Stop Cheating Your Reader

As a writer, reader, and editor, I believe very strongly in not cheating.  This can take several forms, but what it comes down to is this:

Cheating means taking the easy way out instead of giving the reader satisfaction.

Every writer has things they’re good at writing and things they’re bad at—and every writer has things that come easily and things that are hard.  To give an extreme example: I once edited an action thriller novel . . . that had no action in it.  The entire thing was dialogue scenes about the action.  So in one scene, the characters would be talking about this terrifically difficult and dangerous heist they were going to pull, and in the next scene, they were talking about how, yes, the heist went off just fine.

Are you kidding me?  Where’s my heist?  You can’t dangle that in front of us and not show it!  That’s cheating!

But I get it: cheating is awfully tempting.  My guess is that that particular author found action sequences difficult to write, and so just wrote around them.  I don’t find action difficult to write—my struggles come with interpersonal-relationship-growth sequences.  They’re really, really tough for me, but they need to be done in order to achieve a satisfying story.  So I write them even though they're really hard for me.

But I didn’t actually write this post to talk about cheating by avoiding writing particular scenes but about cheat endings.  I once saw these called “weasel-y ways out,” and that’s a pretty good description.

Cheat endings are endings that use convenience to avoid consequences and to reset the circumstances to what they were at the beginning of the story.

Here are some common ones:

·       It was all a dream!

·       Then all the people not in-the-know lost their memories

·       Then the protagonist lost his memory and went back to life as usual

·       Once the bad guy was defeated, the protagonist lost his powers

With very, very few exceptions, these are horrible endings.  They’re vastly unsatisfying—and they’re generally completely unnecessary.  Why did it have to all be a dream?  Why couldn’t it have just been real?  Why couldn’t the entirety of New York have seen the aliens/magic and this spiked a new age?  Why couldn’t our protagonist have remained awesome and kept moving forward instead of regressing—thus completely undoing all the growth we spent the entire book on?

For a book to be satisfying, actions need to have consequences.

I specified earlier dream/lose memory/lose powers endings were cheating because they relied on author convenience.  If you’re writing a series, it’s really tough to have your whole world change, so you may come up with a convenient way to avoid this.  If your focus really, really isn’t on the change, then you might want to come up with a way around it—but:

Unless you fully integrate a reset ability in your universe (a la Men in Black), then resetting is cheating. 

If you’re wondering how this rant came about, it’s because I spent countless hours with a series, only for the protagonist to lose all his powers and get sent back to square one.  It was so frustrating.  It was a lazy way to get him a slightly different power set when he got his power back—but we’d already seen him gain power; we didn’t need to see it again.  Besides, the powers he'd had before were far from fully explored, and if he kept them, there would be some difficult consequences; so robbing him of his powers was a lazy way for the author to avoid dealing with the consequences of him having them.

To add insult to injury, the protagonist’s friends had just witnessed his immense powers for the first time—and we didn’t even get to see their reactions or what happened the next time he (sheepishly) came up to them.  What an amazing scene that would be!  Awkwardly explaining that, heh, yes, he was one of the most powerful people in the universe . . . funny how these things happen.

It would have been amazing to see that protagonist go forward, now that his powers were too great to be easily controlled.  It would have been incredible to see him interact with his friends after they saw him as he was.  And instead, he became a normal boy again, the end.

I just felt so . . . cheated.