Loose ends? Tie them up!

I've had lots of loose ends in my life lately, and I'd planned to tidy them up this weekend. But first I decided to watch a movie with my son.

So we curled up, the cat snoring softly between us, and watched the movie we'd checked out from the friendly neighborhood video store. I'll skip the name of the movie since it's a new release and obviously somebody somewhere liked it--it had a couple of Big Names to star in it plus megachunks of publicity.

We'd missed it in the theater, though we'd wanted to see it. It looked charming and funny. I like movies that make me laugh. When it came out on DVD--and even better, on BlueRay so we could see every glorious moment in HiDef--we rushed out and rented it.

Good thing we didn't buy it.

It wasn't funny. It was so sad in places that we were both trying really hard not to cry. And then at the end, one of the major plot threads--I mean, a REALLY MAJOR PLOT THREAD--hadn't been resolved. Hadn't even been mentioned for the last quarter of the movie. And, to make this even worse, it was the plot issue of the child in the movie.

Loose ends flap around long after the story is done. I'm still bothered by this poor child's dilemma hanging unresolved--and he's not a "real" kid.

Any time we ask a viewer/reader/listener to plunk down even a bit of their hard-earned money, we sure don't want to, wow, ANNOY them.

When I write a synopsis, I also do a graphic representation with plot issues AND both primary and secondary characters at the top, with squiggles and arrows and all kinds of cool artistic things to ensure that they're all addressed throughout the work.

I hope that in my books, I never leave a little boy with his issue unaddressed and unresolved!