<story><title>Stories We’ve Seen Too Often</title><url>http://strangehorizons.com/submit/fiction-submission-guidelines/stories-weve-seen-too-often/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bsder</author><text>&amp;gt; When that happens, the creatives are faced with the choice to change that ending or just deal with the twists and turns getting spoiled.&lt;p&gt;I disagree wholeheartedly.&lt;p&gt;The big problem with every single writer nowadays is a complete and total inability to &lt;i&gt;stick the ending&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m really trying &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; hard to come up with a TV show, book or movie that I thought really stuck the ending in the last 10 years (I&amp;#x27;m being generous--in reality I&amp;#x27;d even say 30 years).  A whole host of the fan theories are &lt;i&gt;WAY&lt;/i&gt; better than what practically all current writers crap out.&lt;p&gt;If I&amp;#x27;m being charitable, I&amp;#x27;ll describe the problem as writers lack varied life experience.  If I&amp;#x27;m being uncharitable, it&amp;#x27;s that most writers are just not very intelligent.</text></item><item><author>slg</author><text>This is a big problem for serialized stories now that fan theorizing on the internet is so common.  A good plot shouldn&amp;#x27;t be completely predictable to your audience, but events need to flow from one to the other because characters and their worlds should have consistency.  This creates predictability and means some small percentage of your audience can now guess what is going to happen.&lt;p&gt;That was fine a decade or two ago when a person might guess the ending to a TV show and blurt it out to their partner on the couch. However, now that small group that guesses the plot correctly will share their predictions on the relevant subreddit which will be picked up by blogs and suddenly everyone knows where you were going.&lt;p&gt;When that happens, the creatives are faced with the choice to change that ending or just deal with the twists and turns getting spoiled.  Westworld is a memorable example of the creators changing the show because fans guessed what was happening next.  The end result was that the show didn&amp;#x27;t make any sense because it prioritized unpredictability over all else and eventually the world and characters didn&amp;#x27;t make any sense anymore.</text></item><item><author>gregmac</author><text>Something that stuck out to me was a side-note:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Note that we do like endings that we didn&amp;#x27;t expect, as long as they derive naturally from character action.&lt;p&gt;This, to me, is probably the biggest thing that makes me hate a story:&lt;p&gt;The character is faced with a situation and reacts in a way contrary to the way we&amp;#x27;d expect them to act based on what we&amp;#x27;ve seen so far. It soon becomes obvious they made that decision only to move the plot to a specific ending or scene.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>erehweb</author><text>I recommend The Good Place throughout, particularly the ending.</text></comment>
<story><title>Stories We’ve Seen Too Often</title><url>http://strangehorizons.com/submit/fiction-submission-guidelines/stories-weve-seen-too-often/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bsder</author><text>&amp;gt; When that happens, the creatives are faced with the choice to change that ending or just deal with the twists and turns getting spoiled.&lt;p&gt;I disagree wholeheartedly.&lt;p&gt;The big problem with every single writer nowadays is a complete and total inability to &lt;i&gt;stick the ending&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m really trying &lt;i&gt;very&lt;/i&gt; hard to come up with a TV show, book or movie that I thought really stuck the ending in the last 10 years (I&amp;#x27;m being generous--in reality I&amp;#x27;d even say 30 years).  A whole host of the fan theories are &lt;i&gt;WAY&lt;/i&gt; better than what practically all current writers crap out.&lt;p&gt;If I&amp;#x27;m being charitable, I&amp;#x27;ll describe the problem as writers lack varied life experience.  If I&amp;#x27;m being uncharitable, it&amp;#x27;s that most writers are just not very intelligent.</text></item><item><author>slg</author><text>This is a big problem for serialized stories now that fan theorizing on the internet is so common.  A good plot shouldn&amp;#x27;t be completely predictable to your audience, but events need to flow from one to the other because characters and their worlds should have consistency.  This creates predictability and means some small percentage of your audience can now guess what is going to happen.&lt;p&gt;That was fine a decade or two ago when a person might guess the ending to a TV show and blurt it out to their partner on the couch. However, now that small group that guesses the plot correctly will share their predictions on the relevant subreddit which will be picked up by blogs and suddenly everyone knows where you were going.&lt;p&gt;When that happens, the creatives are faced with the choice to change that ending or just deal with the twists and turns getting spoiled.  Westworld is a memorable example of the creators changing the show because fans guessed what was happening next.  The end result was that the show didn&amp;#x27;t make any sense because it prioritized unpredictability over all else and eventually the world and characters didn&amp;#x27;t make any sense anymore.</text></item><item><author>gregmac</author><text>Something that stuck out to me was a side-note:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Note that we do like endings that we didn&amp;#x27;t expect, as long as they derive naturally from character action.&lt;p&gt;This, to me, is probably the biggest thing that makes me hate a story:&lt;p&gt;The character is faced with a situation and reacts in a way contrary to the way we&amp;#x27;d expect them to act based on what we&amp;#x27;ve seen so far. It soon becomes obvious they made that decision only to move the plot to a specific ending or scene.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>slg</author><text>I could give you a list of endings that I thought were great, but if you can’t think of a single ending that you found satisfying, that sounds more like a you problem than all of humanity simply stopped writing good endings.</text></comment>