Weak endings

[xssve]

A parallel comes to mind: Poe's Pit and the Pendulum, which is not really a story so much as it's a fascinating situation. I doubt anyone remembers how it ends.

It's the first thing I do remember when I think about this story:

There was a discordant hum of human voices! There was a loud blast as of many trumpets! There was a harsh grating as of a thousand thunders! The fiery walls rushed back! An outstretched arm caught my own as I fell, fainting, into the abyss. It was that of General Lasalle. The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.

Talk about emotional release.

I think in sense, this is dynamic involved in sex stories: emotional release through an external agent - which may be expressed as physical release - as opposed to some other psychological change or growth in your character, though they aren't mutually exclusive by any means.

In terms of Five act theory, it occured to me that the climax of Lolitia occurs when Humbert Humberts wife is killed - the remainder of the novel is denoument, the failure inherent in HH and Lolitas attempt to turn an erotic fetish into a neurotic attachment.

Eroticism is often at it's peak when it remains diffuse, sexualized but unrealized - when that erotic energy is sublimated into the sexual act, the result is often anticlimactic and less satisfying than the delicious torture of erotic tension.

The book would have been orders of magnitude more controversial had he decided to go the other way with that and make their sexual union more satisfying than the erotic one. I think I like the way he did it, it's more evocotive of the dynamic itsef:, i.e., it generates enourmous erotic tension but denies a satisfying release - it's literary orgasm denial.

 

[AllardChardon]

Dr.

"Literary orgasm denial". Yes Lolita has tons of that. I love the movie and have not read the book. That is on this year's list, for sure.

I used that approach for the first chapter of my book and a few subsequent chapters. Mainly I used the great climax scene in every chapter. Which was easy to do considering the setting is a high-class parlor house and the Madam is a fun-loving free-spirited female.

Are you saying it is better to use more "literary orgasm denial" than racy sex scenes with climaxes. Yes, there is that slight "after orgasm depression" that we feel, but if you fall asleep right away, you wake up horney and then maybe have to wait until night to get laid again, but all is well anyway.

If had to deal with "orgasm denial" in a lover, he would probably be dead. Ha.

Allard

 

[AllardChardon]

Sorry xssve,

I was so excited by your post, I misread the sender.

Allard

 

[xssve]

Are you saying it is better to use more "literary orgasm denial" than racy sex scenes with climaxes. Yes, there is that slight "after orgasm depression" that we feel, but if you fall asleep right away, you wake up horney and then maybe have to wait until night to get laid again, but all is well anyway.

If had to deal with "orgasm denial" in a lover, he would probably be dead. Ha.

Allard

Not really Allard, they are two different dynamics that create different effects in terms of emotional response - I believe the tension release form, alá The Pit and the Pendulum is generally found more often in short stories, and it suits the form, while the release denial form is probobly more common in longer, and more "modern" fiction.

Certainly you can find plenty of exceptions in either form, H.P. Lovecraft was very big on unrequited tension unless you consider madness a satisfactory conclusion, and it can be found in many of Poe's works as well the fact is that too pat endings often come across as trite, which is why Ambrose Bierce is generaly considered to be the lesser of the the Three, when their works in the same genre are compared, as Bierce tended to favor conclusive resolutions in his fantasy and horror works, while those works that are usually considered to be his best achievements, to me at least, are less conclusive or predictable; Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge, or some of his other War stories, which are for the most part head and shoulders above his fantasy work.

There may be other dynamics principles involved, the cyclical thing for example, and really I don't see where any one of them is necessarily superior to any other, they simply evoke different responses in different ways, and no reason not to combine them in various ways either.

 

[AllardChardon]

I do see your point about the lingering effect of denial. It is haunting ...

I will ponder your insightful thoughts and look up Ambrose Bierce as well as add The Pit and the Pendulum to my list of books to read in 2008. I think I only saw the movie in theatres when I was a young girl. Vincent Price and the swinging pendulum spring to mind and I know Hollywood probably did not do the work any justice.

 

[xssve]

My current understanding or paradigm of the sexual dynamic stands thus: sex is a social interaction between one person, the protagonist, and an object of neurotic attachment, usually another person, the McGuffin, and the object or McGuffin may be more or less developed, if it is a person, as a personality - i.e., H. Humbert is the protagonist, we are privy to his thoughts through the voice of the narrator, and we learn of Lolita through his perceptions of her: erotic attachments to her physical person, her bare. slender legs, etc., her personality traits, her sauciness etc. (haven't actully read this book in probobly twenty years so my memoies are fragmentary), and it's only gradually that her objective status is transformed into and identifiable person with her own emotional state that the reader can identify with.

