I was considering posting another Completely Random Crap Teaser today, but then Cindy Pon brought up the movie Bright Star, which she saw recently. That got me thinking of John Keats, dead so young, and that in turn made me think about the very idea of my Random Crap folder, from which spring all these Random Crap Teasers.
Negative Capability
Keats was the one who put forth the idea of Negative Capability, which entails people being able to accept and embrace the fact that not everything can be resolved. The ability to exist comfortably in the presence of uncertainty and the unknowable.
That is at the heart of my Random Crap folder. It is a collection of ideas that bows before pragmatic reality: they cannot all be written. When I put a story file into the Random Crap folder, I acknowledge that in all likelihood I will never finish it. For every idea plucked out of the folder and written to some form of completion, another dozen have crawled into that dark cavern to languish, perhaps never to see the light of day again.
I am okay with that. It’s the nature of writing. If I dropped dead today, killed by boredom at a departmental meeting, I would never get to work on those ideas. I would never do final revisions on THIRTEEN. I would never finish a first draft of HORNBEAM. I would never find out why Axyl Witt has a daughter named Ninja.
Are you okay with that? When you read my Random Crap Teasers, does it trouble you to know that they’re scraps of some larger work that only exists in my brain? Do you lie awake at night worrying about the stories in your Random Crap folder? Do you try to imagine what would happen if you died before finishing your magnum opus?
Keats opined that a person who possessed Negative Capability was a “Man of Achievement,” but I suspect it’s just a matter of type. There are people who require resolution and people who don’t. Some people are okay with books that end uncertainly. Others prefer that all the questions be tied up in the last chapter. Different genres even cater to that dichotomy. Those who like all the ends tied up perhaps prefer murder mysteries and romances. Those of us who don’t perhaps prefer literary or oddball books not easily classified.
As for the writers who die before they complete the next book in a series, you can find a glaring absence of Negative Capability in the people they leave behind. Robert Jordan, JRR Tolkien, and Douglas Adams have all been raised from the dead to assuage the readers who don’t hold with Negative Capability. (And more likely to satisfy the publishers who own the rights.)
As for me, I would have to decline. Even if offered a posthumous sequel to such beloved and ambiguously-ended books as Invisible Man and Maurice, I would prefer to embrace my Negative Capability.
How about you?
Bryn Greenwood 
This was a well written post! And well said. I’m not sure, I’m one of those “gray” people that can see the benefit and entertainment of either. Though I’m also obsessive and addictive, and if I really like I story, I find myself thinking “What? This isn’t an ending. I want more!” Though I don’t think this personality type is unusual seeing all the series and trilogies and quadrilogies out ther being devoured by readers.
Dude, that picture for my “avatar” WTH is it? lol
As nice as it would be to have everything in life and literature tied up in neat little parcels with pretty bows, I’m ok with the fact that it doesn’t happen like that.
Some of the best films I’ve seen have ambiguous endings that leave me wanting more but, in the same breath, I’m thinking, how cool and brave to leave the audience wondering. (Cloverfield springs to mind, for some reason).
One thing that does bug me is this unwillingness, by people, to accept that a writer is dead and isn’t going to write any more. It does my head in to see Jane Austen fan-fic, etc. Why not just settle for the wonderful books she wrote? Read them again and again instead of settling for a naff imitation.
/rant. 🙂
I prefer ambiguous endings over sad ones. I hate it when I commit days of my life to a series only to find out the ending of the last book sucks.
wow! you know a lot about keats.
are you a fan? i knew very little about
him or his poetry. i love this post.
i agree, that it is very personal and
dependent on personality. i wish i had
a crap ideas folder too. i don’t get enough
crap ideas to write utter poo. =D
CC: I dunno. I love the monster avatars, though. You’re like a lobster-amoeba-anvil thingy.
Uninvoked: Check the link on the right to “On Literary Intent.” K. Stewart did a great series of blog posts on series.
Sue: Yeah…I don’t get the “sequel” to famous books allure at all.
Cindy: Well, I was an English major, so I have to have the bare minimum of Keats street cred. Oddly enough I’m not a huge fan of his poetry, but his letters were wonderful.
