A promise “to love and cherish” is one often made at weddings as the bride and groom gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes, no doubt thinking of their future as a married couple and all that this promise implies. While we writers are not married to our readers (nor they to us, remember), it might stand us in good stead to consider making such a promise and then, even more importantly, to keep it.
In a general sense, this merely means that we should respect our readers, appreciate their loyalty, and try to give them the type of story they expect, especially in genre fiction. I think most fiction writers do this without even thinking about it. But when it comes to the specific details of the plot, authors do sometimes fail to keep that promise, and this can upset the reader. I know because I’ve been one of those readers on more than one occasion.
We all get upset when a beloved character is killed off for no apparent reason. When fictional sleuth Sherlock Holmes presumably fell to his death while defending himself against Professor Moriarty, readers were in such an uproar that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had to resurrect Holmes and continue with the stories the author had intended to lay to rest.
But what I want to talk about here is something much subtler yet still distressing to the reader. And that is when the author introduces an item in the story in such a way as to indicate that this item will later have significance but fails ever to mention it again. Or if the item is further involved in the story, it is only in passing, leaving the reader to wonder why it was ever brought to anyone’s attention in the first place.
Perhaps this is more easily explained in relation to film. When you are watching a thriller and the camera shoots a close-up of a butcher knife lying on the kitchen counter, you expect that knife to become a weapon at some point, whether in the hands of an attacker or a victim. If that knife never comes into play at all, except perhaps to chop some hapless vegetable, the reader is left feeling puzzled, disgruntled, and perhaps even ill-used by the film director.
Years ago I read a horror story by a best-selling author—and a good one, too, I might add—who informed the reader early on that one of the sympathetic characters in the story made collages. When that character was murdered, I thought, ah yes, but at least his beloved sister will still have the collages, the art her brother had put his heart and soul into making. Alas, it was not to be. Those collages that should have adorned the walls of his sister’s office in the novel’s denouement were sadly lacking, leaving me feeling far more frustrated than fulfilled at the end of the book.
Another possibility is that a character relationship is developed to the point where the reader expects it to evolve into something more, and then, when the perfect opportunity arises, this never happens, leaving the reader feeling dissatisfied and emotionally empty. I encountered this in a highly acclaimed, beautifully written novel in which the possibility of a future romance was implied during the story, but when the time was right for our hero to pursue it—again, in the denouement— he, unlike us readers, either didn’t think of it or, for some reason known only to him or his creator, didn’t bother to do anything about it.
In my view, but I hope not in my books, such possible “perfect endings” have been ruined either by author oversight or some editor’s misguided hand.
Our readers want to be mystified, terrified, or tantalized. They look for clues throughout the story to help them engage with the characters and foresee the inevitable ending. This doesn’t mean they don’t like surprises, but they also look forward to that “ah-ha!” moment when they can say, “I knew that knife was going to come into play” or “I knew she’d have her brother’s treasured artwork hanging on her walls” or “I knew he was going to ask her out.”
If you “promise” that an item, incident, or relationship will be important to the story, don’t deprive your reader of the satisfaction of seeing that promise fulfilled. After all, when it comes to fiction, “a promise kept” is one of the reasons we all love literature in the first place.
© 2017 Ann Henry, all rights reserved.
Photo: To Love and to Cherish © 2017 Robert Henry, all rights reserved.