For a culture so obsessed with “enjoying the journey,” we sure do hate a ruined ending — isn’t that contradictory? A ruined ending — and the subsequent spoiler alerts that follow — belies our secret obsession with the destination: to enjoy the journey, we need to know how it ends. We don’t want to know how the story ends because we like to be kept in suspense to see if we’ll actually arrive at… well somewhere, we’ll know when we get there. And yet we tell one another endlessly that we must enjoy the journey. The truth is, there’s more than one way to ruin the ending of any story — indeed to ruin the ending of any life — and the easiest way is to ruin the vision for where you’d like to end up.
The ruined ending actually encourages us to enjoy the unknown journey all the more because we know where we’re headed. I think of all the flights and train rides that delighted me precisely because I knew where I was heading: anticipating the destination made me all the more aware of the details of the trip, of how we got there. The Medievalists understood this. Dante for them was great precisely because he riffed on Virgil’s endings in a new and bold way. Julius Caesar rewarded the Elizabethans precisely because they knew of the plot and assassination in advance. You can almost hear the echo of their whispering how Romeo and Juliet both die at the end and the follow-up questions from a theatre-departing mob who wondered what kind of world would lead to the death of two children in love? A world filled with Montagues and Capulets. If there was any sin to the narrative mind of the Medieval man, it was that one of his friends might spoil the beginning. The start of a story is the seed of the end and the slightest variations in what is sown prophecy that wild variety of crops that will later fill our narrative harvest house.
You see this at work in the “spoiler alert” memes for historical fictions. For Titanic, spoiler alert: the boat sinks. For Pearl Harbor, spoiler alert: the base is bombed. For Sully, spoiler alert: he lands the plane in the river. For The Passion of the Christ, spoiler alert: he dies and rises.
If the power in any historical drama is not what happens in the end but how and why and when and where and, especially, for whom it happened, then the power in any story at all could be the very same. In fact the worse crime would not be spoiling that the ship sinks in the end of Titanic but rather spoiling that the historical Titanic ever set sail at all. Why do I say that? Because that’s what happened during the rerelease of the film at the 100th anniversary of its sinking: tons of kids took to Twitter baffled that such a historical event ever occurred, which added historic insult to historic injury. The kids knew the boat sank in the movie. What they didn’t know was that a hundred years prior, 1,517 human souls really were lost to the sea. In refusing to spoil the ending, they spoilt the entire tale of 1,517 actual lives.
We must know the ending to know our place in the journey. You see, the ending of Avengers wasn’t ruined for me because I discovered via the trailer that Iron Man would destroy the aliens. I didn’t know he would going into the film. Rather, the ending was ruined for me because I knew The Hulk would catch him. I didn’t know “what” would happen, but I did know “how” and “to whom,” which spoils far more than knowing the rough plot outline — even than knowing the Sparknotes version — ever could. Knowing Hulk will catch him takes all of the tension out of Iron Man’s sacrifice. And if you hadn’t figured that out and haven’t seen it, for that spoiler I fully apologize.
The Medievalists understood this. The various tales of Arthur all agree that Camelot fails and Arthur suffers. In some, Arthur dies. In others, he loses his wife and best friend. In one fascinating version Lancelot is the King of the Fae. Guinevere the Queen of the Fae. Therefore Arthur’s union and his vision of Camelot work for the law of men but against the laws of the Fae. Camelot must fail because his ideal does not match up to the forms of the universe. We’ve all encountered at least one self-obsessed leader whose most compelling vision is both a lie and an act of piracy.
All of the endings to all of those Camelot stories would be spoiled in one sense because the audience always knew that Camelot failed. It’s like trying to tell a story in which the Titanic does not sink: to do so would be an act of sci fi and the exception — that it stays afloat — would simply prove the rule. But how and why and for whom it sinks changes the Titanic for us. And how and why and for whom Camelot fails changed everything for the people of that time and they spoiled the ending gladly in order to preserve the beginning. Knowing where they headed, they enjoyed the journey far more than we ever could. When I first wrote this, I knew I was headed to New Haven at the start of February for the launch party of the new issue of The New Haven Review to which I contributed a short story. How I would get there and what obstacles I would encounter remained a mystery. I ruined the ending to preserve the story and in fact the beginning surprised me for I left with a documentary filmmaker I just met, one who might hire me to go to Alaska.
