I've always loved stories with double meanings, things that leave it to the audience (or reader) to decide one way or another. Not just 'does this happy ending last', but the meaning of the piece altogether. Margaret Atwood's A Handmaiden's Tale is perhaps the best example of this I've ever seen. It's something I've tried several times myself in short stories - unsuccessfully so far. I suspect that's largely to do with the fact that I couldn't decide / never knew which of several versions was actually happening, which made it impossible to write clearly. That and I always aimed for something far too complex to be ambiguous.

Having just seen Inception, which pulls this trick off beautifully, I think I'm getting a better idea of just why my previous attempts fell apart. Inception's version is very, very clear. It's obvious. More to the point, it's obvious right through the movie - from the very start, we're given the question, just like any movie. We're given the idea the movie will explore, the decision that will fall one way or another, and in the normal structure of things, we'll be handed that decision at the end - shown, as a twist, that the world is really this way or that.

And then, instead of giving us the revelation as the climax, Inception lets us decide. There are two very clear options, and it could be either. (Well, provided you ignore some plot-logic, it could be either. But I haven't met a movie yet that didn't have plot logic problems somewhere).

That's what makes it work - what the audience is deciding is not some nebulous meaning or interpretation, nor one of several various options that have different meanings for different parts of the story. It's a clear choice, a yes/no option, a simple concept, and it's a choice that was built into the movie from the start. It's everywhere, right through it. And it works.

However, Inception - any movie - has a huge advantage over a literary version. Namely, it can show you things without telling you.

Say, for example, we have a final scene where a man is hesitantly dialling a number. Maybe it's his long-lost girlfriend. Maybe it's a hit squad. Maybe it's the police, he's turning himself in. Whatever. It's an important phone call, and whether he makes it or not will speak volumes about how he's developed over the course of the story.

A movie can use any number of sensory techniques to balance the will he / won't he decision. Music, sound effects, framing, pacing, cutting, and just the visual effect of fingers reaching slowly for buttons - all of these things will be interwoven to create perfect ambiguity. Literature, however, has no choice but to describe everything to you. To tell you what's happening, even if the writer is doing it in a 'show' type way. And that unavoidable, additional information - that intrusion of the authorial perspective, the person who wrote the text you're reading - will always spin the choice.

That's not to say it's impossible - it's clearly been done before. But it's not a gimmick you can just slap onto the end of any old story - the whole structure has to be set up to lead the audience to accept that lack of closure.

With that in mind, I think I shall be revisiting some previously retired stories.

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