Had a film student tell me my endings were too neat last semester

She said real life doesn't wrap up cleanly so why should stories. Made me rethink how I close out my alternate endings now, keep them messier.

3 comments

3 Comments

the_rose10d ago

Ever notice how people always expect loose ends in stories but freak out when their own don't wrap up?

alice99110d ago

and the thing is, we actually love loose ends in real life more than we admit. like how people spend hours on reddit trying to figure out what happened to some random person they read about once... but then if their own friend goes quiet for a week they're sending missing person posts. we romanticize mystery for strangers but demand closure from everyone we actually know. it's almost like we treat our own lives like they should have a neat bow on every chapter, but we get bored when other people's stories do.

sean_martin447d ago

Trap a bunch of strangers in a room and watch how fast they get annoyed by someone who keeps leaving their stories half finished. It's like we've all got this weird double standard where we want our own lives to flow like a Netflix series with wrapped up seasons, but we'd lose interest real quick if everyone around us started talking like a mystery novel. I run a small electrical shop and I see it every day customers want a clear timeline on their repair, but then they'll tell me some wild incomplete story about their neighbor's cousin that died weird and they never ask what happened. We just can't stand the mess of real life closure because it's usually boring or uncomfortable, not because we actually need it.