The last line ruined it.

So, I found a "gift" in my in-box, a short story from someone who normally sends a newsletter my way. In it was a very touching, well written story, that had tears in my eyes until I got to the last line.

I'm going to back up here. I want to note that I'm not offended by stories where God (be it the God of the storyteller or the God of the characters) is important. One of my all time favorite movies is Amadeus, which is really the story of how Solieri grapples with his faith in God, his belief that God gave him musical talent to use to praise God--and his crisis of faith caused by the fact (in his view) that God gave the very irreverent Mozart more talent than He gave Solieri. Now, I don't know if the real Solieri felt this way, but the movie-Solieri was fascinating and his story riveted me, all because of his relationship with God.

There's plenty of other great stories where God (or some metaphor for God) is an integral character or at least an integral part of one or more characters' experience of the world. What would Star Wars be without The Force? Or Narnia without Aslan?

But this story--this was a tale of a boy who saw someone being picked on and instead of walking away reached out, offering friendship with the very simple act of helping to pick up books that had been tossed to the ground. In beautiful, clean prose, I saw the friendship's inception and I read how it blossomed and grew.  Finally, the story climaxes with the second boy, now valedictorian of his class, admitting for the first time that he'd planned to commit suicide that day, and didn't because at that low point in his life a stranger befriended him. I had tears in my eyes from reading this beautiful story about the power of simple human kindness.

Then I got to the last line, wherein the author (admittedly still in first-person narrative format) writes that God places us where we are needed.

It threw me right out of the story.  One moment I had tears in my eyes and a view of the young man in his cap and gown at the podium, and the next I was sitting there thinking about the author's choice to use this story to--what? Proselytize? Preach? In short, I was thinking about the author's religion and politics instead of about the story itself.

Then, of course (being a writer), I was analyzing my own reactions to the story--my reaction before I got to the final preachy line, and my reaction to that line.  It totally changed my experience of the story.  Wow--how powerful a single sentence can be!

I ended up thinking about how we experience stories, about how much of our experience of a story is what we bring to the story, and how what we bring--or don't bring--interacts with what the author put there.

I bet there are people who didn't mind that last line--but I also bet those are people who brought God to the story, who added Him into it from the very first line.  I didn't.  I'm as likely to read stories by or about atheists as by or about believers in one religion or another.  For that last line to work for me, I would have needed God to show up in the story itself.  For instance, I think perhaps if the two boys had become altar boys together or otherwise were portrayed as religious, the last line wouldn't have jarred me out of the intense, inspiring experience I was having up to that point.

It's kind of the opposite of "deus ex machina", that term for the variety of flawed writing where the author can't figure out how to empower the characters, so  (in essence) a miracle is plopped into the story to fix things.  Here, the characters did it all by themselves, no miracle was needed--but then God was plopped into the story so He could be given the credit at the end.

Heh--I guess it says something about me that instead of worrying about whether God should or should not be in a story like this, I spent all this time analyzing story writing technique and trying to understand why the author's chosen last line didn't work for me!

The last line ruined it.

So, I found a "gift" in my in-box, a short story from someone who normally sends a newsletter my way. In it was a very touching, well written story, that had tears in my eyes until I got to the last line.

I'm going to back up here. I want to note that I'm not offended by stories where God (be it the God of the storyteller or the God of the characters) is important. One of my all time favorite movies is Amadeus, which is really the story of how Solieri grapples with his faith in God, his belief that God gave him musical talent to use to praise God--and his crisis of faith caused by the fact (in his view) that God gave the very irreverent Mozart more talent than He gave Solieri. Now, I don't know if the real Solieri felt this way, but the movie-Solieri was fascinating and his story riveted me, all because of his relationship with God.

There's plenty of other great stories where God (or some metaphor for God) is an integral character or at least an integral part of one or more characters' experience of the world. What would Star Wars be without The Force? Or Narnia without Aslan?

But this story--this was a tale of a boy who saw someone being picked on and instead of walking away reached out, offering friendship with the very simple act of helping to pick up books that had been tossed to the ground. In beautiful, clean prose, I saw the friendship's inception and I read how it blossomed and grew.  Finally, the story climaxes with the second boy, now valedictorian of his class, admitting for the first time that he'd planned to commit suicide that day, and didn't because at that low point in his life a stranger befriended him. I had tears in my eyes from reading this beautiful story about the power of simple human kindness.

Then I got to the last line, wherein the author (admittedly still in first-person narrative format) writes that God places us where we are needed.

It threw me right out of the story.  One moment I had tears in my eyes and a view of the young man in his cap and gown at the podium, and the next I was sitting there thinking about the author's choice to use this story to--what? Proselytize? Preach? In short, I was thinking about the author's religion and politics instead of about the story itself.

Then, of course (being a writer), I was analyzing my own reactions to the story--my reaction before I got to the final preachy line, and my reaction to that line.  It totally changed my experience of the story.  Wow--how powerful a single sentence can be!

I ended up thinking about how we experience stories, about how much of our experience of a story is what we bring to the story, and how what we bring--or don't bring--interacts with what the author put there.

I bet there are people who didn't mind that last line--but I also bet those are people who brought God to the story, who added Him into it from the very first line.  I didn't.  I'm as likely to read stories by or about atheists as by or about believers in one religion or another.  For that last line to work for me, I would have needed God to show up in the story itself.  For instance, I think perhaps if the two boys had become altar boys together or otherwise were portrayed as religious, the last line wouldn't have jarred me out of the intense, inspiring experience I was having up to that point.

It's kind of the opposite of "deus ex machina", that term for the variety of flawed writing where the author can't figure out how to empower the characters, so  (in essence) a miracle is plopped into the story to fix things.  Here, the characters did it all by themselves, no miracle was needed--but then God was plopped into the story so He could be given the credit at the end.

Heh--I guess it says something about me that instead of worrying about whether God should or should not be in a story like this, I spent all this time analyzing story writing technique and trying to understand why the author's chosen last line didn't work for me!