Open-ending: A writing trick or a trap

There are assumptions about literacy and art that we never question once we accept them. These assumptions may turn into limiting beliefs that shape our thoughts, creations, and ultimately our lives.

If you haven’t deeply explored what fiction truly is and how its structure functions, you might find it challenging to produce your best work. To make this process easier, take some time to reflect on common assumptions that might be holding you back. These assumptions could be preventing you from fully expressing your artistic and literary talents to the world.

Start by examining the concept of open endings and their impact on readers’ minds. Is it a writing trick or a trap?

Understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Your reader is not the author—you are. Why should it be the reader’s responsibility to conclude your story? Consider this: Do we ever wonder what kind of adult lives the children of Anna Karenina after their mother’s suicide? Tolstoy provided a clear conclusion to his story, leaving no ambiguity for the reader. But does his ending prevent us from being curious? No, but we never consider Anna Karenina as open-ended.

Use the Magnetic Field Method to uncover other limiting assumptions. And you can learn it here. This method helps you shed these beliefs, freeing your mind and your writing.

How do you feel about open endings? 🤔

By delving deeper into the nature of fiction and questioning other common assumptions, you can unlock your full potential as a writer and create works that truly resonate with your audience. 📝✨

Every fiction should have a certain level of closure or completeness.

An open ending is an intrusion of reality into fiction.

The events in real life often lack clear conclusions. When an open ending is used in fiction, it introduces elements of “real-life uncertainty” and ambiguity into a narrative that ideally should be self-contained and resolved within its universe. A fictional piece owes readers a spacious, enclosed, and loosely structured yet perfectly controlled universe because—beyond other properties it has—fiction is basically a design. This is the main teaching of the Magnetic Field Method. This is how we differentiate art from reality.

Remember, theoretically, all stories can continue indefinitely—more events and consequences can always follow—or the reader might be curious after any final page or sequence.

Life is a continuum that doesn’t seem to conclude at any point, adding day upon day, extending from one generation to the next. In life, there’s always a next moment, a next day, but in fiction, days and moments are artificially constrained.

In other words, treating fiction as something that inherently includes open endings might undermine storytelling’s crafted and purposeful nature. The admonition to not mix fiction with reality emphasizes the need to maintain the boundaries between the constructed, intentional world of fiction and the unpredictable and unresolved nature of real life. Fiction should provide a sense of completeness and coherence that reality does not offer. Overall, this perspective advocates for a clear distinction between the structured, resolved world of fiction and the open-ended, ambiguous nature of real life.