What I mean...oh, how about DISTURBIA. There at the end when the cops finally arrive. They just arrive and then the scene ends without the moment "I" as audience have been waiting to see. The big moment when the hero gets to show the cops what he found/his mother and explain things and get the thrill of being right.

No. The scene stops before the release of tension that way. It just hops over to days later and a sort of "subtle" denouement.

Arriki, I believe they do that believing that the end of the scene is obvious. That's my impression, anyway. It is as if they say, "Well, everything that happens after the police arrive will be obvious, so lets just skip it."

Also, if you've never read those books, you really should; they're fantastic.

"I" think people are taking that idea/technique too far because it IS so easy to skip the big emotional parts of long-awaited moments, as in DISTURBIA.

The advice about leaving early works in many cases...BUT there ARE scenes which the audience WANTS to have finished. The audience (well, this audience, me) wants to wallow in the emotional climax! I feel a big let down when I'm not allowed to witness the rest of the scene.

[This message has been edited by arriki (edited January 10, 2008).]

I think leaving the big bang ending unfinished makes me dislike the book. Rereading it will never give me what I missed in that unfinished ending because it is not a matter of information but of emotion.

Hmmm...it's probably a matter of artistic sense. I can think of big bang endings that might work. When the climax is a single shot killing the bad guy. Yeah. Maybe. Even probably. But when what I'm looking to participate in is the emotional bang of being proved right, of showing the whomever or whatever that the hero IS right. That sort of climax, then cutting it will never satisfy me and no amount of re-viewing or rereading will either. It'll make me angry and possibly avoid stories coming from the same source.

I wonder how many other people feel the same way. How many like always being cheated out of the emotional climax?

I don't think lack of resolution is what arriki was talking about. Resolution comes, not from tying up the plot elements, but from tying up the story package. Of course, it's become common to leave loads of plot threads dangling. (And I don't mean just a few, which is good for showing that the story takes place in a larger continuum--it didn't come from nowhere, and the world goes on after. No, I mean you're left with the feeling of "what happened?" and even "why did I read this?") But in most of those cases, that happens when the climax isn't quite yet in sight. It doesn't skip over the OBVIOUS climax. As arriki said:

quote:

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No. The scene stops before the release of tension that way. It just hops over to days later and a sort of "subtle" denouement.

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I don't think that what Block does is exactly what arriki was talking about, either. There, the end of a SCENE is skipped, because what happens is obvious AND the reader doesn't really want to have to go through it. The problem--at least in the cases that caused the initial reaction--comes from cases where the CLIMAX is skipped.

And arriki's initial guess is also exactly why it's done. It IS harder to write. It IS liable to sound trite, and if it does, it's a big letdown. Leaving it out will be a letdown, too, but at least it won't be trite. So why not leave it out, when people can figure it out anyway?

I'll tell you why. That's a form a cowardice. "I'm afraid I won't be able to tell this effectively enough, so I won't. They'll get it anyway." Bad choice.

The thing to do is to tell it as well as you can. If you're not satisfied, keep working on it until it gets better. Reach deep. The results will be worth it.

As an example, consider watching the first STAR WARS movie without the award ceremony at the end. You know they destroyed the Death Star and they survived (though this is some question about R2D2), so Lucas could have ended the movie without the big "validation" scene of the award ceremony. Same for the end of the RETURN OF THE JEDI. The partying at the end wasn't actually necessary for the plot, but it validated and paid off the audience involvement in the story.

Validation is probably being left off movies and stories because, as Rick said, it's hard to do well and people may be afraid to hassle with it, and it can seem rather cheesy if they do. But audiences/readers will feel cheated without something like that (a kiss or a wedding scene, for example, at the end of a romance; someone riding off into the sunset at the end of an adventure; the murderer being taken into custody at the end of a mystery; and so on).

I have a tangent/sideline to this that I wanted to complain about. I think it's related, let me try. I am a fan of the TV show House. I like the actor, the medical drama stuff is interesting, the dialogue is snappy, etc. There are problems with it, but I watch very little TV and this show is enjoyable to me (Battlestar Gallactica is the only other current show I watch, if you must know. LOL)

So, the thing that has been bugging me about House, and it's lit up for me a problem with visual media in general (so I hope I learn some kind of writing lesson from this...) is that in the show, which is quite formulaic, we have no way to get into the MC's head to see how he's thinking through something.

Backing up to explain - Dr. House is a cranky but brilliant diagnostician who each show handles a single medical case that is a puzzle. Typically he and his medical team formulate theories on what's wrong with a patient, then bad things happen or the patient crashes or new symptoms emerge and the team is proven wrong over and over. Eventually, House has a "moment" (almost always on film) where he makes some connections and puts the puzzle together. From here we are usually brough to some kind of climactic scene - often with House bursting into the surgical room to halt the surgery or some such. A little over the top after a while, but again - in spite of its flaws I find it an entertaining piece of television. Helps that the actor who plays House is very charismatic.

ANYWAY - my beef is this. We never see the MC's thought processes to see HOW he put the puzzle together. In those dramatic surgery-interruption scenes he does often explain a little bit of it, but by then he's self-confident and cocky and it often comes out as a bit of "as you know, Bob." What I feel frustrating is that there is no view into the head of the MC in tv/film. So, I have this pet peeve about his "moment of clarity" and wishing there were some way to convey the thoughts/feelings of the character during those aha processes (or, in the moments that lead to all the pieces fitting together.)

