Of plottwists and endings

People from the comments dislike dream twists but I'm curious how stories like "Alice in wonderland" or "Total recall" or "Wizard of Oz" pulled those endings off.

The problem with "just a dream" is generally that the reader is left with the impression "nothing really happened." That is a disappointing ending, a waste of time.

An exception to this is like "The Wizard of Oz", where due to the dream, the MC Dorothy has been fundamentally and irrevocably changed; Dorothy's dream brought her a new understanding of her life, so emotionally speaking something did happen to the MC, which is far more important than something physically changing.

The same can be true for other stories, I think in Total Recall the sub-story "dream" episodes were all part of a larger, real plot, and we the audience had to figure that out. In Stephen King's very successful novel The Stand, characters are led by dream visions to a real prophet leader that knew what was going on in their post-apocalyptic world.

Alice in Wonderland was (I think I have read), a fantastical adventure that was a critique on politics and society at the time, the "dream" was an allegory for the real world, and otherwise a fanciful children's story; those are much more forgiving on the need for plot or logic. Watch any children's show, they are fun for kids but boring and ridiculous for adults (unless they contain a message only adults will understand).

If you are writing entertainment for non-toddlers, people with some measure of rationality, the "all a dream" ending is seen as a deus ex machina, a way to rescue an unsalvageable plot line by imposing some new rules. That is not how adults expect stories to work, they expect the author to have a satisfying and logical ending that ties up all the loose ends and apparently inexplicable mysteries you have introduced. It is not satisfying to issue a blanket statement that "none of it was real", it feels like a fraud. No amount of logic will change that feeling. Just because a "dream" IS an explanation, doesn't make it an emotionally satisfying one.

posted over 6 years ago

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Amadeus‭

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You say you maybe want your MC to leave the world and his friends. This is no problem and can make for a satisfying ending. Just look at LOTR. I also remember a different Story where the MC basically becomes a God at the end of the Story after/while he saves the world. You could say he is leaving his old world/life behind, but he still lives a happy life with his mortal love for the rest of her natural life, and then he lives a happy life with his other love who is very long lived.

So these endings felt satisfying, and they have something in common: The sidecharacters live a long and happy life until they die a natural death because of age. Maybe they have some problems to overcome (dealing with the political aftermath of the war, rebuilding, uniting everyone), but in general they are now capable of it and succeed.

The happy and successful sidecharacters might even balance out the fact that the MC got a bittersweet ending.

So I would recommend against killing them. I would also recommend against making the Mc regret leaving. Make it bittersweet (for the reader).

(Obviously you can make everything work, but it would definitly go against expectations. And if you want to go against genre expectations, make sure to make it clear from the beginning of the book that this isn't your typical story)

posted over 6 years ago

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Lichtbringer‭

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I think you've hit on the key in your question: All secondary story arcs need to reach a satisfying conclusion prior to the twist. This is because what we seek at the end of a story is emotional completeness, not necessarily logical or narrative completeness (although it's significantly harder to achieve the first without the other two).

The movie version of Oz works because Dorothy's friends have all achieved their goals, and Dorothy herself has earned her happy ending, prior to her learning a) the existential lesson that she always had the power to rescue herself and b) that it was all in her head. If this ending had come sooner, and short-circuited the story arcs, it would have been deplored, rather than celebrated.

Thus, in the Sixth Sense, Malcolm completes his therapeutic work with Cole before learning his truth. In Children of Men, even though we never learn the final fate of the world, we do know that the protagonist has completed his journey from a selfish, apathetic, hopeless and emotionally distanced cynic to someone willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for a comparative stranger. As far as Alice, it's a bit of a special case because it's an episodic work without major secondary story arcs. It still has an emotionally satisfying conclusion, however: Alice asserts ownership over her own dream world, and ceases to be bullied by figments of her own imagination. (This is also the ending to Nabakov's Invitation to an Execution.)

posted over 6 years ago

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Chris Sunami‭

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