Should mystery stories have resolutions?

There's a concept that I'm rather fond of regarding story resolution called "promises to the reader"

The idea is that every story promises things to the readers, and failing to fulfill those promises will leave the readers unsatisfied. These promises come from a variety of places - the title, the genre, the events of the book, etc, and while readers may not consciously know what they are expexting, recognizing what promises you make is the key to making your ending satisfying.

For example, the final battle in Lord of the Rings was mostly superfluous from the perspective of defeating Sauron - it was merely a distraction, and it was never made clear if it was a needed one. But from a plotting perspective, it was critical because a war epic like Lord of the Rings promises an epic battle as part of the resolution. Similarly, the character drama regarding whether Gollum deserved mercy promised the reader that he would make a final appearance to resolve the question. Finally, the descriptions of the Ring's power made a promise of a final test of will at the peak of Mt Doom.

How you fulfill these promises is left undefined. In fact, fulfilling them in unexpected ways is a good way to make your ending engaging (see above for Frodo's test of will at Mt Doom). But you do need to fulfill them.

Circling back to your question about mysteries, the answer is that if you promise your readers an answer to the mystery, then they will be unsatisfied if you fail to give them one. In Return of the Jedi, viewers would have been unsatisfied had nothing been said about Darth Vader's history. On the flip side, nobody minded that we learned nothing about Yoda. One history was promised, and the other was not.

Now, I have unfortunately little advice on how to avoid promising an answer to the mystery. But as others have said, that promise is generally implicit to the mystery genre, so the more you distance yourself from that the better off you'll be. Also, beta reader feedback is excellent for identifying promises.

I also recommend the Writing Excuses podcast from which I blatantly stole this concept.

posted over 6 years ago

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Arcanist Lupus‭

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In principle, you can have an open-ended story, where you leave the mystery unresolved and present it as, Mr Reader, what do you think the solution is?

But in my humble opinion, this is hard to pull off in a satisfying way.

Your post reminds me of a movie I saw years ago, "Unidentified", that was about a group of reporters investigating a UFO sighting. The story was presented as, One reporter is convinced it's all a hoax, another thinks it's aliens, and the third thinks it's something supernatural. And when they got to the end -- WARNING, SPOILER -- nothing was resolved. We were just left with the three competing theories. If this had been a documentary, I would have been impressed with how they treated all three competing ideas fairly and gave each a chance to present their case. Maybe the goal of the producers was to present these conflicting ideas, I don't know. But as a drama, it just ... had no ending. People argued about competing opinions, and then the movie just stopped in the middle of the discussion with no resolution.

Without knowing more about your particular story, I can't say if you can make this work or not. If the story is about character development, and the mystery is just a side issue along the way, maybe when the hero learns his valuable lesson or whatever the reader won't care about the resolution of the mystery. It's served it's purpose, now we forget it and move on. Or if the whole point is that this is a mystery that will not be easily solved, having the story end with the characters talking about how this mystery will not be easily solved might be a sort of paradoxical resolution, i.e. the solution is that there is no solution. Another trick is to have an ambiguous ending: to have the characters think they've solved the mystery but then there's a final scene where something is revealed that calls the solution into doubt, and the reader is supposed to go away thinking, "So was it really X or not?"

But frankly, I think leaving a mystery unresolved and still having a satisfying story is hard. Not impossible, writers have done it. But it's hard. You can't build up a mystery and then just drop it and leave it unresolved. You have to have an ending that, in some sense, explains why it is unresolved.

posted over 6 years ago

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Jay‭

1055 reputation 1 97 207 0

A simple answer for a simple question.

Yes, at the end. That's how mysteries work.

Edit: I'll elaborate. Mystery, as a genre, revolves around building suspense around an unknown factor, and the plot is about uncovering said unknown factor through ingenuity/conflict. Resolving the mystery is paramount to the payoff.

I thought this was self-explanatory, but apparently not.

posted almost 5 years ago

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Matthew Dave‭

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A story should finish what it starts.

You control what, exactly, you choose to start. If you're not going to be finishing a murder mystery with a solution, you need to be careful not to set the story up in a way that the story will be unsatisfying without a solution.

Let's imagine you've got a mystery you don't want to solve. A few examples:

• The point is that the detective is obsessed, and the real climax is that he should just let it go.
• Or the point is that some mysteries are unsolvable, and we must all live with uncertainty.
• Or that the characters are wrong to be investigating this mystery; they've misunderstood everything and they're barking up the wrong tree.

Each of these is an example of a story, where the solution to the mystery is unimportant. That's why these stories probably shouldn't start out by establishing the mystery to be solved; instead, they should start out by establishing the problem that needs to reach resolution.

Don't begin with a dead body and questions to be answered; instead, consider:

• Beginning with the obsessed detective, showing how focused he is, and how oblivious (and destructive) he is during his pursuit of the case
• Beginning with the dread of uncertainty, showing how the characters are aching to find meaning and order in the world.
• If the characters are going to misunderstand what's important -- maybe start with what is important, and you'll be portraying your characters as being drawn away from that.

These are simply examples to illustrate the premise: your first, outermost story is what readers will be expecting you to resolve. That's what establishes what the story is about. That's the promise you're making.

Within that supporting framework, "inner" plot threads can already have resolutions like "the solution is, there is no solution." What makes that work is, these resolutions will be meaningful for the higher-level story arc. They'll be delivering on your bigger promise.

That being said, it's not clear to me that you want to resolve your mystery thread at all. You see it as a vehicle to get your characters moving; once it does that, it sounds like you don't see the benefit of actually resolving it at all.

To which I would say: a story should finish what it starts.

If you used a mystery to grab the reader's attention, you don't get to let that mystery drift off just because it's not useful to you any longer. The reader's attention is still on it. The reader is still expecting some form of payoff for it, and will feel cheated if they don't get it.

So: keep close track of what promises you're making the reader. Keep promises that you can; don't make promises that you can't. And if you feel like you need to make a promise that you can't really keep, that's a good sign that there's something important there that will have a payoff, and what you need to do is tweak the promise so it matches what you're actually going to provide.

posted over 6 years ago

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Standback‭

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