The 2006 Christopher Nolan film The Prestige, based on the novel by Christopher Priest, has a lot to tell us about how to write magical stories.
Though there are many things to learn from the way it presents us with a story of two rival magicians, perhaps the most important learning point is the concept embodied in the title itself. For those who don’t know, “The Prestige” is the third act of any magician’s trick, in which what they previously destroyed, or made to disappear, returns – to the delight and adulation of the crowd. As Michael Caine’s character, Cutter, observes, “It’s not enough to make something disappear. You have to bring it back.”
“It’s not enough to make something disappear. You have to bring it back.”
Our mythologies and religions are full to bursting with gods and human beings who return from death. From the wounded King Arthur, who will one day come again from beyond the veils of Avalon, to the crucified Jesus who lay three days dead in the tomb yet rose, to the dismembered god Osiris, who was reforged from scattered body parts by his wife, Isis, the list goes on and on.
The recurrence of this image throughout history and across innumerable cultures is evidence that the idea of a “prestige” is hardwired into our deepest psyche. We yearn for what was lost to return to us. The concept has filtered through into modern-day popular culture too: The Return of the King, The Return of the Jedi, even Superman Returns. There is a sense that true heroes, true saviours, come back to us when we need them the most.
Of course, sometimes this deep human need is exploited for quick cash grabs, as in the “endless sequel” effect in which our favourite characters just keep coming back time and time again. In these instances, often it is the case that the story begins to lose all meaning, because there are no real stakes; the heroes are invulnerable, and even if they seem to die, they always come back without a scratch.
However, when this mythic principle is handled with sincerity and integrity, it can produce some of the most startling and moving moments in cinema, prose, poetry, indeed, any medium. The initial disappearance of the figure who is going to return need not even be via death; it can be just that: a disappearance. Consider how Gandalf leaving Helm’s Deep in the second Lord of the Rings movie shapes the narrative. He leaves the story for some time, long enough we almost forget where he’s gone off to, but at the critical moment, when all hope seems lost, he returns to save the day (bringing with him the “lost” Rohirrim) in a sublime eucatastrophe.
I often hear writers talking about how they have “written themselves into a corner” by disposing of an artefact, character, or even a place. Many of these issues can be fixed by building the concept of a “prestige” into your fiction from the get go.
A sad death at the end of a book can be devastating. But a “prestige”, a triumphant return, is infinitely more powerful; it shakes to the bone.
And on that subject, I always admire a writer who has the guts to kill their characters, and sometimes a character simply has to die, and die forever, for a story to end, for it to have any meaning. But whilst the bitter fruit of death, or loss, is sometimes what is needed to round out a tale, the far sweeter fruit of return also has its place. This is more true of horror, not less. In Nolan’s 2010 film Inception, he remarked that “Positive emotion trumps negative every time”, and I also happen to agree with him on this front. A sad death at the end of a book can be devastating. But a “prestige”, a triumphant return, is infinitely more powerful; it shakes to the bone. Death, after all, is merely existential.
As someone who helps upcoming writers refine and structure their work, I get a lot of questions about my craft: how I do what I do, the secret knowledge of how narrative works. All great writing is built on a deep philosophy which, at least in a healthy organism, evolves over time and with greater learning and understanding. Many people look to me for guidance about the underlying principles of narrative and how to work spells upon your reader.
This Patreon, the Mindvault, is built to give you the answers to these questions.
Once a month, I will share with you a Lost Relic – a piece of occult writing expanding on a narrative idea. For higher tier backers, I’ll also be sharing short behind-the-scenes videos about my creative process, the tools I use to create fiction and narrative, the hobbies that feed my creativity, and more. This is your chance to get up close and personal with a fully tentacled mindflayer.
Every other Monday, we will introduce you to a writer from the Writers’ Mastermind. Today, we have Joseph Sale, a novelist and editor (aka The Mindflayer).
Meet Joseph Sale
Joseph is a prolific novelist and editor. His first novel, The Darkest Touch, was published by Dark Hall Press in 2014. He is published with The Writing Collective and has authored more than ten novels, including his Black Gate trilogy, and his love-letter to fantasy: Save Game. He grew up in the Lovecraftian seaside town of Bournemouth.