Didn’t expect that.
Did expect to arrive at New Haven’s Institute Library.
The sort of awakening described by some historians as The Renaissance (though I agree with the historians who disbelieve in the existence of such a period) was not so much an awakening as a rebirth, a phoenix which had to be ruined in order to be remade. It was in the embers of the monasteries that Aristotle was preserved, because the end of the monasteries was always to preserve the highest and best and truest and that meant first and foremost preserving that queen of the schools: philosophy and theology. It was in the warm ashes of Assisi that man learned to love nature not as his mother but as surely as his sister and to call that bright bulb in the midnight sky neither “the moon” nor “Lady Goddess Luna,” neither a name of indignity nor a name of worship, but rather Sister Moon. You could say Assisi ruined the chief end of creation in order to let men rediscover its beginning in a Creator. And in the same way, it may well have fatally disturbed those end-spoiling naturalists of The Renaissance had they known that their ideological ancestors would ruin the beginning of their era by describing their naturalism with a word that means “born again.” Which is another way of saying that the start of spoiled endings itself needed a spoiler alert.
As authors of fiction, we’re readers of fiction, yes? Hopefully the best kind: those who draw on fiction in order to first imitate the greats and, hopefully, become great ourselves. That in mind, what do you think would happen if the moment you finished a great book, you immediately went back to the first chapter and read how they set it up? How would spoilers change your view of a great beginning? And would that make it easier to imitate the great stories?
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About Lance Schaubert
Lancelot Schaubert has sold his written work to markets like The New Haven Review, McSweeney’s, The Poet’s Market, Writer’s Digest (books and magazine), Poker Pro, Encounter, The Misty Review and many other similar markets. He reinvented the photonovel through Cold Brewed and was commissioned by the Missouri Tourism Board to create a second photonovel — The Joplin Undercurrent — that both fictionalizes and enchants the history and culture of Joplin, Missouri.
Getting on my soapbox here: I followed the link to the piece about youngsters and others not knowing the Titanic was real. That information was appalling enough, but I was stopped cold by the caption under a photo of the real Titanic, which stated that “Most historians” agree the ship was real and the disaster actually happened.
“Most historians”? This from the Daily Mail? Do historians exist who are, so to speak, Titanic deniers? If so, they can’t possibly be historians, just empty-headed bloviators. Oh, Daily Mail, what kind of journalists are you? Or who writes your captions?
Now I’ll get back to reading the rest of this promising post and comment later on its actual substance.
Exactly. This is part of the consequence of worrying about spoilers: ignorance.
The folks who lived in Medieval times would learn a thing in outline, memorize the outline, then reread it and recite it.
Spoilers?
Yes.
But when one of that school of thought can finish a quote from any book you pull off their personal shelf as Lewis was reported to have done, it’s pretty hard to argue with it.
I’ll let you finish.
I love the idea of going back to beginning to see how the ending was set up. Now on my reading to-do list.
Come back and let me know how it goes, Densie.
Lance, as a re-reader of favorite books, you are singing my song. No book has ever been spoiled for me by knowing the ending. In fact, it adds to the enjoyment, just like with music. And when I’ve read a particularly good one, I immediately go back to the beginning to see how everything was set up. Thanks for this post.
Exactly, Vijaya! I think of superfans of Rowling and Austen and Dickens and Shakespeare — especially PhDs in each — who read and reread and reread and always find a deeper layer.
Only a culture starved for wonder would care about spoilers. In eras filled with wonder like the Middle Ages — in eras that understood, metaphysically, that forces like gravity must be contingent upon some higher first principle — they loved a good spoiler. They loved it because seeing Quidditch with new eyes and deeper reflection, seeing Noah (from The Notebook) and his poetry with fresh insight, reencountering John Cleever or Jason Bourne at a different stage in life would teach them something new and deeper about ultimate reality.
For the same reason, Opera attendees still love good spoilers. They don’t assume that they’ve “seen it all.” They assume that they haven’t even plunged the depths of the first thing they ever saw, let alone the second, the third… It’s a humble, teachable posture that knows how to reencounter even the kitchen table and the ingrown toenail with wonder.
