The Man of No Happy Endings

“These are the words I desperately want to write,”

says Lemony Snicket in the 2004 screen adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events, portrayed by Jude Law as the narrator of the sad story. He makes this statement after composing a lighter alternate ending on his typewriter, and before resuming his report of the events that actually occurred. This sets a pattern for all of Snicket’s stories: he builds and builds anticipation for the happiness of his characters, the success of all their endeavors–he makes us expect and believe and know it will happen–and then.

He whips us back into his dark reality.

The final installment of All the Wrong Questions is aptly entitled, “Why Is This Night Different From All Other Nights?” Answer: because all the other nights that 13-year-old Lemony Snicket spent solving the mystery of this series ended with a glimmer of hope. He had hope that good would triumph over evil, that he and his associates would stay safe and stay together, that the girl he’d become attached to would get her father back and get revenge on the person who had taken him from her.

I won’t say that none of these hopes are realized in this book (in fact I’ll try not to include any real spoilers at all, for the sake of those who haven’t read it) but if any of them are realized, it is not in the way that we readers have been led to expect. Rather, on completing the series, I was left wondering how exactly I had expected it to end.

Did I really presume to think that Lemony Snicket, the author who has made himself famous and made his living off unfortunate events, would write something that ended happily? Looking back, I suppose that I did. This presumption directly opposed the many revelations Snicket gave within this series, that any hopes I had for its outcome would likely be disappointed. Some examples…

From book 1:

“Stew Mitchum is like something stuck at the bottom of a waste bin. I try and try to throw him out, but he just sticks there, getting older and older.”-Dashiell Qwerty
“The map is not the territory.”-S. Theodora Markson on the discrepancy between the way we imagine things will go, and the way they actually do

From book 3:

“The terrible phone call, the rainstorm, the sinister knock on the door— they will all come. Soon enough arrive the treacherous villain and the unfair trial and the smoke and the flames of the suspicious fires to burn everything away. In the meantime, it is best to grab what wonderful moments you find lying around.”
“Ellington was just on the other side of a small room, but the longer I thought, the farther away she seemed. It was like the growing distance I felt inside myself, between the person I wanted to be, the brave volunteer who would soon triumph against evil treachery, and the person I was.”

From book 4:

“She’s a box of fire, I thought. You cannot keep her near you for long, but there is no safe place to stow her away.”-on Ellington Feint
“One of the truths of the world is that the world often snorts at the truth….The truth is like a doorknob. You can stumble around in the dark, and when you finally grasp it, you may end up someplace terrifying.”

It is interesting to note the progression of Snicket’s thinking with each new installment in the series. In the first book, the hints given as to the story’s inevitably unfortunate outcome are not given by him, but by other characters. In the third book, his own confidence that his organization can solve the mystery before them is observably shaken–he still believes there are good people in the world, but begins to doubt whether they will ever eradicate the bad.

By the fourth and final book, he is now quite certain that they will not. That the truth, although within his reach, will be terrifying when he reaches it, and that no one will believe it; that the world is an ugly, lawless place, and even his mightiest efforts cannot fix it; and that Ellington, who has perhaps been the biggest mystery of them all, is now more than a mystery. She is a danger, to him and his associates.

So, as a reader who much prefers happy endings, why do I let Lemony Snicket string me along? For the same reason his character uses to explain to Miss Feint why he continues to associate with her “even after everything”: “Because I want to know what happens next.”

It takes a master storyteller to keep us hooked on a tale to which we already know the conclusion–and a master storyteller indeed is Lemony Snicket. It’s hard to describe just what it is that makes him so.

Is it that he makes us question him? Question the world? Question ourselves?

Is it his imaginative view of what’s around him, or his refreshing approach to friendships?

Well… it’s all of the above, but a good many writers have those qualities too. The quality that makes Lemony Snicket unique, makes him who he is as an author, is just as he describes in the voice of his character: “I walked amongst them like a moving shadow, casting darkness over everyone I knew.” Only a truly great writer could cast so great a shadow, and leave his writers in darkness so enlightening.