He edits non-fiction and fiction, helping fledgling authors to realise their potential. He has edited some of the best new voices in speculative fiction including Ross Jeffery, Emily Harrison, Christa Wojciechowski, and more. His short fiction has appeared in Tales from the Shadow Booth, edited by Dan Coxon, as well as in Idle Ink, Silver Blade, Fiction Vortex, Nonbinary Review, Edgar Allan Poet and Storgy Magazine. His stories have also appeared in anthologies such as You Are Not Alone (Storgy), Lost Voices (The Writing Collective), Technological Horror (Dark Hall Press), Burnt Fur (Blood Bound Books) and Exit Earth (Storgy). In 2017 he was nominated for The Guardian’s ‘Not The Booker’ prize.
He is obsessed with Attack on Titan and Community.
1. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you from? Where are you now? What has your life been like?
I’m Joseph Sale, sometimes called The Mindflayer, and I’m from Bournemouth, a little seaside town clinging to the southern coast of England. It’s a strange place, at once beautiful and Innsmouth-esque. Now, I’m a little further north, in the historic town of Winchester, where one of the many alleged round tables of King Arthur resides (I have to say, it’s bad-ass; it’s hung up on the wall of a castle, and makes for a pretty imposing talisman). My life has been a series of incarcerations and liberations; imprisonment in an awful school in which children were being brutalised on a daily basis – then freedom from it. Incarceration in meaningless work, then liberation from it. And finally, the incarceration of my own limiting beliefs and – though hard won – a mental liberation. The strangest and most wondrous thing about my life is that after twenty seven years, it has only just begun.
2. What kind of stories do you write?
I am fascinated by encounters with the divine, the indescribable, the ineffable, the demonic, the eldritch, and how these experiences change who we are forever. As a result, the genres I write in vary greatly, but there is always a theme of the supernatural, or supra-normal. Sometimes this takes the form of cosmic horror, and there is a lot of horror in my work, but fantasy is equally if not more important.
3. What sets you apart from other writers in your space?
This is a tough question to answer without slipping into ego. However, I think what separates my work is style and form, and then the flood of emotion that bursts through that. Most writers, I find, are writing the story as it manifests in their head; they’re “setting it down”, which is awesome. However, because I’m a freak and a weirdo (cue Radiohead song), I’m more approaching the writing from, I guess, a poet’s standpoint: how is X or Y word going to affect the reader? How can this sentence mimetically embody the meaning of what I’m trying to say? For me, language is not a means to an end, it is the end.
4. What drives your writing? What do you mean to accomplish with your stories?
Words are a form of magic, an incantation, and they should be used as such to cast an emotionally healing spell upon the reader. My hope is that, in reading my stories, people will see not only an emblem of their own condition, but a way to become liberated from it, even if momentarily. The Greek word for this is catharsis, and I think it’s certainly my ultimate aim. I don’t always achieve it, but it’s always what I’m striving for.
5. Who are you favorite writers and books? What are your other creative influences?
There are so many favourites it is hard to know where to begin! In terms of big names, I love the phantasmagorical wonder and horror (and also eroticism) of Clive Barker’s mythopeic epics. Barker is surely a prophet, glimpsing a universe beyond our mortal bounds.
I adore the heartfelt, spellbinding narratives of Grady Hendrix. His My Best Friend’s Exorcism is, in my mind, one of the greatest novels ever written.
I’m a big fan of the classics too, and Edmund Spenser is an overlooked genius of the Elizabethan era, whose fantastical epic The Faerie Queene was a huge inspiration for my upcoming project Virtue’s End.
In terms of indie writers, well, now there are so many names I am surely going to miss a few, but I think the indie scene is really where there is an abundance of talent and some of the most exciting literature emerging. My favourite authors here are Christa Wojciechowski (your good self), surely one of the best writers alive today, indie or not: psychological insight, supple and beautiful prose, characters one adores, and fathoms of depth. Ross Jeffery is a phenomenal writer, though I am biased as I’m his editor! I also love Dan Soule, a truly classic horror author; Iseult Murphy, whom I’ve already mentioned; S. C. Mendes, who writes phenomenal occult thrillers; Nikki Noir, who writes erotic, occult horror (it’s as incredible as it sounds); the mysterious Gordon James, a Writing Collective author, and criminally underrated; I also love the YA fantasy epic Hecctrossipy by Bia Bella Baker. She’s a master world-builder.
There are so many more, but to list them all would take up a book’s worth of space!
