You might be wondering â especially after I so cheerfully gave away the ending of a millennia-old play last week â how likely you are to encounter other spoilers here at Lit in One Sentence.
After all, one of my goals here is â in exchange for 30 seconds to 10 minutes of your week â to make you feel like you have practically read whatever story weâre looking at, and could practically have written it.
But how much do I need to give away to accomplish this? And will reading any storyâs âone sentenceâ capture, or the lessons in emotional spellcasting we draw from it, increase or decrease your enjoyment of that story if you havenât read or watched it yet?
Rest assured that another of my goals is to increase the time all of us can spend experiencing pleasurable emotions in story. With that in mind, letâs delve a little deeper this week into the question of how weâll treat spoilers here at Lit in One Sentence.
What the Research Says About Spoilers
The vast majority of people, if asked directly, will say that spoilers ruin their experience of a story.
But a 2011 study by then UC San Diego psychology professor Nicholas Christenfeld1 found that participants who read across three different genres â mystery stories with a âwhodunitâ moment, ironic twist stories, and literary fiction with a neat resolution â consistently reported higher levels of enjoyment when the stories had been spoiled in a short âintroductionâ compared to participants who read the stories with no context.
A follow-up study found participants reported higher levels of enjoyment for âspoiledâ stories even when researchers stopped their reading in the middle, before they had even gotten to the supposedly spoiled ending.
While other studies suggest different results, they also may have used different types of spoilers. Spoilers that focus on the very end of a story seem to decrease enjoyment while spoilers that focus on more nuanced information like a storyâs overall themes are the ones that increase enjoyment.
It makes sense that fluent processing of a story is pleasurable because it gives us the ability to interpret various clues and plot points that may otherwise have been confusing at first, and to see how everything is adding up.
As the researchers of the original study pointed out, people often read or watch their favorite stories more than once, and often with increasing pleasure.
How Spoiler-y are One Sentence Captures?
Not very!
For example, for Yellowface, our one sentence capture is:
A white author who achieves her only dream of bestsellerdom by stealing her dead Asian friendâs work must defend her right to tell any story or lose everything.
Not, say:
A white author ⌠defends her right to tell any story and avoids losing everything.
Or:
A white author ⌠canât defend her right to tell any story and loses everything.
In other words â similar to the spoilers in the studies where they were found to increase enjoyment â weâre describing what the character is trying to do for most of the story and why it matters to her, not how it all works out for her in the end.
Youâll have to read the book to find that out, but at least youâll know exactly what kind of a ride youâre in for. My hope for the sentences is that they will both make you aware of what type of emotional experience this story is offering and leave you intrigued enough to spend more time with the actual story if itâs a good fit for you.
Still, itâs not like the sentences give away nothing that the main character doesnât know at the beginning of the story.
Our one for American Fiction is:
A literary author must decide whether to perform the crude Black stereotypes that will make him an acclaimed bestseller and finance his motherâs dementia care.
Thelonious has no idea when the curtain rises that his motherâs situation is going to deteriorate in such a costly way or that heâs going to have to make this kind of a choice. So when the first hints show up on screen, if youâve read this sentence, youâll know more about it than he does.
However, I also donât think itâs ruining any potentially enjoyable twist to tell you up front that this is going to be part of his journey.
Itâs the same type of information that any movie trailer or book jacket copy will try to tease for you. And the reason they do is both because you need some context to decide if this story appeals to you and because having that helps you enjoy the story more when youâre not completely confused the moment it begins.
If youâre okay with this, you can safely read any of the one sentence captures on Lit in One Sentence.
Theyâll do similar work for you. And (spoiler alert), without messing up the story in clearly unenjoyable ways, they also do much more.
You Only Get to Experience the First Time Once
Have you ever told someone youâre jealous because they get to experience a story you love for the first time?
Skepchickâs Rebecca Watson points out that thereâs a difference between experiencing increased pleasure if you have some context the first time you encounter a story and increasing pleasure between the first and second times if you donât.
What if, the first time, the story creators pull off this amazing twist that you never saw coming? And then any other times you reread or rewatch it, part of your enjoyment comes from remembering how well it worked the first time?
In these cases, having more information the first time youâre experiencing the story might make it more enjoyable, but not as enjoyable as if you were just encountering the whole thing two times.
Again, unless you wouldnât even read jacket copy or watch a movie trailer for a specific story, you probably donât need to worry about this for our one sentence captures. But, you should definitely consider this before reading certain lessons in emotional spellcasting.
When Might We Talk About Endings?
Remember when I mentioned above that one sentence captures do much more work than a book jacket or movie trailer?
If we get them right, you can open to a any page of a book or scene of a movie and see all the elements of its one sentence capture at play.
If anythingâs missing, it will be of much, much less importance than everything that connects back to the sentence.
This makes these sentences extraordinarily powerful tools for understanding any element of story craft, including endings.
But, as with the Medea, if weâre using the sentence to explore how the story creator(s) pulled off an especially powerful ending, I will warn you.
I craft the lessons so you can learn something about big picture story design from them even if you havenât read or watched the work in question. As long as youâre okay with having a âsecond timeâ story experience if you decide to spend time with the whole thing, you can safely read them. If you think youâll want a âfirst timeâ experience with this particular story, you might want to wait on the lesson part until youâve done that.
Questions for You
Can you think of a story where the first time you watched it has a special place in your heart?
What about one that was better the second time around?
My answers are below the fold and I hope youâll leave yours in the comments, which are only visible to paying subscribers of Lit in One Sentence, not the whole internet.
If your answer includes spoilers, please mark them with an emoji đ¨spoiler alertđ¨.