I’ve always heard that Charles Dickens changed the ending to The Old Curiosity Shop becuase his audience demanded it. I’ll grant that it’s not one of his better books, but if paying attention to your audience was important to Charles Dickens….. The man knew what he was doing.

This is a fascinating series of comments, by the way. You always get such interesting discussions going here. I’m jealous.

I agree with you completely. The writer does not owe the reader anything! In fact, I know that from my own experience, sometimes even I feel cheated by the story that is being written. Characters are who they are. Sometimes they do stupid things and you just want to scream at them, but the writer shouldn’t feel the need to change someone because they think that their audience might expect something else.

My characters are almost-living, almost-breathing people. I can’t change them or their actions any more than I can change anyone else’s who I see on a daily basis.

Authors do owe something to the story they are telling. For the final season(s) of BTVS, it was pretty evident that Joss’s attentions were elsewhere. As mentioned above, part of the problem with VM was Rob not being let alone to tell his story, but trying to meet network requests. The main times I’ve been angry at how a book turns out or is told, its usually because it gets too messagey or someone acts out of character or it feels rushed.

And fans owe it to the author and creator to let the story be told — to realize that the resolution of the story isn’t going to fit what the fan wants or their individual needs.

Art is communication. Writing even more so than most I believe. I’ve met “artistes” that slop paint on canvas and say it’s the viewer’s fault they don’t “get” it. I’ve read poetry that is similar. It fails to communicate. There’s no message, theme, or point.

In a novel, there should be a story. I think that a writer owes the reader a story if they’re writing a story. If I want an action-adventure film, I don’t go to the History section. If I want a history book, I don’t look under Fiction. If I want a STORY, then I look for stories. If a writer gives me something else, I’m going to be upset with them.

In a series, the hardest task is to give new content without devaluing or departing from the old material. An author doesn’t OWE the readers a better-than-the-last book each and every time, but they should try. A series ending should be at least as good as the beginning, and should BE an ending. But the author doesn’t OWE the readers that, it’s just good manners.

An author doesn’t have to move onto something new when they’ve totally said everything they can possibly say on the old subjects… but I personally would appreciate it. I’ll let you know if/when you approach that (we’ll check in a dozen books or so).

Readers should have NO influence over the details of said awesome. If they have such good ideas, let them write their own damn books. And if their books kick ass, then they’ll have fans of their own. Fair is fair.

Does anybody really believe Stephanie Meyer got 3 books in and said “Now I’m going to ruin this for everybody!” She made it as awesome as she could and then gave it to the world, which is an act of supreme courage, whether it pleases everybody or not.

I’m of two minds on this too. I don’t want my favorite authors to write a book that is what I expect it to be. I want to be surprised. I think people came up with theories, got attached to them, and then were disappointed when they were wrong. So, they blame Stephanie Meyer. I think she wrote a great book that nearly had me calling in sick to work so I could stay home and read. I only went cause I remembered the four pairs of shoes that I just bought. (Curse my shoe addiction!)

As for the seventh Harry Potter, I did have my theories, but I was disappointed when I got it right. Because if I got it right, it was what I expected and I wasn’t surprised. Although I’ll admit there was a smug “Ha! I figured it out” feeling when I did get something right, the surprises were much more fun.

At the same time though, I totally agree that creators of Veronica Mars owe me for what they did to that show. I also think the creators of Gilmore Girls owe me a new ending to the show. Maybe writers of books owe their readers nothing, but creators of TV shows owe their viewers everything? Although that seems discriminatory. Ah well. It’s the best I can come up with thanks to the amount of tea I’ve had today.

~Catherine

Sure, not everyone always sees eye-to-eye, so there’ll always be people who hate it, and everyone reads the book with something different in mind, but I think that an ending tacked-on to a very different feeling book—be it happy OR sad, just doesn’t work.
Which is why a lot of the endings most protested are the ones of series or TV shows stretched out for longer than they were originally planned.

Also, I kind of liked Season Seven of Buffy, which I actually only finished watching today. Well-plotted if single-minded, and quite the improvement on Season Six, in my opinion.

I keep starting responses and then someone else has said what I was going to say further along. Bless!