6. Do you write in silence? Background noise? Or music? What kind?
I used to write to music, but I generally find that now I use music to kind of “hype up” for writing a specific scene, and the writing itself takes place in silence. Music is a very important part of who I am, I think. I listen to an eclectic range, from Tupac to Avenged Sevenfold to the gorgeous baroque of J. S. Bach and Vivaldi. I wrote the entirety of the final Black Gate book listening to “Et In Terra Pax”, which is arguably one of my all time favourite pieces of music. That was an instance the music was on. Because there were no words to distract me, I could just let the melodies wash over my ears, and hypnotise me into the trance I needed to be in to see and feel the ending of the story.
7. What is your favorite thing to do when you are not writing?
Nerd stuff!! I love to play video games, Magic: The Gathering, and to paint miniatures. But if I had to say one thing: I am a Game Master and have created my own unique RPG system known as Dead World: Desecrated Empires (which for the first time ever is being released onto the world July 2021). We play over Zoom (it was a godsend during lockdown!) and have sessions every week. We’ve occupied this fantasy world for so long, it feels real to us in the same way that a regular holiday destination does to others.
8. Who is your current celebrity crush?
Oh no. Don’t do this to me. Last time I played this game with my wife she almost killed me… Okay, well, they say honesty is the best policy, right? Alexandra Daddario would have to be my crush. I think she’s an amazing actress with charisma overload; she was mesmeric in We Summon The Darkness as a psychopath with serious, serious daddy issues, and in True Detective she managed to make a character who could have been so forgettable absolutely iconic. Why are you looking at me like that? It’s her acting, dammit! That’s the reason for the crush. No other reason!
9. Why do you think it’s important to write fiction?
Where to begin? Narrative is a form of therapy, which is why even people without a creative bone in their body can get a lot of relief by simply journalling, speaking to someone about their problems, or perhaps even going so far as to write a biography. But fiction trumps non-fiction and biography in one key way: it allows us to use the power of imagination to visualise an alternative outcome. In other words, we can, quite literally, re-write the narratives of our lives. It is not easily done, I hasten to add, but when it is achieved, this can be more potently healing than merely chronicling or “reflecting”. Reflecting is key, because it leads to self-awareness, the first step of any true healing or awakening. But in and of itself it’s “dead” because it lacks movement or transformation. Fiction allows us to transubstantiate the stale and rotten bread of our lives into the living flesh of Christ. It is only by taking this final step, of removing the veil and worship of “reality”, that we can transcend our fears and reach true healing. When we do this, we become something greater.
10. Who would be the best writer, alive or dead, to tell the story of your life?
Oh that’s an interesting one! It would have to be someone very good at writing the supernatural, let me tell you! Someone like Barker would probably be a great fit, because he would understand the British cultural elements, the frustrations with the hierarchy and classism of our society, the friendships and loves formed from striving in the gutter, and the encounters with the divine. But equally I think someone like Ross Jeffery would do an amazing job. He regularly visits Bournemouth, so he understands a little bit of the lingo and feel of the place in which I was raised, and he also has a great feel for the supernatural and the spiritual.
11. What are you working on right now?
So many things! I always tend to be two or three books ahead of myself. My next release will be announced in full soon, but suffice to say it’s a short novel called The Tunnel, about a camgirl going up against a gigantic two-tonne killer crocodile on a murder-rampage in London. I’ve got Desecrated Empires, my RPG book, which is now in proofing stage and coming out July time. I also have my occult fantasy epic, Virtue’s End, which may come at the end of 2021, or early 2022. I am still editing this. It’s vast in scope, and undoubtedly the most ambitious and beautiful thing I’ve ever done. Finally, I’m working on a new book which might become a series, quite daunting but exciting. I am not entirely sure what it is going to become yet, but it has supernatural and occult elements…
DARK HILARITY
Tara Dufrain and Nicola Morgan are eleven year old girls growing up in the ‘90s, obsessed by Valentine Killshot, a metal screamo band. In particular, they’re enamoured by the lead singer, the mysterious yet charismatic Jed Maine who bears the epithet “The Cretin”. In Jed’s lyrics, he describes a world beyond the Dark Stars that he hopes one day to reach. The girls think it’s all just make-believe they share together, until a freak, traumatic incident makes this world very real. As adults, Tara and Nicola try to come to terms with the devastating catastrophe that changed their lives growing up, but to do so they will have to step once more into Jed Maine’s world, and confront the man who took everything from them. Dark Hilarity is My Best Friend’s Exorcism meets The Never-Ending Story, a fantasy that explores addiction, depression, and the healing power of friendship.
