At 09:23 AM 11/11/2005 -0500, you wrote:
>Hi, Kerry,
>I wish it didn't have to be one or the other, but
cause and effect and logic
>are hard to cheat, so few writers can make surprise
endings that work in
>those
>ways and have fully developed characters at the same
time.
But cause and effect and logic have little to do with
characters, whose humanity must surely account for their
emotions, their value systems, their ambitions and their
reactions. People are consecutively and concurrently but
seldom consistently simplistic and/or complex. And the thing
about storytelling is that the writer seldom has to limit
herself to just one. We mix them in together, see what
happens.
The surprise ending has gone out of fashion to a large
degree, but I still like Roald Dahl's "Lamb to the Slaughter"
a noir short story that I think fits the definition and
reveals much about its characters. True, short stories tend
to a narrow or singular focus, but I don't think Dahl's
characters were in any way stunted in that yarn. In fact,
they suggest that there's more to the characters than we
might first have supposed.
I'm currently about midway in Jason Starr's Twisted City. A
chapter or so back I did not like the protagonist. He did not
seem credible to me, making bad decisions that he knew were
bad decisions, and I knew he knew they were bad decisions
because he explained to me why they were bad decisions and
why he shouldn't make them, but he did. Man, he's been
pissing me off. There's something else going on in italics
that could serve to explain this, but I'm not quite buying
that yet either. But it struck me that the guy is a bit
sexually obsessive. In fact the book began with him in the
act of a pick-up. On the other hand, he's just refused a
proposition from a junkie-hooker, though he does seem to find
her exciting and repulsive at the same time. The book could
go either way at this point, and that's my point. Jason could
pull it all together yet, and surprise me, and I'm really
hoping he does.
He's done it before.
Kerry
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 11 Nov 2005 EST