I like to think of what happens to characters in good novels and stories as knots—things keep knotting up. And by the end of the story—readers see an “unknotting” of sorts. Not what they expect, not the easy answers you get on TV, not wash and wear philosophies, but a reproduction of believable emotional experiences.
Hand in hand
bookpatrol:
Hand imitates hand.
The cover of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close comes to life
Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
It has long been a tradition among novel writers that a book must end by everybody getting just what they wanted, or if the conventional happy ending was impossible, then it must be a tragedy in which one or both should die. In real life very few of us get what we want, our tragedies don’t kill us, but we go on living them year after year, carrying them with us like a scar on an old wound.
No matter how emphemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.
