Mea Culpa UPDATED

UPDATED

Since I wrote the original post under this title (yesterday) there have been a handful of replies here (thanks, everybody), one on Facebook, and a half dozen or so emails. I’m going to try to synthesize all of that into a cohesive whole. Please bear with me. 

The issue: I hear from readers who are confused or irritated by unresolved storylines in The Gilded Hour.  Specifically two storylines seem to raise the most questions.

The Russo children (where was Tonino, and where is Vittorio?)
The identity of the individuals who were responsible for the deaths of at least six women.

Before I address these issues, there were some good comments I should address. The general gist is: Don’t worry about what your readers think. It’s a series. Just keep writing!  Why am I not taking this advice?  If a lot of readers come to me with the same question, it means I failed to make something clear. And I don’t like that. So this is my final effort to address the issues, in detail.  I’ll start with a couple of representative emails.

First, an email that came in this morning from Nancy. It’s like a lot of email I get recently.

Dear Sara I just finished your new book the Gilded Hour. I have a question. On page 696,after looking for a killer through most of the other 695 pages Oscar says, no reasons to give up now, in reference to finding the killer. Then there is not another word in the remaining 36 pages about finding the killer. What???? Who was the killer??? It turned out to be a very disappointing read I must say.

I am hoping for a reply .

Nancy

This next email is from Sandra, who is also curious, but in more general terms.

Hi Rosina/Sara

I have never written to an author before but I had to write you. I loved The Gilded Hour and was heartbroken to finish it. When I saw on your webpage that “a new series was launched” I assume that means you are going to write more. Whew! I just have to know what happens to all these people. I am in love with them and am imagining futures for each one of them. I want to read more about Anna & Jack, Sophie & Cap, Rosa & her siblings, Ned, Aunt Quinlan, Margaret, Elise. I feel like I know them now so want to follow their lives.

Some truths about this whole storytelling business, to start:

First Big Truth: It’s really uplifting to hear from readers, even when they are irritated. It means the story got under that reader’s skin. That’s what I strive for. 

Second Big Truth: Sometimes confusion has to do with the reader, and not with the book. I have had questions from readers who, while supportive and enthusiastic, didn’t read very closely and for that reason are confused. A memorable example: the reader who thought that Hannah was pregnant by her brother.  There’s next to nothing I can do to respond in a constructive way to such questions.

Third Big Truth: These days instant gratification is the thing.  Readers used to wait for months for the next chapter in a book they were reading, dying of curiosity, talking about the story with other people who were following the series. No more. Today it’s possible to binge. You can order all of the books in the Niccolo Rising series or all of Harry Potter and never have to wait to find out what happens next. You can rent or buy every season of E.R. or Friends or Lost or Breaking Bad and watch them one after the other until your eyes pop out. But this is all very new. When I was a kid, you had one chance every year to see The Wizard of Oz when it was on television. That was it. If you missed it, too bad. No way to record anything, no way to order up a movie out of simply curiosity.

When I hear from readers who want answers right now, I have a choice. I can lecture that person about patience (it’s a virtue, apparently) and wax lyrical about the changing world of storytelling. Or I can empathize and say two things: I’m writing as fast as I can, and I hope that the end product will be worth the wait.

These are people who have read the book I wrote and felt strongly enough about it to write to me. That’s good. That’s what I focus on. 

Getting down to specifics about the two big questions above: (the Russo children, and  the murders.) I start with Voltaire.1

Good storytelling leaves questions open to be considered and answered by the reader or viewer.

It’s true that you haven’t heard in detail about what Tonino went through, and you don’t know where Vittorio is; his adoptive family is gone. Where? Why? You also don’t know how Sophie’s parents died, or why Aunt Quinlan left Paradise.  And there are eternal questions about Callie and Ethan.

As a series develops there are more of such questions. You may get answers down the line, and you might not. Shawn pointed out in the comments that there are thousands of people out there who have lived sixty years or longer with no answers about where they came from, why they were put up for adoption, and where their birth parents might be.

Bottom line: No quick answers in real life, or in the way I tell stories.

The question about the murders is, of course, far more pressing. Some people raced through the last part of the book because they just had to know who was responsible … And then were disappointed.  Really disappointed. One star irritated.

And I can’t help them. I would suggest that it’s far more interesting to think about the clues (there are a lot of them) and come up with your own theories. So again: I’m just not going to tie everything up in a neat package. I won’t tell everything. I can’t, really, because that just isn’t the way my storytelling mind works. So I have to disappoint those who must know immediately. 

The thing is, I do hope that when the next book comes out, irritated and frustrated readers will find that it really was worth the wait. 

From Wikipedia: François-Marie Arouet  21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778, known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state. Voltaire was a versatile writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. He was an outspoken advocate of several liberties, despite the risk this placed him in under the strict censorship laws of the time. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma, and the French institutions of his day. ↩



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