Tomorrow David and I are off to the Winter Words Festival at Pitlochry to earn our stripes as writers rather than as publishers for a couple of days. Putting together my notes for the whole hour that I have to speak about The Long Delirious Burning Blue, I looked back at some of the feedback I’ve received over the months from readers of the book. One of the things that stood out was how many people had made positive comments about the ending – how it was unpredictable but somehow very satisfying, in spite of not being ‘neat and all tied up’ like so many other novels on the market nowadays.
And endings have been the subject of a whole bunch of mini-rants in the Two Ravens Press household over the past few months. We very very rarely watch TV – oddly enough, being writers and publishers, we’d much rather curl up with a good book! But we do also love good movies and so every now and again the Sky dish comes into its own and we flop down in front of something that looks as if it would be worth a watch. And yet, time after time, we find ourselves knowing exactly what’s going to happen half an hour into the movie or even sooner. That old Hollywood formula – especially in the case of so-called thrillers (how can it be thrilling when you know exactly what’s going to happen???) – just kicks into play over and over again. Becoming so very predictable that you can’t even find it in you to enjoy the unique way that particular movie conforms to the formula. (Though most of them, sadly, aren’t unique in any way…)
What becomes even more disappointing is when you finally, after months of trying, find a movie that, even though it sports a Hollywood star or two, holds promise. The most recent example that we’ve watched? Little Children, with Kate Winslett, among others. It starts well. Quirky, strange voiceover, discussions of Madame Bovary in the context of living life fully or settling for the easy life … lots of very fine stuff that I won’t bore you with. Because the point is that, in the end, the makers just couldn’t bring themselves to do the un-Hollywood thing and have an ending that fitted with the film. No – it had to revert straight to formula. Happy ending – everyone stays together, exactly where they were at the start of the movie, in spite of the fact that everyone’s lives are sterile (albeit easy) and that sterility is what the whole movie has been about … because that all-American all-Hollywood ‘family values are everything’ rule has to be adhered to, it seems, no matter what has gone before. You just can’t be too unpredictable, after all.
Which has its parallels in the book world, of course. Where so often you get ten pages into a book and can see exactly where it’s going, because everyone’s read the same ‘how to write a blockbuster’ book and has internalised the rules contained within and regurgitated them without fail in their own work. Most of the books I come across these days fall into that category too. But just like movies (the very best entirely unpredictable intriguing example of which I’ve seen this year is the film of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men – which also was a very fine book) no matter how well-presented, they are so very, very predictable and so very very dull. Which makes me appreciate all the more the occasional submissions that we do get at Two Ravens Press where not only the narrative voice but the entire structure of the book and particularly the ending is braver and newer – and somehow truer. I only wish there were more like that – movies as well as books.
Sharon
