Quote:
Originally Posted by Trollheart
Firstly, I was messing about Frownland, just trying to annoy him. Secondly, it's the last lines that say "this is what happened", and sorry, but it is an explanation, or comes across as one. If it had ended with them listening to the music and (if this were on TV for instance) Logan smiling knowingly, or if he had said something cryptic like "a lot of love went into that" or something then ok, but you basically - and sorry to harp on at you about it, but you absolutely did - explained it at the end, removing any doubt or ambiguity the reader might have had - oh God! Did he really - no, he couldn't have! Did he?
I loved it up to then, and it's still the best of the bunch for me, but the ending made it suck a little and was a disappointment.
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What else did you think Logan was going to do after putting a tarp down, telling his wife he loved her, and then approaching her with closed fists?
But I sort of get how you feel, because after writing the story and reading it back to myself, I hated the ending. In fact, I hated the whole story. I especially hated how Logan beats Regina to death. I thought about making it vague and ambiguous, or making it seem like Regina had died, only to reveal that Logan had actually killed himself (streaming his song and his death live as it happened). But in the end, I thought about why I wrote the story, the whole point of it, and decided to keep the original ending. The point I wanted to make would have been weakened by ambiguity. I wanted you to know exactly what he did. And in fact, I'm really happy that I got you to hope so strongly that something, anything, else could have happened, before being forced to accept what really happened.
The ending isn't an explanation, because by that point, you already knew what had happened and why it had happened. To pull a "What a TWIST!!!" moment would have cheapened the purity of it.
I mean, I love ambiguity. Some horror is improved by leaving things unanswered, and forcing the reader to inject their own fears into the story to fill in the blanks. But some horror is exactly the opposite. Sometimes, it's what you know beyond doubt that scares you. It's like finding a tumor on yourself in the shower, examining it, and realizing that it can't possibly be anything else. At that point, ambiguity becomes a comfort, telling yourself all the benign things it could be. But the ambiguity fades, and the horror of certainty overwhelms you. It
is a tumor, and you're too poor to see a doctor. You are going to die.
That's the kind of hopelessness that I want to tap into. I know I'm not that great of a writer right now, but hopefully I'll get better as I go.