One major way in which fiction differs from reality is with
closure. Readers need to have most of their questions answered by the end of
the book or they feel dissatisfied. In reality, a lack of closure is commonplace
and often leads to a great deal of angst.
A common circumstance that prevents closure is through a
death, especially if the death is sudden or unexpected. We may have a tendency
to believe that the people surrounding us will always be there and will always
be available to answer our questions, when in reality none of us carry any guarantees.
A loved one’s unexpected death might then leave us with unanswered questions for
months—or even years.
In fiction, the plotline may begin with the death of a loved
one. We find our hero suffering from heartbreak due to the physical loss as
well as experiencing a sense of loss from all their unanswered questions. This,
in turn, places the hero—and the reader—on a journey. A notable bestseller that
uses this plotline is The Shack by Wm. Paul Young.
Or we might discover the deceased led a double life and the
person we thought we knew was someone else entirely. In A Double Life by Flynn Berry, the
deceased is someone that is murdered and the loved one—the hero’s father—is missing
for nearly thirty years. In Claire’s journey to discover what happened, she is
placed on a path that will determine whether her recently discovered, estranged
father is a murderer. The book is inspired by the real life story of Richard
John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan and better known as Lord Lucan, who disappeared in 1974.
In other stories, we discover things about the deceased that
might have pulled the hero closer to their loved one, if only they had known. A
notable one is Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Hg,
in which a couple’s favorite child is found dead in a local lake, plunging the
family into a journey filled with secrets and longing.
In other stories, the hero might have inherited property
from the deceased, often from a distant relative they barely knew. The property
is never in the hero’s hometown, but always in an unfamiliar setting, which
takes us on a journey of discovery together. They often encounter secrets long
hidden, a haunted property, or in forging a new life for themselves, they fall
in love or otherwise are placed on a path they had never foreseen. Many times
they confront problems, often seemingly insurmountable, and through the act of
perseverance they come through the fire, forever changed.
In reality, not having closure is also increasingly common
through ghosting, a term I (being of an older generation) was not familiar with
until recently, although the AO (Always Online) generation considers it a fact
of life. In this case, the loved one has not died but has simply become a ghost
to someone with whom they had a relationship. The one that is left may have
been unfriended or unfollowed on social media, have had their phone numbers and
email addresses blocked, often rendering the other party impossible to reconnect
with. This leaves even more unanswered questions as the biggest question of all—Why?—remains elusive. This is
particularly frustrating when the parties live far apart, even on opposite
sides of the world, preventing the party that was left from physically
reconnecting.
One novel that dramatically covers this phenomenon is Ghosted by Rosie Walsh. Two people meet and fall
in love and when one disappears, the other is left with a million questions.
This is a page-turner that takes our hero on a quest to discover what happened
to the man she loves.
Then there are novels in which closure doesn’t occur until
decades later, such as Secrets of the Lighthouse by Santa Montefiore, the story of a woman that travels to Ireland and discovers thirty-year-old
family secrets—and in so doing, discovers her future.
In fiction, unlike real life, authors must make sense of the
journey we’ve put the reader on. In reality, much of our lives appear to have
no rhyme or reason and we are constantly discarding those things our
subconscious deems unimportant to fill our brains and our time with those
things our subconscious considers important. Novels must dispense with the
unimportant and focus only on what is critical to the plot. Every scene must
perform double duty, and by the end of the book the reader must be satisfied why they were taken on this journey. The
best books leave lessons behind. The best books contain characters that come alive
in our minds and heart, characters that have become our friends or our foes
during the course of the book and that remain with us long after we have
finished that last page. To leave the character in limbo or the reasons
unexplained is to leave the reader with the sense that closure has eluded them.
The exception is when a book leads us to the next in the
series. We still require closure of those challenges that brought us through
the plot with the characters, but we also begin to see clues that the characters’
stories are continuing. Perhaps they are given a new job, different mission, a
move is imminent or a romance is beginning. We have become invested in the
characters so we will eagerly await their next adventure as we have done with
James Bond, Jason Bourne and others.
And in that continuing adventure we discover that the novels
now imitate life, and once one chapter is laid to rest, another begins.