Saying this as the guy who just now — at thirty — got his wisdom teeth taken out. I’m pretty swollen and in a FANTASTIC amount of pain (though on the plus side, I’m available for comments more than normal, so here we are). Anyways, I’ve done dental work before, but this is something entirely different and fresh. There’s wonder in the pain, even though I knew what was coming. There’s also wonder in having oxycodone for the pain again (for good reason, of course, and in moderation).
I guess you could say the reason I don’t care about spoilers is precisely because grass still surprises me even after all these years. So does rain.
As an aside: it makes me wonder if my parents got a divorce precisely because they couldn’t truly imagine themselves keeping that appointment they made on their wedding day — “till death.” It makes me wonder: what if they had truly believed in the infinite depth of the soul?
What if they had truly believed that they could never plunge the depths of one another’s quirks and moods, habits and addictions, glories and failures?
The spoiler of “till death” may well have been the best part.
“Only a culture starved for wonder would care about spoilers.” This. You’ve retained your child-like wonder even with the extraction of wisdom teeth :) Never lose it. I think this is why I love writing for children best. And you have such good thoughts about marriage–it has to be till death do us part because two flesh really do become one. We can bear fruit in a child, another soul for all eternity.
Congratulations too, on the acceptance at NHR!!!
I’m reminded of the article On Chasing After One’s Hat which taught us that “an inconvenience rightly considered is an adventure; an adventure wrongly considered is an inconvenience.”
Wisdom teeth: what an adventure. Particularly with a CPAP! My god! I’ll never have a chance to navigate a night of sleep like that again.
Honestly, my goal is to help adults reclaim The Fae in their lives — how do you get jaded New Yorkers to believe, once more, “they all lived happily ever after” ?
Thanks so much!
Lance, thank you for that link. Such a delight! I can’t stop smiling about “A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a wife.”
And the answer to your question is to live it– happily ever after.
My pleasure. He’s a master without a masterpiece — every one of his works delights me as much as that one.
Good call.
Shout out to the New Haven Review!
Tales told in reverse, retellings, alternate history…we long to undo the story, to make it come out differently. Why? Perhaps because conflict hurts, and if it hurts enough it never feels fully resolved.
Endings don’t always end the feelings.
On the other hand, we journey in the hope of arriving. In story terms, we hope everything will–finally–come out okay. What disappoints me is when in a novel I never doubt that it will. A sense of genuine suspense is a rare thing.
So what does all this mean in terms of writing a story? It means that the journey ought to feel like the destination is impossible to reach. It means that conflict ought to be so great that ending it still leaves us rewriting in our minds.
Thus, in a way, for writers endings are irrelevant. Getting comfortable with discomfort is the task. Big trouble means big engagement. Spoilers will never spoil a novel written that way.
Thoughtful post, Lance. How’re you doing? Been a while.
Yeah man — they’re great people. Best launch party I’ve been to, I think. And New Haven was a fascinating town — both good and bad.
That’s true, we definitely do that. Perhaps we try to rewrite the stories others tell because we disagree with the “final and irreversible change” their protagonist went through. I can see myself, for instance, rewriting swaths of Game of Thrones precisely because the book only pulls from the bad parts of history’s War of the Roses and ignores all of the great strides in our hope and humanity made that century. Dante, for instance, repurposed Virgil for his own philosophy but did it autobiographically: he made it both more and less personal.
Yeah, that happened to me recently with Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep. The book was great, but I never really doubted that the good guys would win and the bad guys would pay dearly. And that made it weaker than some of King’s other work. On the other hand, I went into the movie theater KNOWING the ending of IT and yet I didn’t know the journey and to make me doubt — seriously doubt — that spoiler in the theaters this fall was a work of genius.
Which is what you’re saying: to make a reader think that said spoiled ending is impossible. Romeo and Juliet would NEVER, at first blush, seem like the kind of story where two teenagers commit suicide. And yet it is.
It’s no wonder why According to research by UC San Diego psychology professor Nicholas Christenfeld, spoilers don’t ruin a story: They make you enjoy it even more.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HH86XMZ8vn8&w=560&h=315%5D
I totally agree: that we make the reader doubt. And great novels can make readers even doubt the spoilers.
