Image is from the NYTimes review of the movie
Forgive me if you’ve seen too many Saltburn takes—I feel like more and more of a boomer the longer I’m off social media but Saltburn is still taking up residence in my brain even if it’s maybe dropped off the rapid social media cycle?!
Anyway, what’s stuck in my brain about Saltburn has to do with craft + writing.
Saltburn’s ending told way too much. Leave me at the coffee shop when the two characters run into each other or even back at the house with that one character in bed (trying not to do spoilers!), hint at what might come next, and end there. Or even keep the ending as it is but without that part that flashes back to show the main character plotting the whole time. It felt like the filmmakers needed to create a blazing neon arrow saying “HEY! IN CASE YOU DIDN’T GET IT, HERE IS EVERY SINGLE DOT CONNECTED FOR YOU IN THE MOST OBVIOUS WAY POSSIBLE!”
(I get that they were trying to go with an eat the rich type of thing with the ending, which might have been lost with the approach of ending earlier. For me, that totally fell flat anyway because I don’t think eating the rich is about becoming the rich.)
My thoughts for writing prompted by all of this:
It’s okay if we don’t connect every single dot as readers (and viewers).
I’d rather be left thinking and wondering than have a weirdly tidy ending with a bow on top. Letting my brain noodle on possibilities is way more interesting to me than being beaten over the head with what the writer(s) wants me to think.
Could we still have gotten what the ending wanted to convey without seeing every step spelled out? Could it have hinted at the ending without showing it to us, and left things a little ambiguous? I say yes.
These questions are especially important for flash, which I’ve been enjoying more of writing recently. In such a small amount of space, what we leave out says as much as what we put in. Where can we sprinkle in details that tell what we want the reader to know without info dumping paragraphs of explanations and details and saying “draw this conclusion?”
For example, instead of explaining how I couldn’t embody my queerness until my mid-twenties because I grew up so Christian and had a lot of compulsory heterosexuality and religious trauma to sort through in a piece that isn’t centered around that, I might just mention “my Christian parents” or sprinkle in a mention of going to church, and trust the reader to connect the dots and understand that influence.
What do we owe our readers? What are the lines between leaving someone with questions versus leaving them confused? What’s intriguing, and what’s just frustrating?
Sometimes I get feedback in writing workshops that someone wants something expanded. Of course I’m interested to know what people want more of, what feels particularly alive in a piece. But this happens often when I mention my coming out in a piece where coming out is relevant but it isn’t actually about my coming out. People want the whole story put in.
Do you need to know that to understand this piece, or do you just want to know that? I don’t want every piece to be rehashing my coming out story, and yet I mention it often because it’s the root of so many other stories. As readers, how can we allow our curiosity and imagination to fill in the gaps between what’s said and what isn’t?
And that is what Saltburn made me think about. I’d love to hear your thoughts on some of these questions and walking this tension between what you say and what you don’t, saying what happened and letting the reader draw their own conclusions. How do you make decisions about what’s enough to share and when to trust a reader to fill in the gaps?
With care,
Eryn
I soooo agree with you. And I think the reason they felt like they needed to do that it because character development was SO BAD. Why would we have any inkling that Ollie would've been plotting? Nothing in his character gave us a clue (until the family reveal, but that too...no hints to why he would've done that). Give me more complex characters and less GOTCHYA endings explained in every boring detail. sigh.