After the Mother, the obstacle to resolution through sexual release is killed and removed and the relationship shifts from erotic to sexual, H. Humbert is at first ecstatic, but since he was only ever in love with the idea of her, Lolita as object, the archetype of the nymphet, between Thelarche and Menarche, as opposed to Lolita as a person, the realtionship becomes increasingly unsatisfactory as she matures, and loses the attributes that attracted him to begin with, the objects of his neurotic attachment.

The new climax is the point she becomes most human to him, when he sees her as a person, which is, ironically, the point at which his attachment begins to fade and dissillusionment sets in as awareness of the full magnitude of his betrayal begins to weigh upon him and his erotic love turns to guilt and depression.

It's an excellent observation of male sexual attachment which tend to center on visual stimulus, whereas erotic and neurotic attachments to males tends to more wholistic and accomodating. Women essentially accomodate male fetishes in order to facilitate and strengthen the pair bond, though in the process they may well aquire fetishes of their own.

To return to the paradigm, sex begins with social interaction, which takes place on a number of levels - there are the things you say, nad then there are the things you don't say.

i.e., you might have a conversation about a particular subject, which may be idle chatter, or it may involve some sort of conflict resolution - either way there are other unspoken levels of communication occuring simultanously, sexual tension that may be communicated through sexual signalling: kinesthetics or body language, if it's an idle conversation there may be other social conflicts involved, economic issues, attention getting behaviors, or other issues associated with cost negotiation, etc. i.e., if the woman is playing hard to get, she is essentially raising the mans costs in order to determine the strength of his need or the quality of his attachment - in biological terms the cost is all on her side, and it's in her self interests to see how far the man is willing to share in thoise costs,and this is usually expressed in attention getting behaviors, romancing behaviors as a form of foreplay and pair bonding, etc. - she may or may not be attempting to extract an explicit promise.

There is the whole busines of assessing need, and how one might expect it to be expressed, played out in the form of flirtation, etc.

A typical example might be an economic or social conflict, where to go for dinner for instance: there is a conflict which seves as foreplay on another level, i.e., Italian or Mexican? ("I bet you like it hot?", "What about Greek?", etc.) which can be resolved in course of escalting to an actual sexual encounter ("I'm hot already!"), and subsequent sexual and/or emotional release.

This is, of course, followed by a new conflict as the original issue at hand, where to eat, which had seemingly been resolved suddenly becomes the source of a new conflict, i.e., she changes her mind, now she want's Italian - I thought we agreed on Mexican? And so on.

In this construct, the story is in communicating all the unspoken levels of meaning involved, which as in most social exchanges of this sort are less about what you actually say and more about what you actually mean, which itself might involve mixed feelings on various levels.

Heh, I don't know if that helps or not, but it's what I've got at the moment.

 

[AllardChardon]

I know what you mean about the point where his attraction fades and disillusionment sets in.

Being a good looking woman for many years, I have used this to my advantage several times.

A man, gazing across a crowded bar, sights me and heads over to get a closer look. After several minutes of gawking, he moves closer to speak to me.

"May I buy you a drink?" he asks even though my glass is full.

I am not attracted to him, he is way too young for my taste, and full of that "we were meant to meet like this" look in his eye, so I blurt out in my best trailer trash accent, "Sure honey, but I really prefer a good cigar!"

The goddess on the pedestal crashes to the floor where she is much more comfortable. At times I can be an American vulgarism.

But, if I was attracted to him, that story would proceed very differently, I might even act the coquette.

I was not familiar with the denoument. I looked it up. A good word but spelled with the additional e. Denouement. Thanks for the enlightenment.

 

[xssve]

Thank you for the spellcheck, that might have been the first time I've actually written the word, or used it, for that matter, since High School.

I get in a lot of trouble over my ribald banter myself, I was a big fan of Mae West - and it helps me weed out the lightweights.

My thought on the subject were going in a bit different direction however, in terms of an observed phenomonae for which I have only anecdotal evidence: namely, that men who are attracted largely to physical beauty seem more likely to cheat or divorce - i.e., if a man is only attracted to a woman as an abstract object which represents beauty, and posesses whatever advantages that might confer, whether it be status, self esteem, etc., then he is also more at risk of transferring these needs elsewhere as looks fade, the reality behind the facade becomes more apparent, etc.

I guess it just strikes me whenever I see a attractive woman whose husband cheats on her - she is baffled, and so am I, thinking "damn, what kind of man would throw something like that away?" And I'm not talking supermodels here, just otherwise ordinary, well adjusted women with active minds and affectionate dispositions.