I’m great man, thanks for asking. Just finished the last draft of the novel I started in at UnCon last year. Really proud of it — it was actually an excerpt of that novel that sold to the New Haven Review. Half of my family’s sick, but we’re having a good time joking about cancer and the like in spite of it, so life’s good.
How are things with you?
Good. I’m writing to you from Berg’n, which you first told me about. Come on over for lunch sometime!
Awesome. Love that place (first Ramen burger I ever ate and best saison I ever drank). I tell you what, soon as I heal up from these wisdom teeth extractions, I’ll head your way. Thanks for the invite!
First, as a resident of New Haven county, I have to promote our fair Elm City, and ask if you were not, truly, transformed by the New Haven aPizza experience? (Pepe’s is fine, but Modern is the best.) Also, the Yale Art Gallery is a jewel. Hope you got to enjoy that as well.
I will seek out your piece in the New Haven Review. Congrats.
Lots of good fodder here from you and Don, so thank you for your post. I will definitely approach the next round of edits on my WIP with the goal of eliciting an “impossible to reach” feeling in the reader.
And yes, I love going straight back to page one when I finish a great novel, even with a “spoiled” ending. If I’m asking “how’d they do that?” by the end, I know it’s a good sign.
I wish I could still eat pizza! Alas, I’ve developed a visceral intolerance for dairy these last few years.
Though I did enjoy several places — one had some amazing meaty sandwiches, some hole in the wall newer place. A great brunch too at some massive diner. The Institute Library was amazing and the people were very, very warm and inviting. I remember Brian Slatterly’s band being very well-received and engaging.
The elms definitely did my soul good — I tend to be surrounded by steel and concrete in NYC.
And yeah, the gallery was great. Though it was weird seeing a painting of Ferguson (Hands Up, Don’t Shoot) since my wife’s from Ferguson, to read about the historical racism of Mr. Yale and his city and to see it written in a tone that made it sound chronologically snobbish — as if that sort of thing weren’t clearly in play in the city these days. (I interacted with as many underprivileged in New Haven as I did large donors for The Institute).
So I had a great experience but I also felt a pang of shame over the negative connections between Yale and my wife’s hometown and felt longing myself for the better side of New Haven to affect the darker side. It was an odd, deep experience. One I’m definitely grateful for.
The story they bought is actually the first short story I send people who subscribe to my mailing list, so you can get it for free by signing up on my website..
Don’s a great thinker on this stuff, so follow his lead before you follow any of my stumbling attempts.
But I do really aspire to make readers doubt: particularly to doubt the longing — the sehnsucht — within the main character (both the external goal and the internal misbelief that needs unlearned). That longing can be amplified with a well-placed spoiler.
There’s nothing greater than rereading the start — particularly the start of the first book in a series. I spent an hour Sunday meditating on “Gringotts is the safest place in the world, other than Hogwarts, of course.” That statement turned out to be true like twelve times over before the series was done.
I couldn’t have savored all of that without spoiling exactly how and where that statement applied.
Best thing I ever did to my debut novel (Book 1 of a mainstream trilogy) was to realize I needed I ray of some kind of hope for a happy ending – and to go back and add a prologue (145 words) which gives away what happens at the end of the story.
It is so short, it’s easy to almost forget that you read that; indeed, people who skip prologues will miss a key piece, and will be surprised when they get where I’ve already told them they’re going.
But I’ve always blessed whatever instinct it was that made me write the tiny spoiler.
See this is the beauty of it, right here. And Don alluded to this earlier too:
What about stories that begin at the end?
I’m thinking of stories that go beginning-middle-beginning?
For instance, in film:
• Arrival
• Memento
• Inception
• Fight Club
• Pulp Fiction
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• The Usual Suspects
• Gandhi
• Big Fish
And so on. Big Fish, in particular, leaves us with this giant mythology about this man who died and THE WHOLE FUN of the story is finding out how he ended up as a walking myth.
It reminds me of Rothfuss’ cue card at the start and end of the first two books of his trilogy:
“It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.”
It fills you with dread knowing Kvothe will die. It’s a spoiler, of course. But how that happens? What kind of death he’s waiting for?
Well that’s the whole story.
