Martha Galvez: "Dear Vina Jie-Min Prasad: Don't Leave Me Hanging"

Dear Vina Jie-Min Prasad: Don’t Leave Me Hanging

By Martha Galvez

One of my favorite works of fiction that we have read as a class this semester is “Cat Pictures Please” by Naomi Kritzer. I liked it a lot because it was simple and not overly complicated like a lot of speculative fiction stories. This was also true for the ending of it because it was very clear what had happened, and the reader wasn’t left wondering about what had happened or what was going to happen. I’ll avoid spoiling the ending but like I said, this story’s ending satisfied me because the narrator, which was a form of AI, explicitly said what was happening and what was going to continue to happen. There have been several other stories that we have read in this class and that I have read in other classes that leave the reader very confused and asking so many questions. I know a lot of people I have talked to like this type of mysterious ending because it gives room for the story to be different for each reader by filling in the gaps with their own imagination. However, when a story ends like that for me, it makes me almost mad because after all the time I spent reading the story, I would like to be told exactly how it ends. It’s something that I might go over and over again in my mind trying to figure out but to no avail because I will never truly know what the author wanted the ending to be unless the author actually wrote about it in the story.

Another aspect of a satisfying ending for me is when the ending is completely unexpected. I think most readers love it when the ending is something that they never saw coming and is a huge surprise. I think the most traditional example of this is the “Sixth Sense” because nobody ever sees the ending come. If I were to write a story, I think I would come up with two completely different story lines and then find a way to connect them so that the reader will never be able to see the ending. Completely unexpected endings are the best entertainment in literature in my opinion.

My third and final aspect of an ending which makes it satisfying is a happy ending. Of course there will always be sad stories and bad things will happen in them, but when a book kills off the main character which is also the most lovable and relatable, it is going to make the reader feel very upset about it and might possible avoid any other work from the same author. There has been a time when I was reading a book and one of my favorite characters died, after this happened, I honestly just didn’t want to read anymore of it. Even though there was only a couple pages left, it just didn’t feel worth it anymore. I lost the person who I was rooting for so why was I going to read any more of it.

So as I’ve said, the three most important parts of an ending to me are clarity, unpredictability, and keeping the story relatively happy. The more the author can say about the author can say about the ending, the better. I love knowing as much as I can about what happens after the big conflict or whatever it is that was happening throughout the story. An ending that can be seen since the beginning of the story is not entertaining if it was in the reader’s mind the whole time. Finally, nobody likes a sad story if it is unnecessary.