The reader expects that the story will be about something. They expect that there will be clues and foreshadowing that will point toward the ending. They expect that the author won’t introduce things into the denouement that were not introduced or implied somewhere earlier in the story. They expect things to conform to the general rules and tropes of the genre or for deviations to be explained at some point.

The reader needs to have some idea what to watch and watch for, or they will become increasingly unhappy over the course of the story, and downright irate if the rug is suddenly jerked out from under them somewhere along the line by huge unexplained deviation from expectation.

Now, it’s possible to successfully violate every single expectation of the implicit, but it has to be done consciously and extremely well or the book is likely to make a ballistic arc and lose the author a reader, certainly for that story and possibly forever.

I’ve also seen writers get really focused on their IDEA, to the point where they shoe-horn the character in to fit the story. Or people who put all kinds of markers in, aiming at misleading the reader, but all it does is succeed in setting up expectations that will be dashed. They see it as a plot twist, the reader sees it as violations between the author and reader. (El at comment 8 makes this remark better than I am doing here….)

One person who does surprising and subversive plot elements well is Lois Bujold. There’s a point in her novel, A Civil Campaign, where you wonder what a secondary character is doing off-screen. And based upon my culture, I made all kinds of assumptions. None of which were right. But when the reveal occured, I was really digging where it took the story. It was consistent with the characters (as we knew them) and THEIR culture. It was a surprise and yet played well with the rules of the Vorkosigan-verse.

Recently, Elizabeth George killed off a major character in her Inspector Lynley mysteries. And got a lot of flak for it. I was personally unhappy with the decision…and I read her justification for it, and still didn’t like it, but didn’t feel betrayed because it was still playing by the rules she sets for her characters. Harsh things happen…has always been a rule in her series. People lose jobs, parents die, fertility issues prevent people from conceiving, racism affects neighbours, and sometimes people lose loved ones in senseless incidents. It was consistent with how she treated the characters.

The writer can get away with a lot, as long as they aren’t betraying the reader by changing the rules. Other than that…anything is fair game.

Okay, rant over.

As for the reader-writer contract- the writer owes a reader nothing unless it pleases his/her ego. But. The writer must write books that people want to read. Or nothing will sell and then what kind of authorhood is that? Stephenie Meyer is not having that problem at this point. When you are that high on the bestseller list you are presumably doing enough right to not have to worry about fans with different taste than yours. Because they did still buy the book, apparently.She can write the book however she wants. And I thought she did a fairly good job of it.

(This may be overly cynical. I can’t see a famous author not caring to the level that they want to write something many readers might hate, but as Justine has said before, authors are thin-skinned beasties.)

I agree with Corey Feldman

I don’t think authors owe readers anything. Nothing at all. Art’s only responsibility is to itself.

But.

Readers don’t owe authors anything either. Piss on your readers and they’ll stop buying your books.

I think it’s a dilemma artists of all stripes face: how do you balance what’s in your heart (avant-garde free-jazz skronk) and what your audience expects (upbeat summery pop tunes)?

Of course, just phoning it in is another quick route to losing your fanbase (and it lacks even the meager cover of artistic integrity to keep you warm during those long, cold, fan-less nights).

But regardless of why the artist has done it, I think their only responsibility is to their own vision. Even if I hate hate hate it.

Basically, you owe me an ending as good as the beginning that drew me in.

That’s it.

BD seemed to give everyone a happy ending; a few too many joyous people for well over 700 pages. (Okay, there were a select few affected by pain/death/etc.) It could be the conditioning of the Harry Potter series where anyone can die, no one is off limits, causing me to want more conflict, but I think it’s just the need for conflict with consequences.

Authors may not owe readers a certain story, but they shouldn’t kill fans viewpoints of them by writing freakishly strange sap either.

On a side note I didn’t HATE the book, I just feel it could have been MUCH better had the time been spent on it. I think she was killing herself trying to get the Host out as well as BD in one year. She never should have overextended.

High school shows just seem unable to make it to college. Sniffle. I do wish they’d managed to convince the powers that be to let them do the four-years-later, Veronica-at-the-FBI fourth season, though.

I miss my shows. And you’re horrifying me with this shark-jumping talk about Weeds. I’m almost to the end of season three and I still love Nancy.

/end TV-chatter hijack of interesting discussion thread.

Buffy season 7 gets points for the Anya episode, at least!