in Editing
Twelve promises a draft didn't keep
A setup without a payoff is a debt. Here is how we find them, and why we don't pay all of them off.
Reading the corrected manuscript of Dreamscape Code against its own pages produced a list of twelve promises the book had made and not kept. Characters are told the protagonist is "the one" and nobody ever says why. An entire world is described as dying and then never mentioned again. A death happens behind a closed door. A character refers to training the reader never saw.
Where they come from
Almost never from carelessness. They come from the order in which a book is written. A phrase invented in chapter nine to sound ominous is load-bearing by chapter twenty, and the writer who put it there has long since stopped hearing it as a question. Other promises are the fossils of a plan that changed: the subplot was cut, the line that set it up stayed.
Three ways to settle one
Pay it off: write the scene that answers it. Cut the setup: remove the line that made the promise, which is often two sentences of work and costs the book nothing. Or leave it open on purpose, which is legitimate when the book is the first of several, and a disaster when it isn't and the reader can tell.
The point of the list is that somebody decides. Unresolved is fine. Unnoticed is not.
What it feels like to the reader
Readers rarely name these things. They say the ending felt rushed, or that they lost interest, or that they never quite believed it. Underneath, more often than not, is a pile of small unpaid debts, each one individually forgivable, that together stop the book from closing.