I'm calling that Barbie syndrome, and women play into that too, not only in using looks to their advantage to marry successful men, but more ordinarily by trying to become the perfect "well adjusted" soccer mom or whatever, sacrificing their individuality to some societal model of perfection, the suburban "Stepford" syndrome, that is in most respects a requirement of corporate culture that has everything to do with adapting to business requirements of bland professionalism but very little to do with actual happiness, self actualization or mental health.

In a sense, it's all a reflection of consumer culture, people as commodities rather than as potential collaborators, partners, allies, etc. - i.e., one has to overllok certian human failings in ones partner to truely be able to relate to them on a human level, as a unique human being rather than as an abstract representation of status, sexual attractiveness, etc., a "trophy" in other words, and object - which is what Lolita is to H.H.

Women do the same thing to men in their persuit of resources, which is, biologically, a strategy to enhance and optimize breeding potential, but is easily tranferred to seeking status for it's own sake, and in both cases can transmorgify from a strategy that optimizes reprductive potential to one that actively undermines it. The children of highly successful, status driven people often end up highly dysfunctional - I can't tell you how many dysfuctional, drug addicted trust funders I've known over the years. And even on the flip side, how many really miserable, exausted, Christian women with more kids than they can handle, i.e., having five kids before they're Thirty or something, with little or no help from the man, because it would affect his status to lift a finger - that can be a status seeking behavior too, depending on your cultural embedding.

Not much to do with weak endings perhaps, but it does suggest certain possible directions for character development in terms of moral fable.

 

[Rumple Foreskin]

By far, the most popular form of fiction today is Romance which always has an ending. Most of the time they are HEA (happy ever after) but more tenative endings, if there's a possibility of an HEA in the future, are showing up more and more.

I agree, as usual, with Zoot. These days, if a novel lacks a traditional ending, then it's considered high lit instead of genre fiction, a Larry McMurtry westeron, for instance, instead of Zane Grey.

Rumple Foreskin

 

[AllardChardon]

Rumple, I hope happy endings are poplular somewhere, because they are still my favorites. And a great orgasm scene before falling asleep is a happy ending to me.

xssve, The Barbie syndrome, yes I have played that game. As most women have. This is off 'weak endings' a bit, but here goes.

I was an unwed mother in 1977 at 25 years of age. The father was a heroin addicted Viet Nam vet that I dated in High School. Not a good situation to raise a child, so I did it alone.

My parents, friends and others told me that no one would want to marry a single unwed mother and I would be doomed for all time. Oh well, I will be an outcast, I am keeping this kid. I had two previous abortions due to being a promiscuous young adult.

When my son, Gabe, was two years old, I met Jim, an Italian Catholic. He fell for me and I thought it might work. After all Italians are greast lovers and do not divorce very often, so maybe I would have a chance at Barbiedom, after all.

The Catholicism screwed this poor man sexually, so badly that even sex with his wife was bad if it involved things God would not approve of, like cocksucking. So I was left in a lustless marriage and it wore on me. If I couldn't be a happily married woman, then I would be the best mom possible.

I threw myself into raising the two sons because I got pregnant quickly and we had to get married, so to speak. I did everything a woman could do. Sent Jim to a therapist, which did not work, and volunteered at school. The list of hats I have worn over my 30 years of being a good mom is endless.

When the boys were 6 and 9 and we were on the verge of divorce, I got pregnant with my only daughter and decided to stay put. One more son was born so the little girl would have a sibling her own age to rough and tumble with. I had arrived in my Barbiedom and was personally miserable.

Respectable and miserable. Oh well, I have four great kids, a supportive co-parent, the youngest child is 17 and a senior in High School. If my first novel sells, I will finally get to enjoy some real freedom for the first time since I was young.

I do not regret any of it. It has made me the person I am today and I like her alot. I know this was very personal, but that journey to Barbiedom I took was not as much fun as I thought going in.

To tie back into weak endings, I am searching for the great finish to my life, in the distant future, of course.

Do women have a little easier time of it now, I wonder? Or is that unwanted pregancy thing still the same nightmare? Depends on the families involved, I would guess.

 

[xssve]

Good question, I appear to live in Barbiland so I have no idea - I do see a lot of (presumably) unwed mothers but they seem to have no trouble finding dates. I think a woman has to be pretty much of a basket case to not be able to find a man - it's actually much more difficult for a single man to find a marriagable woman, which is why we lie about it all the time. Helps to double check the demographics once in a while, I'm just re-reading Faludi.

My Ex is an abusive alchoholic, I took the kids and left so I have no social life, my curfew is like 2:00 pm most of the time - it was worth the hell I guess, I have nerves of steel and two great kids.

