a few weeks ago, ambiguity in stories came up in a chatroom, and someone contended that 90% of stories that end right before showing the outcome of a character’s choice or the resolution of some dilemma would be improved by “just fucking showing what happens”
i disagree! now, conflict of interest disclosure, .
but still i would counter that no, often these stories wouldn’t be improved by just showing what happens, because they’re designed to not be improved by showing what happens.
when writing stories, you try to make the parts fit together with efficiency and necessity, ideally honing it to the point where removing or shifting one of the elements makes the whole thing fall apart like a jenga tower with the wrong piece removed.
one of the applications of this is that you can make it so that what literally happens next is one of those precarious pieces that collapses everything if tugged on.
now, should you do this? is this not just jamming a stick in your bike?
anyway, i’m reminded of the principle that, when you find yourself blocked on a scene and can’t figure out what to write next, oftentimes you’re not going to find the answer by just staring at the last paragraph and smacking yourself for what to put next
an easy trick is to back earlier in the scene, adding a line that lays pipe such that you set up some new momentum that lets you go somewhere else next.
but i digress. the thing i’m getting at is that most of the time, when a story ends by throwing ambiguity in the reader’s face? merely showing what happens next means replacing ambiguity with arbitrariness, and i don’t think that’s an improvement!
worse, ambiguous stories usually tick by building up a fundamental equivalence between the options.
see, there’s reasons for it to go either way, mutual plausibility, and there can be no good reason for it to need to resolve one way instead of the other — because then there would be no ambiguity!
so in practice, to resolve an ambiguous story without butchering it, you would have to go back and rewrite it so as to break the symmetry, figuring out which resolution would be more satisfying and building that one up.
and imo, if you’re at the point of writing an ambiguous story i find you’re doing that because you don’t find either option truly satisfying, and have (perhaps correctly!) identified, if not deliberately insured, that you’d be fucked either way if you wrote one word further.
in short, the point of an ambiguous story is to say “these two things are the same” or “it doesn’t matter, the story was about something else.”
and again, i’m biased, but i think those can be worthwhile points