“The Appearance of Real-Life Chaos”

What makes a good work of fiction? 

In the view of Richard Ridley, an author and contributor to Amazon's "CreateSpace," an important element is “the appearance of real-life chaos.”  Subplots, which give depth to characters, are also valuable in that they create familiar disorder, he maintained in a short advice-to-authors blog post entitled “The Resolution Matrix.”

In other words, human events rarely proceed in a predictable, straight-line fashion so to be credible, fiction shouldn’t either.

Ridley’s advice on that front is probably well taken, but his main message is somewhat curious.

Writers of fiction have an unwritten obligation to give readers "resolution," he says, arguing that there are two ways of doing that: a definitive ending where everything is wrapped up in tidy fashion and an open ending where it’s up to the reader to resolve matters for him or herself. 

No resolution is resolution.

While one could argue that’s a classic case of having it both ways, Ridley suggests a couple of reasons why an author might want to leave certain aspects of a story open at the conclusion. The first is a classic of popular fiction and arguably rather commercially self-serving on the part of the author: leave the door open for a sequel.  It's true some readers might relish the prospect of spending more time with characters or plot lines they have grown to like (and be willing to pay for it), but others might feel they had been played for suckers and didn't get what they paid for.

The other reason Ridley offers might be characterized as an act of literary noblesse oblige on the part of an author: to give the reader “ownership of a story’s resolution.” If you’re not convinced you have a compelling or at least satisfactory ending, hit the ball into the reader’s court and claim you are doing him or her a favor.

An argument can be made that in practice, an author actually has no control over such matters. Once a work has been created and released to the public, readers, not the author, decide what the work means whether an ending appears to be definitive or not, and the meaning may even change over time as views shift and society changes. So goes one school of literary criticism and we may see something along those lines happening with “To Kill a Mockingbird" in light of the recent publication of “Go Set a Watchman.”

Talk about real life chaos!

One wonders how and when  resolution will come on that front.