A Bad Ending may be Better than No Ending...

[lavenderbard]

…But I’d really rather get a Good Ending.

So, news: During the past two weeks my health was only so-so, and I had a lot of downtime. Bummer.Fortunately I’ve a whole lot of practice trying to look at things positively. Although I didn’t make my weekly wordage goal for either week, if you add the wordage for both weeks together, the result is easily over my weekly goal.

So I didn’t have two bad weeks, I only had one bad week, it just wasn’t a consecutive week. 😉

Which brings me to the post title…

I watch a lot of asian dramas when I’m not feeling well. But IMHO one of the weaknesses of the medium is the endings. I just ran into one what particularly irked me. According to the reviews it had a “ambiguous” ending. Apparently “ambiguous” means that after forcing the heroine to tragically sacrifice herself by means of a scientifically-unsound plot device, and establishing that it is essentially impossible for the heroine to have survived, we will none the less show you scenes that make it look like she might have survived anyway.

I can appreciate a clever explanation of why the inevitable maybe isn’t inevitable after all, but I didn’t GET an explanation. So it doesn’t even matter whether she’s “really alive” to me or not, at this point, because either way it just feels like someone tried to play a very cheap trick on me.

I still have ~60K words to go to my next ending. But when I get there, I swear I will do a MUCH better job.

Comments

[lizvogel]

So I didn’t have two bad weeks, I only had one bad week, it just wasn’t a consecutive week.

LOL! That sounds so familiar, somehow....

What You Said about endings. I had some friends who were trying to get me into anime for a while, and I liked a lot of the storytelling, but resolutions really aren't their thing.

The ending of the last book I finished didn't quite stick the landing (still not sure what to do about that), but at least I didn't do something unviable, yank the rug out from under it, and then throw glitter all over everything in hopes that nobody would notice. ;-)

[lavenderbard]

Precisely so.

I watched a Korean drama about making Korean dramas, and according to what was depicted in that show, it would take a minor miracle for them to ever get an ending right. They start filming with only a third of the show actually written, start broadcasting with much less than a third filmed, and from that point on they just fall further and further behind, until they are rewriting final scenes that will be filmed that day so that the final episode can be delivered to the broadcasting station that evening.

Of course, I saw this in a drama, so it's probably exaggerated at least a little.

Still, as a person who believes firmly in going back and editing the beginning after I've had a chance to see how the ending went, I'm glad you have a chance to look at what you've done, say, "Hmm, I think this needs fixing" and then even hopefully fix it. :)

That's a waaaaayyyyy better way to tell stories, IMHO.

[lizvogel]

TV production schedules are nuts.

I do very, very little revision as a general rule, but even I like to let the virtual ink dry and give the whole work a once-over before it goes out into the world. Even posting fanfic as a WIP has always seemed reckless to me. ;-)

(Hopefully someday I will think of a way to fix it. I got nothing.)