When we think of creating our fictional worlds, we tend to think in terms of landscapes, maps, these two-dimensional planes of existence. However, whilst this can be useful for creating scope – lots of characters and a wide, wide world to explore, a feeling of breadth – it is less useful for creating depth.
Function follows form, and so when we create literally “deep” worlds, we also create symbolically deep ones. The best example of this in classical literature is, of course, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, which sees a perilous descent through the Nine Circles of Hell, then an upward ascent of the mountain of Purgatory, and finally a flight into the Spheres of Heaven.
… understanding that stories should not only move along but also upward and downward along a vertical axis is pivotal to creating psychological and symbolic depth.
There are many reasons why this structure – vertical rather than horizontal – works at such a profound level. An obvious one is that our own consciousness seems to function this way. We sit at a conscious level most of the time, but when we dream or enter trances, we enter a subconscious state, a lower level, where intuition and creativity and more primordial forces hold sway. Beneath even that is the pure chaos of the unconscious, the maelstrom of desires and shared human memory.
One can easily map Dante’s tripartite tiers to the levels of consciousness. Hell is unconscious, roiling in its own filth and destruction, without any self-awareness. Purgatory is sub-conscious. There is a level of awareness, of self-insight, and the desires and energies of the unconscious have been filtered and harnessed towards progress here. Lastly, in Heaven, we are fully conscious – aware of ourselves and self-actualised.
This is only a cursory overview, but already we can see how deeply this system appeals to our natural psychology and spirituality. Most authors focus on lateral, horizontal movement – going from A to B. But in reality, stories should not only move from A to B, but also from the ground floor to the basement, and from the basement all the way upwards to the first storey.
To give contemporary examples of what I mean, we can look at two masterclasses in vertical storytelling. The first is The City by S. C. Mendes, published by the amazing folks at Blood Bound Books. This incredible novel is set in the 1910s, and revolves around a detective, Max Elliot; he wants to quit the force, but a gruesome murder reminiscent of one that went unsolved long years ago – a personal tragedy that broke Max, but which he now has a shot at gaining closure on with this new case – pulls him back in. In trying to solve this murder, Max discovers an occult secret at the heart of San Francisco, which leads him down a path of profane knowledge, and to a city deep underground.
Without giving too much away, not only is there a literal element of verticality in this storytelling (we must descend to reach The City), but there is also a figurative element, in that Max discovers the realities of what is lying beneath what we think we know – which includes traditional notions of morality. His descent into the eponymous City ultimately leads him to confront unimaginable degradations, horrors, and ritualistic “sins”.
There is more than a little sense of plummeting down Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell here, as each successive horror becomes more extreme, disturbing, and perverse. This gives the sense that we are not simply exploring a physical landscape, but the psyche of our own hero Max Elliot (who has seen horror in his time on the force, too), or, indeed, of the human race. What I loved about Mendes’ work is that it did not feel like I was being titillated with violence (the gore-porn that so often substitutes actual horror), but rather that there was coded symbolism in the violence that represented something deeper for our character, the wider plot, and indeed the human condition.
Most authors focus on lateral, horizontal movement – going from A to B. But in reality, stories should not only move from A to B, but also from the ground floor to the basement, and from the basement all the way upwards to the first storey.
This secret underground city is populated by mysterious lizard-people who predate humankind by quite some way; these symbolically seem to represent the cold, unfeeling reptilian part of the human brain – where there is only desire, fulfilment of those desires, and repetition.This reptilian part of the brain lies buried deep within us, but it is still there, regulating our unconscious breathing and prompting our need to eat, have sex, and sleep. This part of us knows nothing of societal norms – or perhaps obeys its own norms which we have become unfamiliar with – and so it is with the lizards of The City. In some sense, the lizard-people may represent a regression into an older – and perhaps more potent – form of being.
Certainly it seems that the ancient peoples, and even the early moderns, had far more of an affinity with sex and violence than we do. Our tastes seem ultimately voyeuristic and sterile by comparison with the blood-sacrifices of the Aztecs, the Bacchanalia of the Greeks, the gladiatorial games of Rome, or even the gruesome executions of the Elizabethans. This leads me nicely onto another aspect of “verticality” in fiction: our relationship with time.
