posted
Hey y'all. I know we've discussed about holding information back from the reader before, but I thought I'd highlight these as they are serious culprits, but seem to have won a competition despite that.
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I didn't mind "Gently Does It", but I guessed at the truth immeadiately probably because I was expecting it to have a twist and that was what I came up with. However it would have been better to just be honest about the experience from the beginning. "Victims" I didn't like as much. It was too much.
I also noticed all three were in first person and two of them, the ones with the twist endings, were also in present tense.
I like a good twist ending, as long as the reader has enough information to see where you are going and as long as you don't violate POV.
First person doesn't lend itself well to twist endings. Why? Because the person telling the story knows what the twist is, withholding it violates POV. The only time a twist ending works in first person, is when the twist is unknown to the POV character.
posted
Yep, I guessed exactly what "Gently Does It" would do, and it did it. I didn't actually feel cheated, but I did feel that there was nothing whatsoever to the story; if that was supposed to be an interesting twist, clearly I'm not easily interested... presumably, the reader was supposed to come to certain assumptions, but maybe we writers are a tricksy breed, not so easily fooled.
Generally speaking, information should be revealed as and when it becomes germane. Nothing in the early part of that story actually required the narrator to tell you the "truth" - but then, in fact, nothing at the end required it, either, so the big reveal failed from that perspective. The events would have been exactly the same whether the narrator mentioned it up-front, at the end, or never at all.
But each to their own. A lot of people do look for twist endings, simply because it's an easy form of drama, a way of jumping out at the reader and going "a-ha!", rather than actually structuring a story so that it builds to a naatural climax - which, in flash fiction particularly, is very difficult, as you don't have the luxury of tim to build up to it.
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I don't mind story that make me go, "Ahhh, I get it now.", but I do mind stories that go, "GOTCHA!".
Both of the trick stories here were going for "GOTCHA!" which is a cheat.
<<<Mild Spoiler Alert -- the following comment aludes to the ending. If you want to be "surprised", read the story first.>>>
. . . . . . .
In "Gently Does It", the author specifically puts in a line about the mother/daughter relationship early on and goes to obvious trouble to avoid clarifying who is who by always using the pronoun "she" instead of "mother" or "my mom" or the like.
I liked "Victims" even less because it doesn't do anything to remotely hint at the ending until you get to the last 10 words.
Benskia was right to use the term "trick ending", because that is what these stories do. They intentionally misdirect the reader, withhold information, and scream "GOTCHA!". A twist ending is something that lets the tuned-in reader know something is coming so that at the reader goes "A-ha."
posted
I absolutely love twist endings. Suprise me, please! Don't give me a story where I can call the shots before they happen. Of course, you have to make me care first.
Of course, I understand the problem of viewpoint and withholding. TV and movies have an advantage, they show the character from the outside, and the viewer has to make judgements as to what they are thinking and seeing. It lends itself to twists in a way writers cannot get away with.
Spoiler:
The above mentioned story, while not blowing me away, seemed to use withholding to make a point. The story is about the role reversal of parent and child, where the child becomes the parent of thier parent. Maybe the viewpoint character feels that way, that she is the mother.
[This message has been edited by ChrisOwens (edited October 12, 2005).]
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While I agree in theory with the principle of not withholding information from the reader, I have to say that neither of these examples bothered me. I think there is a huge difference between witholding information in a longer work, say, a novel, than there is a Flash of under 1000 words. The reader isn't emotionally invested in the characters, and the twist doesn't feel so much like a cheat. I would be P.O.ed to have a writer pull something like that on me once I'd invested 100,000 words into reading. But in my mind, a Flash of this length is an OK venue to pull this sort of trick in. On the other hand, I sort of like this kind of tricksy ending to short stories.
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posted
I don't mind the twist endings so much as the fact that when you take them away, there's nothing left to the story. I think it was OSC who said that a twist ending was bad because you spent so much time withholding information that you never really got into the meat of the story, and I totally agree. Those stories are a case in point: take away the ending, and I don't see what the fuss is about. I suspect they wouldn't have won any awards without those endings.
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posted
Wow, those stories were awful. Every one of them.
Now, let's clarify the difference between trick ending and twist ending. Twist endings, when well done, make you think you should have seen that coming but wasn't it great that you didn't? Trick endings serve no purpose but to fool the reader through the course of the story and typically have nothing more to the story except for the trick.
The two stories in question here had trick endings, one of which I saw coming, which made it all the worse because there wasn't anything else that made the story a story.
Flash fiction can get away with witholding information better than longer stories. The flash fiction story is only about one thing anyway, one point, one moment that usually comes at the end. I'm therefore a little more lenient, but I thought these stories were utter crap. Their one thing, one idea, one moment was utterly without depth or meaning.
That said, I've noticed that plain old witholing of information is something that publishers are either overlooking or are deciding is all right. One of the most recent WOTF winners (it's not published yet, I happened to read it as a critique piece) was terribly guilty of this, IMO.
This begs the question: Should I give in and write like this?
The answer: No. I find these stories annoying, unsatisfying, and even a cheat. Especially when I know information is being withheld from me, I spend the whole story just wondering what that one bit of information is that the author wont' tell me and at the end it's never worth the effort of finding out.
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Anybody still listen to (or remember listening to) "Paul Harvey and The rest of the Story"?
The whole point was that Paul concealed the identity of the person involved up until the very end. Yet I have yet to feel cheated when listening to one of those stories. The reason is there are always clues that lead you to the ending; the end may come as a surprise, but it is an "A-ha, I get it now." response.
If "Gently Does It" is supposed to be about how the daughter is now seeing herself in a role-reversal with her mother, then it fails as a story. All it does is compare old age to infancy.
"Victims", I almost didn't read the whole thing. I couldn't understand or connect to the character because I believed she was married and devoted to a serial killer and there was no effort to make an explaination of why she would stay with him. It isn't until the end that ALL OF A SUDDEN! it's revealed that the husband is actually a cop. Now the level of characterization works and I can begin to understand the character who is telling the story, but to appreciate the character and her story, I need that little bit of information.
Flash is no excuse to break the rules that you would normally adhere to. Twist endings can work in any length story, but they need to be done in a way that doesn't violate POV or cheat the reader. If you want to read a good, twisted flash e-mail Edmund and ask to read his flash story about the guy who makes a deal with the devil. The sotry isn't even 100 words but it is masterful. There is a phenomenal twist that you probably won't see coming and he doesn't have to violate POV or cheat the reader to accomplish it.
[This message has been edited by Robyn_Hood (edited October 12, 2005).]
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It also doesn't feel like cheating because *you know* in advance that that's what Paul Harvey is going to do. You're not reading along, trusting the author, and then having everything dumped upside down at the end.
I'm with Silver on this - if there's no story w/out the trick ending then I am not interested in it.
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I didn't have a problem with any of them. I think that it was partly because I wasn't "tricked", so to me both stories seemed like perfectly natural juxtaposition of expected roles. Perhaps if I hadn't been warned that they had trick endings, I wouldn't have found them acceptable. But I didn't get the sense that either is really working at tricking the reader.
I did have a minor nit with "Victims", since forensic pathologists aren't cops, they're doctors. But that was unrelated to the "trick" except insofar as it is the twist.
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