In a post last week based in part on an interview with award-winning author Laura van den Berg, she talked about the strangeness we encounter in daily life. Some people may see mysteries in that strangeness, some see the workings of the supernatural, and some just pass right by, eyes glued to cell phone. Now that’s strange! The current Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine includes a number of stories that anticipate Halloween and the different ways people react to such hard-to-explain happenings.

Strangeness and ambiguity are useful tools in fiction, not just at Halloween. In real life, friendships may suddenly end, marriages dissolve, and we may not know why—even when we’re one of the principals. Conversely, the things that keep a relationship going can be equally puzzling.

To van den Berg, the ambiguity in a story can be either positive or negative. Even when a story doesn’t provide all the answers, she says, “it should give [readers] something to take away.” Inexperienced writers, trying to achieve a sense of mystery, may under-explain, running the risk of merely creating confusion and giving their readers nothing to latch onto. It’s equally off-putting when authors over-explain. Trust your readers to figure many things out. A friend used to write sentences like, “He threw the plate against the wall because he was angry.” Clearly, the “because” clause is completely unnecessary. “She spent an hour on her makeup because she wanted to look her best.” Ditto.

A story’s ending is an important contributor to what the reader will take from it. Van den Berg’s approach to finding the endings of her stories doesn’t sound like a huge assembly of 3 x 5 cards and post-its. Nor does she flail around trying to discover the ending in a morass of prose. Instead, she says she often sees the ending as “an image of some kind.” She may not initially see all the action steps (plot) that will get her there, but she’s moving toward it, through the fog of creation, following the glow of a distant light.

In the mystery/crime/thriller genre, an ending is likely to be unsatisfying if it leaves too many mysteries unsolved, too many loose ends. When I’m writing, I keep a list of unresolved story questions. They may be tangible issues such as, How does Evie know Carl has a peanut allergy? Or less tangible ones, like, If Steve really loves Diana, why did he have an affair?

I don’t have to work out an answer to them the moment they come up (an invitation to backstory that derails the flow), but when I arrive at the end, I check my list. Are all the questions that can be answered with a fact addressed in some logical and preferably unobtrusive way? Have the intangible questions at least been considered by the character? It isn’t necessary that readers completely believe a character’s explanations, but they should be confident the character believes them, at least at some level. A frequent and annoying cop-out is the phrase, “he had no choice but to . . .” following which the author steers the character into some plot-necessary action. Of course there were choices, and it is the writer who made one. Slightly better is when characters say, “I had no choice . . .” Yes, you recognize they’re probably just rationalizing. Weakly. Unpersuasively. Which of itself says something about them.

You may recall that one of the necessaries of a short story is “it needs to have a point.” That doesn’t mean a political point, or a hit-them-over-the-head-with-a-hammer point. It’s more subtle, something that grounds the stories despite and because of life’s mysteries. Irish author Anne Enright said it well, “Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.” You, the writer, are the rock in a sea of ambiguity.