular works both within and outside the genre, I took the ending as another example of Pratchett's style. It wasn't even a tacky cliff-hanger, either, like pointing a gun at someone's head. Without spoiling the ending for those who haven't read it, it is about as literal as one can get.
The fact that Discworld doesn't take itself seriously allows Pratchett to 'get away' with using techniques, characters and plotlines scorned by serious (that's the wrong word; I'm looking for one which means 'non-comic') writers, because he can play around with them, poke fun at them. That's the beauty of comic fantasy.
posted
I think the term "got away" was employed because it's generally agreed upon that a self-contained book, or rather, a book with a tight story arc and satisfying resolotion is more satisfying than a book without either, especially one with an incomplete, unresolved, or sketchy ending. (When looking at just a single book at a time.)
It could be that having cliff hangers increases--in some cases--the satisfaction of the series as a whole, in which case the entire series can be looked at the same way I'd view the self-contained novel. Multiple books and multiple chapters are suddenly only different in length, but identical in principle. In which case, the series has got to have a satisfying end.
posted
Bear in mind that I know nothing of the series, but I suppose its possible that the original work may have been the first and second book combined. Perhaps he was asked to split the two works and this 'cliffhanger' was the best place to do it?
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extrinsic - go out and get his books. NOW. 2008 is the 25th anniversary of the Diskworld!
Terry Pratchett takes what could be "traditional" sword and sorcery fantasy and turns in on its head. One of his main heros is a failed wizard and the other (for these two books) is the first tourist on the diskworld. Color of Magic was his first big book. His first book was in 1971 - Carpet People. he had two other books published before Color . He wasn't the NAME then he is now.
If someone else wrote THIS literal cliff hanger, we'd all probably throw the book against the wall, cry out we were betrayed and then never buy the author's book again.
Maybe the answer is Pratchett gets away with it because the voice is so strong and the story is so outside the norm, we can accept it. In fact, in many ways, it's a great ending point for the story so far.
But we are clearly mid-story arc. Rincewind (the wizard) is still a failure and has a powerful spell that no one knows what it does lodged in his head. Two-flower (the tourist) is still on vacation. Nothing's been resolved but it's been fun to hang out with the two of them. Could this type of ending work today?
So, to make this more generic - what book endings in a serier or serial didn't satisfy?
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