In Will Shakespeare Die? by Gordon James, a title released by The Writing Collective in 2020, the verticality is almost entirely metaphorical. It is the past which is the murky basement, the lower level of hell, into which we must descend to learn the truth. In Will Shakespeare Die? the story unfolds over two timelines: the 1980s and Elizabethan England. In the ‘80s, Kit Morton and Thom Davenant are desperately trying to salvage the disastrous development of The Play, a theatrical production about Shakespeare’s life; to do this, Morton resorts to occult means.
In Elizabethan England, William Shakespeare also calls on occult magic to see how his story ends, whilst trying to thwart hidden forces closing in on him. Whilst the scenes in the relative “modern day” of the ‘80s are grim, it is the past which proves the true lower level of hell only accessible by means of magical incantation:
“Now with speed he poured more incense in, extinguished the altar lights, sat kneeling toward the triangle of manifestation upon the floor, crossing his arms upon his breast in a crossbones symbol. In the complete darkness he closes his eyes and repeated and repeated: ‘Allay Fortission, Fortissio, Allynsen Roa!’ Then nothing, except he alone in the profound quiet, waiting. ‘I greet you,’ he said, eyes still closed. ‘I greet you.’ The incense seemed to swirl around him, thick currents, sticky as treacle, but charred beyond sweetness. He felt like a man drowning…”
If we construe our consciousness as layers, built up over time, not only through our own experiences, but through the genetic memory passed down through DNA, then the past is a perfect cipher for the unconscious, the deep dreamworld we occasionally are granted access to via moments of clarity, insight, or illumination.
Clive Barker once wrote in his The Great and Secret Show that we access the dream-sea (which he calls “Quiddity”) three times during our life: when we’re born, when we fall in love with our soulmate, and when we die. I do not know if Gordon James has read much Clive Barker, but his story weirdly imitates this structure, as we enter the past only at moments of magical rebirth, intense love, or at the moment before death.
The strangeness of Will Shakespeare Die? is that this portal is double-sided, and whilst our modern characters are going down into the lower depths of “the past” and hell – Shakespeare’s secret England – our Shakespearean cast are visiting, or rather visioning, the 1980s. To them, the future is the dream-sea, an ineffable realm they are trying to ascend towards, but lack the means to fully do so.
I think there is a profound truth in this. When we get lost in looking backwards, trapped in the past, regressing, we are in a form of hell, and interestingly the redemptive notes only begin to creep into the novel when our ‘80s cast realise that they still have time to create a future for themselves, to look forward (or upwards, to extend the metaphor).
As you can see, understanding that stories should not only move along but also upward and downward along a vertical axis is pivotal to creating psychological and symbolic depth. Many writers neglect this aspect of storytelling to their detriment. There are many lessons to be learned from reading S. C. Mendes and Gordon James, and from exploring what the concept of “verticality” means in our own writing.
There’s a spectre haunting us that’s making its presence more and more known. At first, I dismissed my awareness of this wraith, thinking it was perhaps simply a trick of nostalgia, or changing tastes. Every generation, after all, cannot help but hanker a little for the way things were before. Times change, and this is a good thing, because it provides an opportunity for growth and new beginnings, but we should be wise enough as a species now to know that sometimes change is not always for the better. The relentless advance of technology has enabled incredible things: friendships that could have never been, connectedness during a pandemic, access to medical care that the medieval world would have undoubtedly considered magical. However, it is also bringing with it a slew of astonishingly awful consequences, and to my mind the worst of these is a frightening endemic occurring in the Western world: the inability to end stories.
I’m seeing so many writers throw away their endings, as though they’re the least important part of the story, as though the reader is somehow a naive fool for expecting things to pay off.
I should say that I am not some grumpy old man bemoaning the changing face of literature. I welcome innovation; I welcome a broader array of writers and writing styles, and I have done my small part in shepherding and promoting (in my humble opinion) some of the finest of these new voices. I should also say that I am not proposing that no-one can end their stories, as that would be hyperbolic nonsense, and would denigrate the amazing authors I’m connected to who are absolutely knocking the ball out of the park. However, outside of my circle of author friends and brilliant writers, I am noticing a problem, a problem that, if left unaddressed, could have serious consequences for the cultural psyche of the Western world.
