I'm reading "Novelist's Essential Guide to Crafting Scenes" by Raymond Obstfeld right now. (Thank you, Santa -- or MIL, this time.) He's discussing endings right now, particularly the easy ending that makes people feel cheated.
Particularly, the Twilight Zone style twist ending. Where the entire story is flipped on its head at the end and you're not sure if you still care about the people in this new situation. He brings up the Monkey's Paw story -- and I may be making a mish-mash of this chapter as I try to fit in all the necessary specifics before I get to the point I meant to be making. Anyway one of the points he seems to be trying to make is that the only thing this story gives us is that demons are exceptionally strict grammarians rather than proving anything about the story.
So I'd had an idea.
(Hooray for ideas)
That back-from-the-dead trade-off that still doesn't turn out quite the way the person making the wish might have really hoped for, but isn't the really obvious screwing over by the demon/wish-giver. I have some thoughts -- and I'll post them in short story format in three weeks -- but I'd love to hear other thoughts too. If the writers who read this want to offer up your own solutions, write it and keep it until March 2nd so I don't accidentally plagiarize.
Then I'll offer the space and we can discuss the results and how different a simple idea can turn out once it's been filtered through several minds. (I know some of the people who follow are readers rather than writers. Don't worry. You can join in once the story has been written and help me figure out if I've (or we, with participation from others) managed to make a reasonable ending for the story.)
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