Another great riff in Big Fish was the fact that the main character already knew how he would die (i.e., he knew the ending), which made him fearless any time he hit a dangerous situation that didn’t line up with the scenario he knew would ultimately kill him. Brilliant!
GREAT point. I had totally forgotten about that, but that’s totally true: the spoiler itself gave him courage for the journey.
There’s something to be said for how knowing “happily ever after” gives us the courage to face the worst life has for us. There was a thinker in antiquity who used to say, “On the spectrum of possible deaths, you can only have one. Why fear them all?”
This is what most critics who call fantasy and scifi “escapist” don’t understand: “escapist” literature isn’t an insult — neither for the magician nor the P.O.W. It’s a beautiful thing for a prisoner to envision their escape from this broken world precisely by envisioning a world in which their problems are not the same as ours. In a way, that makes fantasy and scifi a sort of poetry of metaphysics. And why the angsty literary novels written by many young MFA grads are still very much fantasizing, though often fantasizing about the mundane and the worries about what we might become in this life, today, at the end of this particular MFA degree.
To find out what we want to become — the piece of virtue ethics where we mediate on what kind of human we can be — is courage. Courage to choose our highest virtues at the testing point as he did in Big Fish. Courage to be our best selves in the teeth of death and the abyss. That’s the opposite of spoilt. That’s about as fresh and original as it gets.
Man that’s a great call. I hadn’t thought about that part of Big Fish.
How you doing, Keith? I miss you man. Thought about you the other day.
Hey Lance – Read your thoughtful essay early today, and it’s left me thinking since. So I wanted you to know that it’s an excellent provocation, and that apparently Josh Gad feels the same as you. In fact, while he’s grilling Lupita Nyongo for advance info on the new Star Wars movie, he says, “Spoilers are overrated.”
Here’s the clip: https://twitter.com/joshgad/status/937959517584728064
Great hearing from you today. Hope you feel better soon!
That was hilarious, Vaughn. So so funny. Thanks for sharing (great that he called out that overreaction too).
Thanks for the compliments. Hope it helps.
How’s your fantasy series coming along?
Coming along pretty well. One edition of the series out there searching for a home, and trying to wrap up its sequel. Fingers crossed. (It’d be great to finally have it connect with readers.) Thanks for asking.
Wonderful to hear of your progress. Wishing you the best with the finished one, and with your current writing projects!
Great man. I hope it finds one very, very soon. I have faith in you man: keep it up.
Appreciate that. We will see what happens. Either way, it’s good to be interacting with WU writers again: reminds me that there are other folk out there who are right here in the trenches with me.
To moving further up and further in.
Loved reading ALL of this, Lance. Maybe you being named Lancelot was in some way the end of the beginning of your story. I found that with my name (Elizabeth) I became a great lover of English history and had to read everything I could find about QE I and QEII as well as become an English major in college and eventual teacher. Your post is thoughtful as well as provocative. Which “calls” out that I will share my work in progress Prologue. (They are so forbidden these days.)
It is: You can never go very far from home.
Since the first part of the story deals with a move that one character wants and the other does not–what exactly am I asking the reader to believe. Is my Prologue a spoiler? They must read and find out. THANKS.
It may be. Then again, I hope I’m much more like the Lancelot of the Fae or the faithful and young Lancelot than the one who betrayed his best friend by adultery and instead of giving it up, tore apart a kingdom. The contrast of the two in the various tellings is a tale unto itself…
It’s interesting because your name is also a transliteration of a transliteration (english > greek > hebrew). The original meant “my God is an oath” or perhaps “my God is abundance” — that is to say, as a sort of pun it means that a good ending to a true commitment is, in itself, a sort of fulfilled spoiler.
That idea of a good ending to a true commitment — a fulfilled spoiler — makes me think that the whole genre of prophecy in fantasy and scifi could use a good treatment on this site.
Of where it’s done well such as in Dune (prophecy as manipulation of data points for one’s own gain) and Harry Potter (prophecy as intended for multiple people and, generally, misinterpreted). And where it’s done poorly such as in Witch and Wizard by Patterson.
