Also known as QRD, everyone knows what this is, whether you’ve experienced it in books, video games, or TV show DVDs.
It’s almost a paradox, but not really. Basically, all books (i say books, but this applies to video games, TV DVDs, etc) can either be categorized into a) good or b) sucky. Let’s address the latter first.
So let’s say you’re reading a really sucky book. You read the first page, and it says something idiotic, like “a fur piece”. What do you do? You toss it. You don’t finish it: it’s crap, why bother? Simple, right?
Now, let’s say it’s a really great book. Awesome you think, as you stay up until 2 AM reading it. That’s what happened to me with Angels & Demons; if nothing else, it was engaging (on a similar note, the day after getting so little sleep, I wrote 2 of my best essays for eng & hist, and I got back a great grade on my Pre-Cal test. Go figure.). But then, you realize, after busting through the book in record time because it was so good, it’s finished. Well that sucks. You get that, “that’s it?” feeling. And then it’s a bit anti-climatic, because it all happened so fast, and typically, the endings to books/video games aren’t very good, BOCTAOE (but of course, there are obvious exceptions. Stolen from the dilbertblog). It’s just kind of a let-down. It was good enough to spread it over a period of time. But it’s so good, you can’t put it down. What do you do?
You could try to take the other route, but then you just kill yourself over the anxiety. Come on, how many of you were dying during school the week after the last Harry Potter book came out, because the only thing you wanted to do was go home and read? So, in the end, by stretching out, you only cause yourself more angst in the process. That for some might work: I mean, Janda was explaining how in music, it’s good to build stress in a piece so that the resolution will feel that much better, but, sorry for the crude analogy, that’s kind like not taking a crap for a couple days and suffering the constipation, just for that “cleansing” feeling after you finally go (I think I remember reading that apparently, the body releases hormones to make you feel better after you take a crap. Or mebbe that’s a complete fallacy). Many may argue, and perhaps, rightly so, but that seems like a bad solution.
The other obvious solution would be, for the writer, just to make it really long, so that even if you tried to go fast, you’d get bogged down. It really doesn’t work with books, seeing as Angels & Demons took me 2 nights, and many read HPs on the first day, but take video games. Particularly, Lasto recently lent me Morrowind. Apparently it’s a great game, but it’s so open-ended, you can literally spend over 100 hrs playing it, engrossed the entire time. After you finally finish it though, then you get that feeling of disillusionment with it, sensing that it was a complete waste of time. And naturally, since humans are stimulated, mentally, by new, exciting things, even the most fun things naturally lose their appeal over time.
Anyone have a solution?
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