Over the last three or four years I’ve noticed a trend, one that is gaining frightening momentum; for lack of a better descriptor, the “anti-ending”. This is where the author decides that resolutions are for wimps and instead destroys everything they have spent 400 pages (or multiple seasons) building; there is not one shred of hope or redemption in it. This is not – I hasten to add – simply the “downer” ending or the “claw out of the ground” stinger, which certainly have their place in horror (or indeed any genre if done right). No, this is a not so much a decimation as an abdication, where the writer neglects their duty to deliver, but yet makes a meal out of that fact, as if they have achieved something tremendous.
Neil Gaiman once said “George R. R. Martin is not your bitch” and that “the only contract a writer makes is that the book in your hand will be good” and people loved it. But we need to examine this statement deeper, because I personally think Gaiman is wrong. Profoundly wrong. Martin is obviously not our bitch, but he does have a duty to us, all writers have duties to their readers. Martin made promises, and good human beings keep their promises to the best of their ability to do so. An independent author like myself could never have gotten away with failing to finish my Black Gate trilogy. My readership was and is small, but very passionate – I don’t think they would have easily forgiven me. We should not therefore believe this fake narrative that successful writers have no obligations to us. They absolutely do.
As I stated before, this “anti-ending” isn’t universal – yet. It’s prevalent largely in the West, and I think results from several cultural factors, which someone with greater knowledge of sociological movements can elucidate further. There are also many bright lights who I think will carry us forward into a booming new era of narrative, if we let them. My concern is the negative shadow-image of these bright lights, the darker forces opposing meaning, beauty, and truth. These shadows are nihilistic, and rejoice in the absence of meaning, in the subversion of expectations for the sake of subverted expectations, rather than to deliver true catharsis.
You have probably already worked out where I’m going with this, but for a moment, let’s talk about Game of Thrones. We understand some of the reasons why that show failed to conclude satisfactorily: the showrunners Weiss and Benioff wanted to get their Disney contract, so weren’t fully committed; they lacked the source-material because George R. R. Martin has failed to produce books 6 & 7; the list goes on. However, I think there are deeper and more philosophical reasons than these. Game of Thrones didn’t just feel like a rush job (although undoubtedly it was), it also felt heartless.
If you look at the character arcs that the previous seasons had set up, such as the redemption of Jaime Lannister, we see a rejection of those ideas in the conclusion. The philosophy of Weiss and Benioff is that Jaime should not be allowed to redeem himself and change. Ultimately, we always go back to being the scumbags we were, however much we “seem” to develop. This is done under the pretense of being “realistic”, but actually is exactly the opposite, for human beings are able to grow. For someone to have been through all that Jaime had been, and then U-turn in the final episodes, was a defiance of storytelling and all it means. This is just one pillar of a collapsing palace, but it illustrates the overarching dearth of understanding quite emblematically.
In my view, storytelling is healing. We tell stories to rectify the broken narrative of the Self … Stories can only achieve this healing when they end truly, when they give us some kind of resolution, even if it’s a dark and forlorn one.
In my view, storytelling is healing. We tell stories to rectify the broken narrative of the Self. In psychology there is a concept called “narrative therapy”; it shows once again that the ancients and myth-makers understood something quite profound: we need stories as much as we need physical medicine, to make sense of the world, to understand why we exist, to answer the big questions, and to show us that we can grow (and sometimes warn us of what happens if we don’t, as with the tragedies). Stories can only achieve this healing when they end truly, when they give us some kind of resolution, even if it’s a dark and forlorn one. I think it’s psychologically fascinating that this problem of not being able to “end” seems to have been exacerbated by the pandemic, which has no visible termination point; it’s an endless suspension of life, of real human interaction. However, this only increases the importance of ending our fiction, of finding a healing there where it is more difficult to find in reality.
I’m seeing this worrying trend in novels as well, which is, in some ways, most disturbing of all. In television and film, there are producers and marketers and other factors involved that all want to have their say, and control the financial resources to a degree; I get that (it’s also what makes the failure of Game of Thrones so bizarre – the producers were uncharacteristically accommodating due to the success of the series and would have let Weiss and Benioff have as much time and money as they needed to make it work). But with novels, there should be fewer external factors, especially in the independent field.
Yet still, I’m seeing so many writers throw away their endings, as though they’re the least important part of the story, as though the reader is somehow a naive fool for expecting things to pay off. I’m not going to name names, because that would be childish and spiteful, but I’m shocked because in some cases these are writers I considered high calibre – the fault isn’t due to a lack of technical ability. This brings me back to an age-old editing adage I often repeat: “I’ll take passionate writing over perfectly edited and boring writing any day of the week.” When passion is there, I rarely see this problem, and this is why I echo reviewer Dan Stubbing’s wise comment that a lot of the best work coming out these days is independent or self-published; it comes from the heart, the Muse, a higher plane of being. It isn’t the product of crude pseudo-intellectualism.
