A Good Story Dies a Noble Death

Just minutes ago, I finished reading Inheritance, the latest book by Christopher Paolini and the last of the series.  I enjoyed it very much, though I wouldn’t say it’s among my very favorite books.  Still, upon finishing the series, I felt a kind of desolation that I usually do when I come to the end of a good story.  It’s a feeling of satisfaction mixed with a strange weight of loss, and neither side is entirely good or bad. 

Those of us who are readers—and even many of us who are not—understand this feeling.  We all spend so much mental and emotional energy devoted to stories, whether they come from books, movies, or even what happens out in the world.  One of the profound questions of human experience is what will happen next?  It’s an integral part of why we read books, why we play games, why we watch the news.  The anticipation and curiosity of not knowing is painful, and yet oddly exhilarating.

For me, this feeling of anticipation is strongest between installments of the stories I read.  I can’t even count the number of stories in which I am currently entangled.  Kristen Britain’s Green Rider series, Patricia Rayburn’s Siren, Clive Barker’s Abarat, and P.C. and Kristin Cast’s Dark Night books are those that sit on my shelf now; there are others, I know.  As a writer, being positioned in this web of uncertainty is marvelous, because it opens so many dozens of possibilities to me.  Where does the main character fall at the end of the story?  How will she cope with the new difficulties and hurts given to her?  What new characters have yet to be revealed?  Questions like these have to be answered, and I tend to write out various answers myself, which generates new ideas and infinite possibilities.

When a series ends, the definitive answers have come, and all the other possibilities die away.  Some of my speculations I save as new stories; others are simply no longer feasible and must be forgotten.  This is part of the sorrow I feel when finishing a story.  The rest comes from the simple fact that I have to withdraw the part of my consciousness from the world in which it has lived.  Using Inheritance as my example, Alagaesia is now closed to me, and while I can go back and visit—and I’m certain I will: I’m a chronic re-reader—it will never have the same vibrancy and life that it once did.  But no story would be any good without its ending.  It is what makes the story worthwhile.  So I will nurse the bittersweet loss of a story for a little while longer, and then find another to open new worlds.