Everyday Canvas

The Neverending Story and Epics

A great novel keeps on having an impact on its readers even after its reading is finished, like The Brothers Karamazov, The Tale of Two Cities, or The Grapes of Wrath, even though what affects each person is dependent on his or her personality. Some of the neverending stories are epics.

The easiest way to create such a story is through plot. In this technique, the writer creates an apparent balance and then shatters it with a surprise. This reversal forces the reader to rethink all the characters and their actions that have led them to this point, such as Darth Vader ending up being Luke Skywalker's father. Now the reader thinks the plot was not what they first thought and there won't be other surprises anymore, but what if…Still, writers should not overdo these shocking surprises too much, as they become irritating and commonplace eventually.

Another way is to weave an intricate network of character, plot, theme, symbol, scene, and dialogue. In this way, there will be no limits to surprises and to the re-evaluation of the story. Some of the possible surprises or changes here can be when the protagonist does not arrive at his goal and other characters come up with new goals for him or themselves or a surprising character change may pop up for the protagonist and/or the antagonist or any other character. Examples to this can be Shakepeare's Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream or Sophocles's Oedipus Rex.

Then, yet another way can be when one of the many backstory events moves to the foreground. Examples to this can be Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind and several of A. Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories.

Other methods can fiddle with making the moral argument or theme ambiguous at first, in order to change it to something else as the story progresses.

The trick in this type of writing lies in withholding the final choices or changing the choices two, three or four times during the course of the story, so the readers can also relate to and explore such choices in their own lives.