The Man With All the Answers

To open each installment of his latest series,

Lemony Snicket laments: “I was almost thirteen and I was wrong. I was wrong about all of it…. I asked the wrong questions–four wrong questions, more or less.” Each of these questions makes up the title to one of the four books in the series, which, in case you hadn’t heard or couldn’t guess, is called All the Wrong Questions. So it’s ironic that the author of such a series seems to know so much more than everybody else, at least in the matter of craft.
In my nearly twenty-two years of life, I’ve read a respectable number of books–fictional books and non-fiction, sci-fi and classics, humor and history, and a long list of junior and children’s titles. But in all my exploration of all these genres, never had I come across a book that reaches so far into every one of them and yet manages to create a league of its own.

Not until Lemony Snicket started asking All the Wrong Questions.

Of course, he’s best known for his much longer Series of Unfortunate Events, the 13-part saga featuring the clever Baudelaire orphans and a wicked Count Olaf who’s after their fortune. After watching the screen adaptation, I read seven or eight books from this set as a teenager. They were funny, mysterious, and at times touching; but the series as a whole seemed to be the same story retold in thirteen settings, and after reading it so many times over I concluded I just didn’t have time to waste on a book to which I already knew the ending.

Then Snicket did something a little different. In what ways?

Difference #1: Point of view. Unfortunate Events was written mostly in third-person with occasional input from the narrator (Lemony Snicket writing as a private investigator version of himself); Questions is entirely in first-person (with Snicket writing as a 13-year-old version of the private investigator version of himself). This allows his signature narrative voice to be heard in a much grander way. The fictional character Lemony Snicket is now the protagonist, an active participant in the events of the story, rather than a passive observer. And this character is now one of my favorites of all time. Which brings me to…

Difference #2: Characters. As I stated, the Baudelaires were clever. But it was in a way that little kids could understand. Questions, although classified officially as junior fiction, features a hero whose mind operates on a much higher level. He is cynical and trusting, stoic and warm, fearful and courageous all at once. Since Count Olaf’s intentions were so straightforward, the Baudelaires learned little from their many victories over him. On the other hand, young Snicket’s experiences teach him vital lessons about justice (“Not even one lonely bottle [of root beer]. There is no justice in this town”); happiness (“You cannot wait for an untroubled world to have an untroubled moment”); and the need to find people he can count on (“the sort of people who will show up to give you a ride exactly when they’ve promised to do so”).

The people he finds during his stay in the dying town of Stain’d-by-the-Sea are an experience in their own right. Some of them he befriends instantly. There are the taxi-driving brothers Pip and Squeak (whose real names Snicket doesn’t use because they ‘make his tongue tired’); the charming Moxie Mallahan, who carries a typewriter wherever she goes; and Jake Hix, who works at his family’s diner and cooks up free meals that make Snicket feel like maybe things aren’t so bad.

Other figures are a bit more shadowy–like the green-eyed Ellington Feint with her “smile that might have meant anything”. Or S. Theodora Markson, Snicket’s ignorant and wild-haired chaperone who never tells him what the S stands for. She and most other adults in the series bear a slight resemblance to those in Unfortunate Events, in that they are portrayed either as bumbling idiots or as sinister villains. Even so, there is depth to their personalities that was sorely lacking in the Baudelaire saga–not to mention that of Snicket and his tight-knit band of recent acquaintances who would all give their lives for each other.

Difference #3: Plot. I won’t presume to say I know what the plot is in All the Wrong Questions, because unlike the one in A Series of Unfortunate Events, it won’t come to light until the very last book. This makes Questions a true mystery, full of chapter and book endings that are true cliffhangers, and passages that inspire true gut-wrenching emotion. Young Lemony Snicket goes through some rough stuff. His experiences, while not necessarily life-threatening like the ones the Baudelaires faced, are a threat to his innocence and his view of the world. He is fooled, loved, betrayed, helped, and depended upon at every turn. He suffers deep-seated feelings of loneliness and self-doubt that the orphans never had because they always had each other. This makes him and his story more relatable, not only for children and teens but for everyone.

