: Re: What factors in fiction arouse readers' expectations? Feedback from my writer's group tells me that my recent stories leave promises unfulfilled and important questions unanswered. So I've become

@Kevin153

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I'd like to state at the onset, that it's not always wrong to leave promises unfulfilled and questions unanswered. I'm a big fan of the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami (and so are millions of others around the world), and unfulfilled promises and unanswered questions are practically his stock-in-trade.

With that said, there are two main things missing from your list that I look for in terms of finding a story or a book satisfying: Emotional closure and moral cause and effect.

1) Emotional closure: People will forgive a lot of details not working out if the story makes emotional sense to them. For example, in Murakami's Wind Up Bird Chronicles, the protagonist is not actually reunited with his wife at the end. You do, however, feel in a real sense that they have been emotionally reunited, which makes the ending still feel satisfying.

On the other hand, if an ending violates emotional sense, it feels weak no matter how carefully the details have been worked out. For example, in Harry Potter the romance between the main character and his best friend's sister never feels like it has been given emotional reality, even though it's supported by the details of the text. It's less important in this case, because the romance is a minor subplot, but unfortunately it's an (emotionally) unbelievable minor subplot.

2) Moral cause and effect: Antiheroes and morally ambiguous plots may be in, but most people still like to see good deeds rewarded and bad deeds punished --at least in some fashion. Even in a story like Woody Allen's Match Point, where the entire premise is that acts of true evil can go entirely unpunished, there's still a sense in which the film has a moral lesson to teach --the final scenes suggest that (though the world has failed to punish him) the main character has in some sense lost his soul, and given up all chance of a life of real love and authentic happiness. (The themes and ending in the film version of The Talented Mr Ripley are much the same.)

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