Prophecies as spoilers in fiction, now that I’m thinking about it, fail for one of these reasons:
1. Too specific.
2. Too concrete, with little symbolism or metaphor.
3. Not enough room for error on the side of the prophet.
4. Lack of context: prophecies don’t happen in a historical, cultural, economic, or autobiographical vacuum.
5. Not enough room for error on the side of the interpreter.
6. Lack of false prophets.
7. Lack of “the other side” of the story.
You’re welcome. Thanks for prompting that rabbit trail. It’s actually helping me process through a problem I had with another book.
Yes, for sure, lack of false prophets–every story could use one. And the interpreter should always make a mistake–that really keeps the reader guessing. As Elizabeth, I’ll knight you the Lancelot you want to be. Take care.
The longer I wait the more I get out of this back-and-forth about spoilers and the many ways they can benefit a narrative. Even though my WIP is a nonfiction narrative based on meticulous historical research (yes, nonfiction, as mentioned before, but I haven’t yet been voted off this island) I can already see various ways of larding in a few spoilers without violating the events or mischaracterizing the people. Thanks!
(Speaking of names, it pleases me that my son John and I have the same name….)
Oh you’re more than welcome here with nonfiction by my count (though I’m more of the lowly WU pirates than one of the WU high commanders, so my opinion and a buck will buy you a soda). I really wish more nonfiction writers would employ principles of good narrative both in their anecdotes (or memoirs) and in the flow of argumentation.
Hopefully it works out for you. You’re more than welcome. But yeah, those are good qualifications: don’t violate what’ll happen and don’t mischaracterize.
Your son John has the same name as Anna? I think I’m missing something…
The names? Same derivation, I should probably have said. And thanks for voting that I stay on the island, or in the tribe, or on the ship, or whatever vehicle this fine group inhabits.
Gotcha, I’m tracking now.
For sure. I volunteer myself as tribute.
Lance at first I was resistant to your thesis: “Spoilers, hmphh! One way to ruin all the fun, mystery and narrative arc! Hmphh!” And then I thought that spoilage really isn’t the case at all for many works that give an early upshot. After all, we know how Napoleon fares against the Russians, but we’ll still wade into War and Peace. (Or maybe just dip our toes in to check the temperature.)
I just watched Sunset Boulevard again a week ago, and its first-scene dead man’s voiceover (along with the buoyant visual of William Holden floating in the mansion pool) didn’t deter from the gothic glories of the film’s movements and crescendo. The journey’s the thing, as you say, and sometimes it’s a titanic (sorry) one.
By the way, being a fellow who’s teeth periodically dial up Satan and invite him for a visit, I throbbed in empathy at your broken bite. Though when you started to describe the wonder in the pain, it did remind me of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, and his declared voluptuous embrace of his tooth pain. Best read when the reader is suffering too, so the moans of anguish are on the page and off.
Thanks for an intriguing post!
War and Peace is a great example, Tom. I’m unfamiliar with Sunset Boulevard, but it’s long been on my list of films, so I’ll punt to you on that example.
Unfamiliar with that volume by Dostoevsky, but as I love him, I’ll give it a look. Synopsis looks promising… although the synopsis makes me wonder if, by your perspective, I sound a little crazy reveling in tooth pain. (Though today it’s nausea from the Amoxicillian, which takes a bit more effort to achieve a sort of human sympathy for those who go through it every day in third world environs.)
My pleasure. Thanks for the comment!
I used to hate spoilers until I realized that one of my favorite stories gives away the end in the title: The Death of Ivan Ilych. The fact that the main character dies is almost incidental. The story’s power is in its depiction of how he lived and of the healing power of forgiveness and hope of resurrection. Likewise with Behold the Dreamers. Knowing that the heroes’ fate will take a catastrophic turn with the collapse of Wall Street in 2008 makes their striving all the more poignant.
This is a GREAT example: where titular lines happen in the climax. I knew going into TILL WE HAVE FACES that the whole book came down to that line and in some strange way, that spoiler spoiled nothing. It simply compounded the anticipation for when and how and why it would be delivered.
Good call there.
I am one of the people who hates spoilers, but I think we may disagree on what the definition of a spoiler is. ANY book, story or movie that tells you the ending at the beginning of the story is not a spoiler. If telling you the end is part of the narrative, then that is part of the narrative. That is how the writer chose to tell the story. A spoiler is when someone reveals a detail about the story before you were made aware of it by the story itself.
