Spoiler Alert
I am of two minds when it comes to spoilers. As a reader, an audience member watching a film, or a middle-aged adult playing a video game—I’m not particularly bothered by spoilers. For me, a story is about the journey, not the destination. The notion of spoiler alerts seems to turn this around. Spoilers are either about the destination or waypoints on the journey to the destination.
As a creator, I understand the delicate crafting that goes into storytelling—a kind of house of cards that has to meet the audience in just the right way to have its desired effect. Whether or not I pull off that effect is as much up to the audience as it is to me, and I don’t worry about it too much.
In my experience, spoiler alerts didn’t exist in the days before the Internet. I remember going to see Return of the Jedi when it first came out and coming home to tell my brother all about it in great detail, including what happens at the end. My brother didn’t seem disappointed by my revelation; my telling made him even more eager to see the movie. But the Internet acts as a kind of informational gravitational lens, magnifying the potential audience of the spoiler. Perhaps there are some people who don’t want to know.
Spoiler alerts seem far more common in works of fiction than in nonfiction—with the possible exception of “shocking revelations” that appear in memoirs or tell-all books. This makes sense. It comes as no shock, when reading a biography of Lincoln, to discover that (spoiler alert!) Lincoln dies in the end. And yet, it is the very idea that a good story can draw us in even when we know the ending that has stayed with me. Knowing that Lincoln dies in the end in no way spoils a biography of Lincoln for me. Recently, I read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s An Unfinished Love Story, a book whose very title is a spoiler alert. And, though I knew the ending, I still enjoyed the book.
There are works of fiction that I have read multiple times. I’ve read Isaac Asimov’s entire Foundation series at least four times. I’ve read Stephen King’s 11/22/63 seven times. Each reading gets better, despite having read the book before. Knowing what happens does not spoil the experience for me.
Ah, but what about that first time? It is true that there is something wonderful about reading a book—particularly a very good book—for the first time, getting lost in something new. But I’m not sure knowing something about what happens ahead of time alters the newness of a book, at least to a degree that would spoil it for me. People describe things I haven’t done all the time, and once I’ve done them, I don’t find the experience diminished. At least, not because of what someone told me ahead of time.
There is a corollary to a spoiler alert that does bother me: it is when someone wants to know what happens before it happens. Kelly is notorious for watching a TV show or film and saying to me, “What happens? Does he live?” Asking for the spoiler seems subversive to the creator in me. Because of this, I avoid spoiler alerts in my writing—not because I think they spoil, but because I think they subvert. They are shortcuts on a larger journey, and it is the journey that is the best part.
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