Going back to the thing about beginnings and endings, this is something I’ve been thinking about recently. Earlier in the year, I had a couple of lectures on Beginnings, Middles and Endings, and I think we were particularly looking at Wordsworth’s The Prelude, and it came up in discussion that sometimes works of fiction start long after the beginning of the story, or finish before the end of the story. And then there are words where the continuity isn’t chronological, where you’re purposefully set into the middle of the story, or the end, and sometimes brought back to the beginning – sometimes not.

I find the idea really fascinating. I’m not sure what to do with it, but I’m always on the look out for fiction that plays around with its chronology. I’m also highly aware that most of my fiction happens in the middle, and neglects both the beginning and the end; but that is on purpose. Either way, I’m fairly certain you can play around with your readers’ perception and experience by being aware of the distinctions. Just… how?

We’ve turned the world to shit, and the reason most of us don’t realize it has a lot to do with the “comfort” of our Skinner Boxes. What wonderfully well-conditioned operants we are!

And as for tailoring your responses to what the audience wants, surely politicians are the most egregious with their “focus groups”? Their formulated, philosophically corrected concepts are in fact no more than a response to what the people want. The ultimate in sophism, a modern version of “bread and circuses”?

And is the pandering to market research when writing a novel what separates “literature” from “brain candy”? There’s nothing wrong with brain candy, we all need a respite at times, and “literature” can be simply just too much like hard work. Is one characteristic of literature that it gives us an ending that is “unexpected”, something that we have to work towards? I don’t know, it’s just a thought.

Whats worse is we’ve become impatient too.
Remember simpler times, when we’d listen to the radio for hours , waiting for a favourite song to be played? Remember request lines? The anticipation and the absolute joy that would come as a result of waiting patiently and being rewarded!

Now when we want something ,it HAS to be instantaneous or we are frustrated and disappointed.
We’ve been conditioned to expect our happy endings and everything else , on cue… on demand.
Our juices flow when we don’t know the outcome, when it isn’t always what we have come to expect.
We have turned the world to shit, and most of don’t even realize it.

end of rant.

Theatrical release “happy ending”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQfzvVeEkGI

Original ending, and from what I understand much closer to the novel itself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOWeyGX5Bgk

So we get a film where the bad guys all get killed, the hero becomes martyr, the survivors bring “the cure” to the rest of the world for an HEA ending…

Your Titanic example didn’t seem an exaggeration at all.