Star Wars and its sequel trilogy are an easy target, but it is good to have such a cultural touchstone as an example. Suffice to say that if we compare the mythopoeic and Taoist depths of the original trilogy (which are not without fault, but they did a lot right), to the modern toy-selling vehicle, there are simply no words to describe the vast gulf between the two. There were moments where it shadowed greatness, where I felt there was hope, but it was always dashed by some bizarre inability to embrace consequence. And this is one key way to look at it. The great biographer Tristine Rainer said that the definition of a climax is “Something must die, so something can live.” This implies a kind of sacrifice. If words are magic, then this is the ritual we must perform – we must make an offering, we must take something away, in order to achieve complete healing.
In some ways, this is the archetypal mythology and theology that sits at the heart of the human mind: it is Christ upon the Cross, healing the world by virtue of passing out of it. The problem with “Disneyfication”, as it has been termed, is that “no one is ever really gone” – these are the words spoken by Luke Skywalker to Princess Leia in The Last Jedi. I love the spiritual sentiment of these words, but they also reveal a deeper level of narrative fear.
We see this in many of the blockbusters – no one is ever dead, characters are just brand-assets that can be wheeled out again at a later date, all endings have to be open to allow for sequels. And I should say I’m not just talking about a literal interpretation of Rainer’s words and killing a character. Many things could die for something else to live. A way of life could die, a memory, a hope, a dream, or, if you are writing a more light-hearted or comedic story, perhaps a character’s pride and hubris could finally perish on the altar in order to birth true love.
I find myself increasingly appreciating the joy of a single stand-alone movie, an open and shut case, as well as stand-alone novels. Big long-running series (I’m talking more than three entries here) – whether of books or films – are ambitious and can be beautiful, but they should not be the default, as this often leads to the writer having to artificially extend the plot via crude means. In sitcoms, it’s the old trick of having the principle couple split up after they’ve finally gotten together so a few more series can be eked out, but this isn’t real story, this is filler content. I admire Japanese animes for how they boldly declare “FINAL SEASON” and stick with it; rarely do animes run longer than four or five seasons. They are complete stories, with structure, with beginning, middle, and end. This is one reason they have such fanatic fanbases (and boy am I a part of it). We can talk about animes as whole and complete artefacts.
If we’re to start a cultural revolution, we need to remember how the story ends, and that the ending may not be your favourite part, but it is undoubtedly the most important part: it’s what you leave the reader on, it’s the final goodbye to the lover on their deathbed, it’s the summation of all your story means.
If we’re to start a cultural revolution, we need to remember how the story ends, and that the ending may not be your favourite part, but it is undoubtedly the most important part: it’s what you leave the reader on, it’s the final goodbye to the lover on their deathbed, it’s the summation of all your story means. Don’t cheaply discard such moments as if they mean nothing, or eternally suspend them with the hope of sequels, because you only denigrate your art. Whatever modernists say, creating any form of art, whether music, literature, fine art, or film, is a moral duty – I leave to you where this duty is bestowed from. It is our role to show the world as it truly is, to use lies to tell the truth, and to show the secret and invisible palaces of dream that can only be described in the language of the imagination. In the words of Theoden in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, “If this is to be our end, then I would have us make such an end, as to be worthy of remembrance.”
Paradoxically, it’s only when we learn how to end, that we become everlasting.
Joseph Sale
Joseph Sale edits non-fiction and fiction, helping fledgling authors to realise their potential. He has edited some of the best new voices in speculative fiction including Ross Jeffery, Emily Harrison, Christa Wojciechowski, and more.
He has authored more than ten novels, including his Black Gate trilogy, and his love-letter to fantasy: Save Game. His short fiction has appeared in Tales from the Shadow Booth, edited by Dan Coxon, as well as in Idle Ink, Silver Blade, Fiction Vortex, Nonbinary Review, Edgar Allan Poet and Storgy Magazine. His stories have also appeared in anthologies such as You Are Not Alone (Storgy), Lost Voices (The Writing Collective), Technological Horror (Dark Hall Press), Burnt Fur (Blood Bound Books) and Exit Earth (Storgy).