In conclusion, All the Wrong Questions is the most unique, the most impressive, the most addictive series of books I have ever read. Within it, Lemony Snicket writes: “What are you doing here? I thought. What good are you? But I did not know if I was talking to the compass or the boy who was holding it.”

I think he knows a lot more than he lets on. In fact, despite the many wrong questions that he asks in these four books, it seems Lemony Snicket is one of few writers out there who know the right answers.

A Study In Parallel

I am currently writing three books. Actually, I am writing about twenty, but at the moment only three of them have a decent measure of my attention, so I will tell you about those.

The one I started most recently is called Speak to Me, and as the NaNoWriMo project of this November, its word count is hovering slightly above 50,000. It likely will be for a while. Shortly after I passed this year’s finish line, despite my intentions of pressing on to the actual end of that story, I resumed work on the one from last year instead. I’ve blogged about this novel before: it is called Foreign State of Mind and is the sequel to Boys and Girls.

Sequel isn’t the right word for it, though, because the first book contains events that happen much later in the character’s timeline than those in the second one. Rather, it’s a story in parallel–at some points, the same story as Boys and Girls, but told from a different perspective; and at others, a completely separate story. I embarked on this project because I believed it would broaden my view of all the characters, and give me a chance to keep writing about them even though I didn’t know what was supposed to happen to them after the events of the first book.

I suppose that’s about where Orson Scott Card’s mind must have been when he decided to write Ender’s Shadow. And who could blame him? If I had written a book as cherished and influential as Ender’s Game, with characters in it as dynamic and complex, and a story as epic and engaging, I think I’d want to keep probing into it as deeply as I could for as long as anyone would let me. Although Boys and Girls probably won’t turn out to be as successful as all that, to me it’s worth some deeper probing.

In this regard, I took a lesson from Orson Scott Card. I hadn’t realized how helpful my reading of Ender’s Shadow could be to my literary endeavors, until I was about seventy-five percent of the way through it. At this point, I was well into the portion of the story which is told in detail in Ender’s Game, so I had to ask myself why I was so captivated by it. I had already read about all these events. I had watched the movie twice and listened to the soundtrack (it was composed by Steve Jablonsky and is absolutely phenomenal, in case you’re wondering) about a hundred times, effectively replaying each scene in my head just as often. I knew this story as well as I knew my own–and yet, reading the one told in parallel, I was in total suspense. Why?

Because there was one thing missing from my knowledge: the thoughts of a certain character named Bean. He is present for a great portion of the original book, basically becoming Ender’s right-hand man by the end of it, yet the readers never find out very much about him. Where did he grow up? What does he think of Battle School? How does he feel about being commanded by Ender?

By answering these questions, Ender’s Shadow kept me hooked on a story I already knew. I couldn’t wait to reach the part of the book where someone makes a serious mistake in Command School and Ender loses his cool with the crew, because while I had already read his thoughts about that fateful day, I had yet to learn of Bean’s.
Once I reasoned this out, I realized there was something very wrong with the pair of books I was writing. The parts that contained fresh, new events could plausibly keep a reader interested; but once I veered back to the things I had already described once in Boys and Girls, there would be nothing missing from that book which they would seek in this one. So I had to make it so that something was missing.
This is no big secret, so I won’t regret revealing it here, for it surfaces within the first few pages of Boys and Girls: its protagonist, Casten, is hopelessly in love with Tallerie, who takes center stage in Foreign State of Mind. Just as we know from watching or reading Ender’s Game how Ender feels about Bean, Casten’s feelings are readily understood in the first of my two books. But in order to emulate Card’s masterful withholding of information which makes Bean so fascinating, I have to save Tallerie’s feelings for the book which centers around her.
Therein lies my mistake: Boys and Girls is written in first-person POV, with some of the writing done by Tallerie. In order to keep her thoughts below the surface, I concluded that these portions of the book would have to be removed. By shutting off her narrative voice on one side of the story, I hope to make it more readable on the other.

Thank you, Orson Scott Card, for these invaluable lessons on writing in parallel.