Which kind of reader are you? The kind who hates spoilers and is rabid about requiring “spoiler alerts” to protect you from accidentally discovering the ending or plot twists?
Or are you the kind of reader who likes leaky plot spoilers. Or at least doesn’t mind learning about them.
In case you hate spoilers, I won’t reveal one novella ending I’m bursting to rag about. It was the inspiration to write this blog.
I’ve watched several Stephen King movies: Mercy, Carrie, Green Mile, Children of the Corn, Shawshank Redemption. But, wanting to have more of a sturdy, scholarly understanding of his writings, I got about 50 more SK stories to study. I faithfully read The Sun Dog, taking notes, marking the margins. And when I got to the almost end, I was at peace, satisfied. And then came the Epilogue. I can’t tell you about it, but “swearword.” SK does say that he likes his stories to have a “bite.” I have no more fingers on my write/right hand.
My reaction to the final plot twist has me wanting to find out more about spoilers and how people react to them. What I learned surprised me.
One View
There’s a common belief—some call it a “debunked scientific myth—that finding out the end of a story or being let into a plot twist ruins the thrill of reading.
So, to avoid having their surprise wrecked, the anti-spoilers may go to extraordinary lengths.
They may:
Yell, “Don’t tell me!” as soon as someone begins to talk about a book, they
Go to a movie or read a book first before someone else can tell them.
Play music on their headphones around friends who like to share spoilers.
Avoid social media and the internet.
Buy an app that lets you screen out mentions of the book/movie you want to be surprised by.
The Other View
There’s also a belief out there that spoilers enhance the reading experience for some. Are you surprised by that too? Well, it’s true, they really do.
You may relate to the pro-spoiler mindset if you can read The Gift of the Magi every year without losing enjoyment or read or see various versions of standards—say Westside Story, Macbeth, Pinocchio–with no impatience, boredom or regret.
What makes people enjoy or not enjoy a story—knowing or not knowing plot points and twists?
That’s the question that researchers, Johnathan Leavitt and Nicholas Christenfeld at the University of California, San Diego looked for answers to.
Their answer? Spoiler alert: “What we found, remarkably, was if you spoil stories, they [readers] actually like them more.”
How Their Experiment Worked
The researchers gave 800 participants three tests as they responded to short stories with up to 4,200 words, using different literary genres including ironic-twist stories, mysteries, evocative literary stories
In the study, those cognitively oriented people who enjoy thinking and puzzling more than the average person were frustrated by spoilers revealing the ending. These readers crave the challenge of figuring it out and don’t want that triumphant feeling to be taken away by a spoiler.
An extreme of that anti-spoiler belief is one reader saying, ”I’ve never read To Kill a Mockingbird, but I know how it ends, so I see no reason to read it.”
Another group in the study, the majority of readers in the experiment, preferred knowing the ending. That way without the distraction of figuring it out, they can enjoy the aesthetic qualities, get the purpose of the overall narrative and can integrate the plot points that got the story to the end.
Which type of reader are you? As for me, I get the most out of reading everything twice!
