A great twist, jolt, or symphonic scene at the climax of a novel will always leave your readers begging for more. But how do you know when your book has gone too far?
Tao Lin is exploring whiz-bang endings (among many other open-ended questions he's posting about his second novel), and this quote in particular got me thinking. Check it out:
"it can start in one place and end in a different place that is unexpected and makes you forget where it began (i think this has happened with short stories, but not really entire books, for me), for example maybe 'graveyard day' by bobbie ann mason, that story where they smoke crack, i think, by a.m. homes, and that story by murakami where they rob a mcdonald's"
You can learn a lot by reading all three of those writers, especially A.M. Homes. She can turn the dullest suburb into a fairytale forest, complete with witches that eat little children.
Still, these twisty endings also run a big risk--you can lose your readers in a heartbeat when you resort to fantasy or major plot shifts. My question for you is this: Can you think of novels that crashed and burned because of a slam-bam ending? How much is too much?
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