 

[AllardChardon]

xssve,

My hat is off to you, girl! It ain't easy with them and it ain't easy without them.

Let's hope writing gets us both out of this situation.

Thanks for the great conversation. I am fixing a rosemary garlic whole roasted chicken with wild rice and spinach salad for me and the boys.

Allard

 

[xssve]

Thanks, though in fact I am of the male persuasion - kind of a whole role reversal situation which doesn't really help things, I'm currently seeing my left hand.

And I draw rather than write - well, I write, just not a lot just yet.
Enjoy your dinner, sounds delicious!

 

[xssve]

Actually, speaking of drawing, one cheap trick I thought of today is to open and close with visual metaphor: blowing leaves, petals falling from flowers in a vase, something the reader will mistake for profundity - let them draw their own conclusions.

 

[AllardChardon]

Sorry about that xssve,

It is difficult to tell with this group. You draw, huh? Well here's hoping you sell some of your work. I am hoping to sell my book, soon. I look forward to our next chat.

Allard, a woman

 

[xssve]

Yes, there are some I'm still not sure about, guys with female avatars don't help.

I do draw, I decided to try and do some sequential storytelling (comix), it's something I always wanted to do and I'm pretty much stuck at home anyways so I'm taking advantage.

Hadn't drawn since High school when I was passable, and I thought I could just take take up where I left off - alas, most of what remained were bad habits and the lingering perceptual effects of full fledged research into creative pharmacology.

I have a few sketches in the Visual Artists Corner, you'll have to go back a couple of months - I actually made something of a breakthrough today, so I hope to update soon.

Ciao.

xssve, a man.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Story tension in terms of Sexual Tension

That's a cool idea, looking at story tension in terms of sexual tension. Normal drama follows the drama of the sexual act, but I'd never considered that an unresolved story communicates unresolved desire.

It opens up the possibility of looking at the dramatic line of a story as a sexual framework and communicating all sorts of subtextual sexual states through the fictional rise and fall of the action: frustration (maybe that's what Allende was trying to relate?), rape or rough use (slasher movies and Grand Guignol fiction could be said to do this), impotence, inorgasmia, erotic diffusion, sublimation - all in the way the story's resolved or unresolved. You relate the experience of reading a story to the primal sexual experience and end with a great, splashy orgasm as in Poe, or a coitus interuptus, or a fade into the autoerotic mists.

And speaking of Poe - okay, yes, the ending of Pit comes back to me, but it's hardly much better than "...and they all died in the quicksand" as far as resolving the ethical problems the story raises. You know that basically he had this great idea for a torture device and no story to go with it, and this is what he ended up with. When he ran out of wine, he stopped writing.

 

[xssve]

It's all sex, as they say in airframes.

The Pit does seem to be largely an excercise in atmospherics, but a very successful one in my estimation - it's not as satisfyingly horrible as The Cask of Amontillado or the The Telltale Heart, or a lot of his other works, but there isn't really a lot of ways to go there anyway, "here comes the cavalry" works as well as anything.

It's a cop out, no question, but it's also an uncharacteristically happy ending for Poe. Maybe his editor told him he was being too depressing, I dunno, it's kind of out of character with respect to the rest of his ouvre, though it's been a while since I've read any Poe - over Twenty years.

I think the ending of Usher, is by contrast, much less of a cop out considering the strong underlying erotic theme of Southern Gothic incest, it's serves as a metaphor for both the atmosphere of tragic, doomed love, and the whole business of sweeping it under the rug, burying it - family secrets.

If anything was cheesy about Usher, it was probobly the resurrection of the sister/wife, in my book anyway, and the ending was suitably dramatic which suits the period.

V.C. Andrews by contrast, milked it out endlessly in more modern, soap opera fashion, but then there is a fairly substantial factor in considering the difference between long and short fiction as the former tends to have more pages to milk things out.

 

[AllardChardon]

I have learned alot from reading the posts on this thread. I love to learn a new way to approach writing and I have gotten some great ideas from this dialog.

I find too much time on this site is spent on silly dribble, sexy or not.

Thanks for being there, writing with intelligence and responding so well, Dr. Mabeuse ( I love the cigar) and xssve.

xssve, I will look forward to your drawing being posted soon. Two of my sons draw and I hope to have them illustrate my book. Might as well take the boys with me if the novel is successful. I have high hopes.

 

[xssve]

S'not a problem Allard, this is one of the few forums I've found where such subjects come up and you can usually count on me to put my two cents in - writing is not somehting I]ve ever spent a lot of time at or even thinking about before, so I'm cramming.

