Jake Cooley: "Dear Max Gladstone: The Curveball Is Where It Counts"

Dear Max Gladstone: The Curveball is where it Counts

By Jake Cooley

Ask me what face I usually make when I’m reading, and I will point you to the image right above this text. If I’m making this face at the book, chances are it will probably be forgotten within the next month after I finish reading. 

Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, in the cases where the ending of a book is given before the story even begins. While those books are more about the journey, the books that stick with me are those where the path for that journey suddenly veers off course and leaves you sitting on your butt wondering what went wrong. For some people it might sound strange to like a story where you’re wracking your brain to figure out what just happened in the text, and I’m here to explain why it’s actually one of the biggest reasons as to why a story goes from “Yeah I read ____ once” to “If you haven’t read ____, your life will be incomplete until you do.” 

Have you ever watched a TV show that you become really engaged in, but then you become filled with dread as the screen fades and you’re hit with an onslaught of commercial breaks? That’s sort of what the feeling of a curveball at the end of a story feels like, except that in a book the commercial break never stops and the end is really the end (unless of course the author makes some form of sequel).  

One of the prime examples I have of this is from a short story called “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin. When reading this story I believed it would be one of the cliché plots where the odds are stacked against the girl who stows away on the ship but at the very end the story she would escape via some elaborate plan. I would have sighed with exasperation over another story where the ending was handed to me long before the turn of the final page, inevitably flushing the reading down to the Memory Dump (as soon as I was sure we weren’t going to have a reading quiz on it). Plot twist! The story didn’t end that way, and I was left in shock when I reached the end realizing that the girl really wasn’t coming back…ever. After I finished reading, I sat and thought about that story for about twenty minutes trying to digest what I had just read. I’m not sure about your opinion, but a story that causes sleep-deprived high schooler to reflect on a short story at 2am instead of collapsing into their pillow earns a pretty high ranking in my book. Although “The Cold Equations” offers a more drawn out plot twist, it still satisfies my ‘narrative kink’ because it proved me wrong. Not only did the story put my prediction skills to shame, but it did so in a fashion where all of the evidence in the text could be used to explain why the ending makes sense. Since the story is over, the only way to go for more information or clarity is back into the text. This method of trying to make sense of the twist in the story allows for a deeper examination of the text, and also appreciation for the careful intricacies placed inside of the story in order to make such an ending work well. 

Additionally, having a twist at the end of a story offers the opportunity for the reader’s imagination to speculate what’s going to happen in the story universe after the final words are read. While most stories tie up loose ends and leave a pretty clear outline of what’s going to happen after curtain call, placing a curveball at the end usually gives the reader a much larger pool of potential outcomes than the former type of narrative. As an unofficial member of the daydreaming club, having stories end with a pool of “what-if” questions to sift through and simulate is a dream come true. 

When writing about this kink, I find that the curveball in the story is symbolic of what we experience in life when our noses aren’t buried in a book. The curveball is important to me because it shows that focusing on the details of the now can leave us a bit more prepared for the uncertainties of the future.