I Don't Understand the Lamps
...and the obsession with dramatic endings for everyone
When I started writing the opening scenes of The Grand Revolution of Lakeside I had already decided that it was going to be a work of magical realism. If you don't know that term, it's a story where the rules of the real world apply with perhaps one or two exceptions. If the author moves beyond one or two things, the work is rapidly moving into the fantasy genre.
In The Grand Revolution of Lakeside, haunted lamps grace the hallways of the Cavenbury Hotel. The ones on the second floor are kind and understanding; the lamps on the third floor are snarky and troublesome. They provide a sort of Statler and Waldorf energy --taking potshots from the balcony just because they feel like it. The lamps whisper of hotel guest secrets, make fun of William's lack of firearm (and sexual) accuracy, and mostly sit in the background with their snark while the world of Lakeside walks past.
"I liked the book," one of my readers told me, "but I don't really get the lamps."
I'm not entirely sure I "get" the lamps either. What I do get is that I wanted them to bring humor and a dabble of absurdity. Nothing is explained in the text about why the lamps are haunted, or why the hotel is haunted in this specific way. There aren't specters lurking in the halls and closets; there aren't strange, unexplained happenings around the hotel. The lamps just talk. And in the spirit of magical realism --the whole point of it, really-- no one cares or takes such an occurrence as noteworthy. Haunted lamps talk and make jokes; it's just what they do. In the world of Lakeside, anyway.
The Cavenbury lamps fill in a corner of Lakeside with a bit of color, which is why I did almost everything in the book. It is all in service to making Lakeside unique and dynamic. The lamps offer an iceberg story within the larger whole. The reader doesn't know why the lamps are the way they are, but they can speculate that there must be a reason, even if that reason is determined by the rules of the world in which Lakeside resides.
I like that ambiguity. I tend to favor stories that don't go out of their way to wrap up every possible open question. Sometimes a "for this character, things went on as they always had" explanation is more viable than making sure they have a dramatic ending.
Take something like Game of Thrones. With an absurd number of characters and plotlines, the later seasons were bogged down by the commitment to tying up every character's arc. Sometimes that was solved by mass murder, other times by jamming a character into a particular space just so they could be impacted in a way that was narratively significant, and still other times by a totally irresponsible uptick in the speed of the narrative itself in order to accommodate. God forbid all 132 characters don't have loud and shocking endings.
To the contrary, it's often really enjoyable when characters come and go as they please with or without a major impact on the primary, or even secondary, plot. I like the Tom Bombadils of the world; those sorts of characters occupy a space that makes their respective world feel not only preoccupied with whatever is happening to the main characters. Sometimes, a really great character is just wandering by at the right moment to cross paths with a protagonist, disappearing as uneventfully as they appeared.
That just doesn't feel like a bad writing decision to me. I imagine that, like all techniques, if you relied on such an approach exclusively, trouble would be imminent. But as a tool in the box? I am fully convinced of its value. And so the Cavenbury lamps insult, philosophize, and cause trouble, and I have no idea why.