When I read a book, I DO want to enjoy the journey. Especially since I know that the writer crafted the story to be told in the specific way that he wrote it. He chose to reveal little tidbits and clues at the moment he chose for a purpose he has in mind.
For me (and I realize this isn’t as important to other people), giving me information before the author intended for me to have it takes away from the experience. And I feel like I am shortchanging the person who put all the work into writing this story. I want every single word to be a surprise. The journey, the discoveries along the way, the successes, the setbacks, and especially the end result.
For anyone who doesn’t mind spoilers or loves to jump right to the end of a book, more power to them. Read or watch anything in the way that you want to do it. However, we all enjoy the things we enjoy in our own way and none of them are wrong.
Hey Brent! Thanks for the comment.
Hannibal Lecter enjoyed eating. In his own way. And it was most certainly wrong because when Hannibal Lecter enjoyed eating, his eating destroyed the one root reason we have for eating: our humanity. For one man to enjoy eating another man is precisely to enjoy the end of all eating and therefore to not enjoy the whole point of eating at all.
So yes, there are many things people call “enjoyment” and “pleasure” that are the destruction of the very things they profess bring them said joy and pleasure.
Were that not true, why even talk about spoilers at all? Why would it even be a subject if there were not merit to talk about a better or worse way? The nuance of experiencing a story? In short, why would I have to even approach spoilers as a defense?
But that’s a philosophical digression like some of the above and isn’t central to your argument, so we should probably both set that aside…
I most certainly am using the word “spoiler” as you’re using it, though you might not have gotten that from the digressions. My example of Romeo and Juliet, for instance, assumed that the commoners who had not yet seen the show did not know that both of the teenagers die and that spoiling their deaths made them want to see the way in which that happened. That knowing the entire story of Virgil made Dante want to riff on it.
For those who appeal to higher authority through phrases like “studies show” (which is, for the record, about as epistemologically tautological as appealing to “the bible says” or “my dad says” or “in my experience”), I should add that studies show that spoiler alerts make you enjoy spoilers more.
This is seen, as I said above, in the opera crowd who insists that audience members know the story before going to their first one. In fact, the opera fans I know in the city are some of the WORST (or best?) about spoiling the story before you go. And yet… it somehow makes me more excited to go to my first one. They won’t shut up about them.
What I’m challenging is precisely the assumption that a spoiler would truly ruin the journey at all, rather than obviously enhancing it as a sort of map. As I said above, only a culture starved for wonder would care about spoilers. In eras filled with wonder in every single rock and stock and sone like the Middle Ages — in eras that understood, metaphysically, that forces like gravity must be contingent upon some higher first principle — they loved a good spoiler. They loved it because seeing Quidditch with new eyes and deeper reflection, seeing Noah (from The Notebook) and his poetry with fresh insight, reencountering John Cleever or Jason Bourne at a different stage in life would teach them something new and deeper about ultimate reality.
For the same reason, Opera attendees still love good spoilers. They don’t assume that they’ve “seen it all.” They assume that they haven’t even plunged the depths of the first thing they ever saw, let alone the second, the third… It’s a humble, teachable posture that knows how to reencounter even the kitchen table and the ingrown toenail with wonder.
For instance, I doubt anyone could truly spoil the Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson. At 400,000 words per book, your spoiler would do well to be shorter than the series itself were you truly going to spoil something of substance. Because of that, anything that spoiled any part would immediately draw a reader into an encounter with a fully realized world that would be deeper and broader than any experience the spoiler could have ruined. In fact, I know one or two fans of the Stormlight Archive who resisted ever starting before I spoiled a few things. That’s what a word-of-mouth recommendation is: one reader spoiling some things in order to develop the interest of a potential new reader.
Perhaps a way to ask the question for your personal circumstance is this: how often have you went ahead and tried a long-form work or a classic in which something of substance was spoiled?
If the answer is never, then Sam — how do you know you don’t like green eggs and ham?
If the answer is several times, I’m curious: what were the stories? What was the spoiler? And how – precisely – did it rob you?
If the answer is once or twice, I beg for a larger sample size.