I think it's related to this topic in that again it feels like the audience is getting cheated out of something important here - the puzzle and it's explanation are the thing that makes this show unique, though it's also a formula that is repeated in crime dramas and other styles I suppose. But, since the puzzle is so central, I feel very cheated. I always turn to my husband when those "aha" moments are shown and say "OK, he's figured it out, has something to do with the hot coffee he's staring at somehow, but I have no idea."

And, yes, just imagine STAR WARS, the first, without the award ceremony. It wouldn't be near as satisfying a movie for me.
Did Rowling ever fail to give the afterwards emotional validation in her books?

What ARE the problems with these validation scenes? Why are they so difficult to write?

On the other hand, a well done validation scene really puts the whole book in perspective. This is why I like the scouring of the shire chapter so much in JRRT (and why I was so upset that they'd taken it out of the movie!). To me, it is a validation scene because it brings everything the hobbits have learned back home to the Shire.

I realized that it wasn't that I wasn't giving them enough information, it was that I wasn't giving them enough of an emotional payoff. I think it was important to show my heroes finally getting a chance to relax after they just went through a giant crapload of trouble and misery. So I wrote THAT ending, and I think it ended up being much more satisfying. I felt better about it, and my readers liked it a lot more. The thing was, the new ending was actually a lot messier than the first one, with a lot more unresolved plot points and unanswered questions.

My point is not just to brag about my book, but to say that a satisfying ending doesn't necessarily have to tie up all the plot points and answer all the questions, but it does have to deliver the emotional payoff that the reader has been looking for since page one. In the case of my story, that emotional payoff was a matter of letting the reader see my characters finally get comfortable for a minute before typing THE END.

BUT...the business at the end of DISTURBIA with removing the anklet early and all...that was the validation of the hero's actions.

If validation isn't what was missing there in DISTURBIA, what was it there in the big scene as the cops arrive and cut...we don't get to see the hero show them he's right?

So whatever it is that is missing that makes the ending unsatisfactory, call it what you will, at the very least can be a lesson to writers.

If I remember correctly, someone once pointed out in another discussion somewhere, that all the fiction in THE NEW YORKER left off the ending as well. Maybe it's just a literary "conceit" (as in a trick writers play on their readers to make the readers feel stupid and the writers feel smart).

I haven't seen DISTURBIA either, though, so I can't comment specifically on it. I'll mention an older movie that flirts with this--and I think successfully, but it's a close call: North by Northwest. The bad guys are killed and captured, the cavalry (so to speak) has arrived, but Eva Marie Saint is still dangling from the face of Mt. Rushmore's George Washington, with Cary Grant reaching down trying to grasp her hand--and we never see him get it. We don't see her get off the mountain. Instead, the scene cuts--very smoothly, you don't even realize it at first--to the train they're on after getting married, and he's reaching down to grasp her hand to pull her up into the top fold-out bed in the sleeper compartment. It's cool, it's clever, it even makes you laugh a little with surprise after the tension just before it--but it's somehow disappointing, also. Everything is there: the plot threads are tied up, and the validation, while short, is in place, but the MOMENT of saving her life is missing.

Maybe it can be done like this ONCE.

I also like the word "validation," by the way. It's what I referred to in my previous post as "tying up the story package" as opposed to tying up the plot. "Validation" is much neater.

Validation -- payoff. Seeing Cary Grant rescue her would be the payoff. Seeing the Death Star blow up is the payoff with the validation coming in the form of the big ceremony.

But not all scenes need/deserve a payoff part. What I'm struggling with now is when does a payoff need to be included to fully satisfy the reader? The big end climax, probably. Maybe most big important scenes? Even if the reader jolly well does know what happens, he wants to "see" it happen!

1) Is that really the denouement? I mean, is the important thing that Shia LaBeouf was right, or was it that he overcome the baddy? Maybe they wanted to simplify the message, so the emphasis was on defeating the bad guy. Because the flipside of the coin is that we focus on Shia being right, and then detract from the explosive climax of him defeating the bad guy. It might be something of an anti-climax. So that's worth thinking about.

2) Some things can be imagined better when they're not shown. The alien was more terrifying in Alien when we didn't see it, compared to the monsters in AvP, which parade around in front of us and look . . . well, less real even than a man in a suit from 1979. Obviously, this might not apply to Disturbia, as I don't think this is what is happening.

3) Producers cut a hell of a lot to fit films into a specific time frame. They get anxious about films going on for much longer than 90 mins. It's worth seeing if the scene was ever shot, as it may have been cut not by the director but by the producer. To return to the Alien Trilogy (let's pretend Whedon never existed :S), if you compare Alien 3's theatrical cut with the assembly cut, the latter makes so much more sense, the characters are more rounded and interesting, and the conflict is heightened emotionally.

Of course, they may not have had time to film the scene, or the budget. Hence why Tank Girl has so many comic strip/animated sequences.

SPOILER ALERT

Of course I can imagine it. But I'm watching a movie, reading a book or whatever and I paid my money to see the whole thing, not imagine it for myself.