closure – Ridley Park

Every writer, instinctively or otherwise, understands the notion of payoffs. This relates to Chekov’s gun. If you mention something, provide closure.

I understand this, too, but life rarely provides closure. Perhaps this is why we want our stories to play this role, everything in neat bundles, strings tied, a nice ribbon.

The challenge as a writer is how to subvert this expectation without alienating your audience.

“Wait, what happened to that character?”

“Why did that mention the purple cow?”

And so on.

To many, these are called out as plot holes. To be fair, many are; some are forgotten plotlines, and others are simply abandoned.

But what if some are intentional? What if the plot better reflected real life? What if you never heard about that man on the tube or that woman at the grocery?

How many people do you pass by, never to encounter again? How many people do you cross paths with only to, years later, befriend.

In principle, I may have run into my wife a decade before I met her. We trod the same ground and frequented the same neighbourhoods.

A narrator may be able to piece this together, but I’ll never know. It’s like when you buy a car that you don’t see often – but then you do – or after you befriend a person, you notice them often.

In a way, a story pulls pieces together and creates narrative threads, but what if it didn’t?

I don’t hide the fact that I rely on AI for early editorial feedback. Once a story is complete, I break out AutoCrit. This programme works well for typical stories that follow standard practices with common tropes. It gets quite confused when I feed it intentionally awkward stories, not the least of which is to advise me to eliminate the awkwardness.

This is a challenge with AI more generally. In this particular story, I leave a lot of loose ends and misdirects, as it’s a commentary on the conspiracy-driven culture we inhabit. The advice, is along the lines of, “You forget to close this lopp. What happened to so and so.”

But this is life. We don’t always know the full story. We drive past an multi-car accident where cares are overturned and in flames, but we never find out what happens – even if we scour the newspapers and internet. Who was that? What happened? What caused it?

We often never find out. In most books and movies, we find out everythung, and it all comes packaged with a nice bow. This is what AI expects. It’s the diet it’s been fed.

Some stories subvert these notions here and there, but by and large, this is not typical American fare. Readers and viewers need to be spoonfed without inconsistencies.

Speaking of inconsistencies addressing one scene, AutoCrit said that a character should act impulsively in one situation and reserved moments later. This was flagged as an iinconsistent character.

In the scene, a woman stops her car immediately to help an injured man on the roadside, but as she gets out of her car an approaches her, she shows caution.

This was a red flag. Why would she have always been rash or always been cautious?

My response, because that how real people act. She acts on instinct but quickly considers that she’s a vulnerable woman alone with a man miles from anywhere.

I don’t suspect a human reader would find this surprising. This is the intelligence absent from Artificial Intelligence — cultural intelligence, a cousin of EQ, emotional quotient.

I know how I want the character to act. I do want AutoCrit to inform me that character A is wielding a pistol but then stabs another character, or that character B is a teetotaler and is getting drunk or that character C has a shellfish allergy but is downing lobsters like they’re going out of style. And I certainly what to be shown continuity errors.

The biggest challenge I have with AutoCrit that is less promonent with other AIs is that I can preface my content with a note explaining my intent. I can even do this after the fact.

If I feed ChatGPT, Claude, or DeepSeek a story of segment to critique without a preface, the responses may be similar to AutoCrit, but when I follow up with some meta, the response may be, “Now it makes sense, but why is John wearing lipstick?” Perhaps he’s metrosexual or non-traditional. Perhaps it’s an oversight.

I dont meán to demean AutoCrit. I’m just advising that if you are writing stories not compliant with 80 per cent of published works, take the advice with a grain of salt, or reserve AutoCrit for more standard fare.

Tag: closure

The Problem with Payoffs

AutoCrit Challenges