Honestly? I wouldn’t want someone to take my characters and write the ending for me, even if I were dead. I don’t think they’d be able to capture the ideas/voice/actions we had for our characters accurately and, well, I hate it when people take something of someone elses and make them do things they’d NEVER do otherwise.
If something happened to Mark, our novels would end. The incomplete ones would remain incomplete, because I wouldn’t be able to write the characters HE created.
as for loosing sleep over it? Nope. I’ve got too much other stuff to loose sleep over. writing isn’t one of it. probably never will be, unless it’s a matter of “meet deadline or get in major trouble”. but that’s a different problem all together, lol.
ok, enough blabbering from me. great post and topic. really makes people think. 😀
Wow, such a well thought-out and intelligently written post. I feel the need to hide my blog in embarrassment!
I love an ambiguous ending so long as it works and doesn’t leave me feeling like the writer ran out of ideas. I tried very hard–and am not sure I succeeded–in doing that with my last WIP. I have to say, it was far more difficult than a tidy ending wrapped up with a bow.
Ambiguity, openness, and unknowing are the way life is. There’s very little that we can KNOW with certainty. I say embrace it. A little mystery makes everything more interesting.
And for goodness sake, leave Douglas Adams, Jane Austen, et. al rest in peace!
I think I’m one of those that NEEDS the resolution. I hate not knowing how something ends up.
For some reason I am beyond naming any deceased authors whose unfinished / unpublished work I would like to see on the shelves of my local bookshop. There are, however, some people whose work should not be left to rot away in a warehouse. The volumes and volumes of notes which were catalogued after Stanley Kubrick’s death would make amazing reading, even if none of the unfilmed fragments were ever set to get a big-screen treatment.
And I’m wondering if Denis Gifford’s estate has any of his incomplete comic scripts or artwork as well. Not to mention any further articles or books which were left incomplete with his death. Not the same as novels, I know, but he had such clever insights that even a semi-complete non-fiction work would be much, much better than most of the stuff Overstreet or Wizard has done in the last ten years combined.
I have to admit buying some of the continuations by other hands, and… No. They ain’t up to scratch (for the most part) simply because the unique voice and personality of a writer cannot be mimicked by another person. When there have been attempts to capture lightning in a bottle twice (the H2G2 book f’rexample) it comes off as a cynical and arrogant marketing decision rather than a love of the original material.
A lot of good points have been brought up, and I still have some thinking to do on wether I approve of the idea as an artistic one or not. In some cases (when …And Zombies is added to an existing work) there is a bit of interesting interplay between genres, so I don’t feel so badly let down. Still not the best use of a writer’s time, but people are buying those books…
I’ve been trying to embrace the old ‘Negative Capability’ when it comes to my house. 😉 If my house was a boat (or an estate?) that’s what I’d call it.
I’m actually a little terrified to think about the state of my house should I die and leave my sisters and GOD FORBID, my mother, to deal with all my crap!
As far as your random crap folder…I like reading whatever you put out there, finished or not, it still sparks my imagination about what isn’t written.
Great post! Oh, and I’m totally okay with my own negative capability. I think there’s value in just the writing of the snippets that get shelved–at least they get your creative juices flowing. It doesn’t bother me a bit to know that, most likely, not all of my little darlings will see fruition.
That said, I’m not sure how I feel about ambiguous endings. I’d definitely rather an ambiguous ending than a crap one, lol–at least it’s easier to morph that undecided finish into whatever I want it to be in my head. I’m a romance fan, so I like happy stuff. Then again, often the best part of romance is the uncertainty of it. Can I just stay on the fence? You know decision-making is far from my forte! 🙂
In the spirit of Negative Capability, can I just say that my capacity to embrace it constantly changes?
There are days I need tidy endings and a sense of closure—these tend to be the days where my own life is in turmoil. There are days where ambiguity strikes me as representative of life, and therefore beautiful in and of itself. That’s why I have a range of books on my shelf and two or three books on the go at a time. My literary appetites vary.
I, too, have a Random Crap folder, although I never seem to get enough purposeful writing done to exhume any of it.
As for reading yours on Teaser Tuesday, bring it on. I have yet to find a piece of your work I don’t enjoy.