The thing with graphic storytelling as an occupation, is that for an artist, it's strictly piecework, you get paid by the page, the story itself belongs to the writer who consequently reaps all subsequent benefits in terms of royalties, reprints, movie options, etc., so while I'm not averse to piecework or, at this stage, even backend deals for commision if the marketing strategy is sound, I'm leaning toward writing my own stuff, so these topics are of great interest to me.

I was going to tell you Dr., as ou've expressed interest, that if you, or anybody else for that matter does get interested in scripting again, one of the better resources I know of is Steven Grant over at comicbookresources.com - he does a regular archived column over there. This week the topic is narrative voice, which is another subject of great interest to me at the moment, and I think it probobly applies to literature as well in many respects.

Here's the column, if you want to check it out: http://www.comicbookresources.com/columns/?column=10

"Style" in comics is a tricky thing, because the written word in comics usually goes much deeper than what's seen on the printed page. For awhile some comics writers (rather pointlessly, I think) became obsessed with the written style of their scripts, despite almost no one ever seeing them. But the words that landed on the printed page usually betrayed no special difference from anything else published at the time, connoted no defining excellence. Scene descriptions, helpful as they may be to the artist, mean nothing to comics, as scene description is indirect writing. Comics writers have three direct modes of expression, three means of exposing our words directly to the reader, available to us: dialog (including thought balloons), sound effects and captions. Sound effects, while as open to possibilities as anything, are usually the most perfunctory of words in a comic book, so we'll leave them out of this discussion. While chosen by the writer and bearing directly on story's action, dialog is the characters' voices, not (hopefully) the writer's.

Captions are the only place in a comic story where the writer's voice goes to the reader unmediated. This isn't the only use of captions by a long shot, but worth considering is that in comics writing, voice is style. Voice is tone.

Whatever decisions we make regarding captions affects the "voice" of the story. Narration, regardless of the speaker, is always the writer's voice. The reader's appreciation of a story will always be influenced not only by the content of the narration, but by the voice, and that makes these thing worth thinking about.

 

[AllardChardon]

xssve,

I never really consider comics as writing. But you are right. I think of it like storyboarding for movies. Pictures, action and dialog move the story along. With so few words to tell the story, that would be daunting enterprise for me. My novel has 107,000. But I am wordy, always have been.

Ways to edit the wordiness are always good and different style of voice also interest me. I will check out that comic book site. I am curious.

I chose third person past tense for my main character the Undertaker and everything is seen through his eyes. He can only guess what others are thinking and alot of the story is his thoughts about what is going on. That has been a real challenge to keep straight. It is the POV that J K Rowling used for Harry Potter and very enjoyable for the reader.

I don't like books in the first person as well for some reason. Maybe, because I like to be the observer when I am not on center stage.

I can see why piece work would be a drag, especially if the comic book takes off and makes lots of money with your artwork inside and no way to get at the royalties. So you must be developing your story at this point. That is a great place to be, I love the character creating part the most.

One the character is created fully in my mind, then it is easy to move him around to talk and interact. Best of luck to you.

Allard

 

[glynndah]

http://images.icanhascheezburger.com/completestore/2008/3/6/konstruktivfede128493038652187500.jpg

 

[AllardChardon]

We just talking comic books here, don't get all catty.

 

[xssve]

? I've been giving a lot of thought to narrative voice, first person stories tend to drag somehow - it's difficult to avoid in comix however, one tends to go in and out, between first and third person as, in a sense, there is no "he said" "she said", i.e., you see the character actually speaking which sort of kicks it automatically into first person.

She Hulk was written for a while example in such a way that she broke "the fourth wall", adressing the audience directly - it's generally considered poor technique, as it distracts the reader and breaks the suspension of disbelief, but can be effective in comedy, when the fight spills out into the studio backlot in Blazing Saddles for example.

One of the the things you can toy with in a visual medium that are a bit trickier in prose.

Anyway, Phillip Pullman has some interesting thoughts on narrative voice, here's an interview where here he discusses some of the fundamental difficulties in translating literature to film: http://books.guardian.co.uk/bookclub/story/0,,2232838,00.html

 

[AllardChardon]

Xssve,

Blazing Saddles! Funny you should mention that film as my son, Nick, is downstairs right now watching it. That is HEDLEY!!

Mel Brooks can do just about what he wants and get away with it. I wish he was my rich uncle but then my mother is not Jewish so that wouldn't work. Unless I could fake being related to his lovely wife, Anne Bancroft, better known as Mrs. Robinson, then I might have a chance.

Seriously, voice is different for comics and would be one of first and third person interacting back and forth. That 'fourth wall' idea works too especially with comedy. Are your comics funny or are your funnies comic, either way?

Allard