The Abruptness of Storytelling

This is a cross-post from The Unicorn Blues.

Lately I’ve been thinking about different ways you can tell a story, and how abrupt tonal shifts and/or endings shouldn’t always be considered flaws. No matter what kind of story you’re telling, it is somewhat going to echo life around you; life with its rapid tonal shifts and unexpected endings.

In John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars the main character, Hazel, is obsessed with a book called An Imperial Affliction. It’s a book that just ends, cuts off abruptly in the middle of a sentence, therefore the reader never find out what happens to the other characters in the book. This story, and how it ends, plays a major point in understanding one of the themes of The Fault in Our Stars; Hazel’s struggle with life, consciousness, and what happens when you die.

The rest of this post can be found here. Thanks for reading!