Ambiguity

[thebratqueen]

stakebait brought up a question about good ambiguity vs bad ambiguity in her journal. I started to respond there but I got a little wordy so figured I'd just haul it over here and call it a journal entry.



Assuming we're talking about deliberately ambiguous as opposed to ambiguity that comes up from bad grammar and whatnot, I'd say my touchstone is if the writer sounds like she knows what she's talking about.

I think I feel for this topic b/c god knows I love a little ambiguity. I couldn't keep my fine tradition of hide in plain sight spoilers without it ;) But it's that fine line of is the reader left with the question of "what does that mean?" because that's the question you want them to have, vs are they asking that because they literally didn't understand a word you wrote.

To me, a writer has done her job with ambiguity if the vague areas are clear and done on purpose. A good example of this (which is on my mind b/c of a Buffy-related rant which may or may not make it to my LJ) is back when we didn't know what the Hell Dawn was. There was a beautifully ambiguous scene of Dawn doing nothing more than handing Joyce a cup of tea but it was the creepiest thing ever because it was ambiguous - was she an innocent little girl giving her mom some tea, or was she some horrible demon in disguise who'd tossed some poison into the mix? Who could say?

A bad example of ambiguity would be the "Spike goes to get a soul" arc, because the dialogue he was given made NO sense given that Spike supposedly knew what he wanted the whole time. So what we had was Spike saying things to himself that were not only ambiguous but misleading because, on a meta-level, Spike needed to be misleading (again - Cordy tells Angel to go to the beach because Connor's got a boat waiting). Although possibly one could argue that this isn't a fault of ambiguity as much as it is very bad fuzzy tigering. Keeping Spike's goal ambiguous was fine. Fuzzy tigering with flat-out implausible lies was not.

I think possibly the be-all end-all for bad ambiguity would be Memnoch. Anne was very fond of publically sucking her own cock for how wonderfully ambiguous the whole thing was because it provoked questions! Questions I tell you! While here in the real world those of us who read it were saying "Yes, questions, like how does this even make sense?"

I guess what it all comes down to is that the story has to make sense and your readers have to feel confident that the things they think are ambiguous are the right things to think that they're ambiguous.

A good example of this is the Cordy/Connor sex scene in Rain of Fire. Now I know spoilers so I'm going to keep my mouth shut on the answer, but suffice it to say even with those spoilers I don't think ME gets any pats on the back for leaving us with a scene that was so badly written and badly acted that we couldn't tell if the complete and utter black hole of chemistry between the two characters was the point.

This is bad ambiguity, because it's ambiguous on a meta-level. Charisma phoned the scene in so badly that we could see the battery indicator of her cell in the upper right hand corner of the screen. This leaves us with no ability to judge what was going on because we don't know what of the scene we're supposed to be judging. A scene in which we wondered if Cordy really loved Connor or if she was simply pining for Angel (or C - none of the above) would've been good, if that's what we knew we were watching. But instead we're left floundering because we've got no landmarks to help guide us. (Much like with Spin the Bottle and our inability to tell what age everyone was supposed to be).

Bringing this back to the point, what it all boils down to is that ambiguity in a story is good, as long as the right things are ambiguous and the story is written solidly enough that the readers don't feel lost and confused.

In other words, story ambiguity = good, meta ambiguity = bad. ;)