Shouts From Down Under

Calm after the storm; loose driftwood on the narrative beach

If you happened to have a piece of cloth in your hands representing your story, you could easily imagine the untrimmed edges having a fringe.
With the right material, or fabric, this is to be expected, and if the loose ends are reasonably even, nothing sticking out too much, then I feel your job is done, and done well.
You don't want a section of cloth poking out, or a couple of threads hanging way out and looking all stupid.

K.M. Weiland explains my murky version of this mode of thinking much better than I ever could. Here's the link to her excellent article about loose ends.

http://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/2014/03/loose-ends-in-your-story.html...

Reasonably trimmed loose ends around your narrative can imply whole worlds outside what you've described in your scenes, and that lends more realness, more authority, more plausableness, more beleivability to your story. Real life isn't cut off at the edges like a piece of cardboard sliced with a Stanley knife.

In case you've been closeted in cotton wool, and fed caviar with the classically overdriven silverspoon description, this world we live in isn't perfect. It's full of faulty people, broken ideals, conflict, damage, wrongness, injustice, starvation and just plain old garden variety horror. War. Diseases that doctors try their best to fix, but have no clue.

But, in our stories, we don't want stuff to happen that has no purpose. An undesirable loose end is one where a character does or says something, however minor, and it contributes nothing to the story.

We could describe Joseph Bloseph as liking the colour blue, and always wearing tight jeans, black T shirts, and bright red loafers. He has a debilitating fear of collecting mail from the mail box. That's it. The story continues on wherever it leads, but the detail about our friend Joseph isn't mentioned again.



Loose ends are our friend. We can tie them off at the end in an oh-so-clever twist, and people will say ahhh. Our smartness becomes our character's smartness that in turn is our readers's smarts. If we've done our job properly, that is.

Otherwise it really will be like K.M Weiland says. They'll say... huh?! Double you tee eff?!

Sparky

Featured as part of my signature, the video below is here to raise awareness of Carly, who thrives despite the difficulties of severe Autism. Watching and learning about her may change how we think of these people, and how we treat them.