Let’s talk about endings. (I said endings, not ENDS, so those of you in the back who just started elbowing each other and chortling can stop right now. There are no off color remarks in this here imaginary classroom.)
This is brought about by three occurrences: First, the con is over; second, I hope to end A Few Good Men; and I just finished reading ConSensual for Kate Paulk. The end took me completely by surprise in a not good way. I’m not going to say how because a) it’s her first pass, and heavens only know what the end will reveal. b) part of the reason it struck me as off is that this is a series, and her ending this way sets it up for a direction the series is not going in (yeah, she talks to me) and that could set up a problem later.
So, on this very scattered Monday morning, when my caffeine meter is still about half down, here are a few thoughts about endings. Particularly endings of novels, which are MUCH more difficult than ending shorts or poems and which have to be more satisfying.
1- Make sure your ending is satisfying. This means, yes, if you’ve been dragging us through this novel, with a repulsive anti-hero, kill him, painfully. OTOH for most novels a “and they all died” is about as satisfying as “and they all woke up and it was all a dream” – which I still get a lot when I judge contests.
2- Make sure your ending is foreshadowed. And the gentleman in the back can JUST stop whining that he wants his ending to be a surprise. Yeah, don’t we all. Remember though no matter how carefully you hide the ending, someone will GUESS so you have to have something besides the surprise. And besides the surprise you want is not WTF? It’s “Oh, wow. I never saw that coming. But now I see that the clues were all there.” The way to do this? Well, I know only one way – put in the clues for more than one ending, and hide the real ones under the false ones. However, I tend to look more for SATISFACTION than surprise. Surprise SOMETIMES in how the ending comes about, but not the ending itself. Look, if everyone wanted surprise endings, Romance would NEVER sell.
3- For series, be very VERY careful how you end a book. This is because anything that happens at the end of a book assumes more importance in the reader’s mind than the ten thousand things that happened in the middle. I.e. it’s what they walk away thinking about, and what they’ll build their imagination on until the next book/movie. Why is this important? Well… Imagine for ex that at the end of book 5 your guy walks off into the sunset with this hot chick. No matter how many clues you build in that this is just a fling like other flings he’s had IN books, no matter how much you foreshadow, because they walk off together at the end, this romance will seem much more important. They’ll expect the next book to be about them setting up house together and will feel you pulled a Karate Kid on them when he starts the next book without her and, btw, book 24 they’ll still be asking you “So, when is he getting together with X?” You don’t want that, you don’t do that at the end. This sometimes can take a LOT of finegling.
4- This is actually a general rule, but it’s particularly important for endings: if you’re going to kill someone, make it count. I.e. if you have a good or neutral person die for the final victory, build them up (sometimes by going backward through the book from the end.) And if you are going to kill the villain, make him good and repulsive!
And to end this, that’s about all I can think of this morning…
According To Hoyt 
Excellent advice, Sarah! The *only* it was all a dream ending, IMHO, that ever worked was the end of the “Newhart” TV show — where he woke up in bed with Suzanne Pleshette (his wife from the previous series, “The Bob Newhart Show”) and told her what a bizarre dream he’d just had.
I seem to remember reading something John Irving wrote (IIRC, as a writer character within a novel) that sometimes it’s hard to not pre-kill characters. If a character is going to die suddenly, that it’s hard not to treat that character differently than you would if you knew he (she) was going to live.
I agree about the “take away” from the end of the book, too! I seem to have read books that did that, but I can’t remember which ones. Which means they so grated me that I made it a point to forget about them. ::grin::
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well, yeah, the Newhart thing totally worked, but it was a COMEDY and totally meta. It can also work in say a short story with “it’s a dream” but then one finds something that says it isn’t. Like, the austen fanfic in wich Lizzy dreamed of Darcy before his arrival, and he gave her a rose. And she wakes up and goes “it’s all a dream” but then while cleaning out her reticule there’s the dried rose in it.
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One author ended a novel with the “good guy” finally reaching the castle of the “Good Overlord” only to find that the “Evil Guy” was in control of it and the “good guy” was trapped.
To make matters worse, we went through half the second book (focusing on the “good gal”) before we found out what happened to the “good guy”.
I wasn’t too happy with that author but at least the third (& last) book was worth reading. [Smile]
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well, the question is, was this foreshadowed?
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IIRC nope.
Mind you, in the case of another author’s book, I blame the publisher. Her book ended in such a way that we need that there had to be another book but nothing earlier told us that it was first in a series.
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1 observation, 1 quibble:
The best endings, especially of the properly set up surprise variety, make the reader want to go back to page 1 and start the book all over again, to marvel at how the author built all that structure into the story without being noticed. Most any D W Jones book has that, but Archer’s Goon is especially so. The ending should evoke, once the reader has reached it knowledgeably, an inevitability.
In the James Bond series the “hot chick” at the end is no more than icing on a cake and the reader knows she will not be around next tale. IIRC, the Travis McGee books had a similar conclusion. Be it noted that these examples are exceptions, falling under a different rule.
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you are VERY correct on the James Bond type setup, but most series heroes aren’t that way. And you know what DW Jones I still re-read to marvel? Deep Secret. It’s like a cat’s cradle, and wonderful of its kind.
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I ALWAYS love these posts. I use them as a check-list for my novel and I’m fantastically tickled when I can check them off.
Thank you!!
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very welcome and good that it’s checking. Congrats.
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I got very frustrated by lack of/inadequate foreshadowing recently to the point where if it had been a paper book I’d have thrown it at the wall. Unfortunately as it was an ebook I couldn’t. Briefly in the penultimate chapter the heroine is captured and imprisoned by the apparently invincible supernatural villain, but in the space of a paragraph overcomes him because she is herself a supernatural being (of a kind not previously mentioned or described in the book) although she didn’t know it herself until the point when her power manifested. AAARGH !!!. Talk about deus ex machina.
Melvyn
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The weird thing is that I’ve got a feeling I’ve read that…
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The annoying thing is that I was enjoying the book up until then. A good story, well written, interesting characters and a fresh perspective. Then my suspension of disbelief went out of the window and totally spoilt the experience.
BTW I’ve just seen the video of your Prometheus Award presentation. I really enjoyed hearing you. And I now know what you sound like in person, but I still don’t hear that accent in my head when I’m reading your words. I wonder if we all hear other people/characters voices in our native accents in our heads. Do your characters talk to you in a portuguese accent?
Melvyn
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No. The very weird thing is I don’t hear MY OWN accent. In my head I have a normal American accent…
Thena in Darkship Thieves HAS an accent but it’s not like any I know, and to make it worse, she has this high, spoiled little girl voice.
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I Am Not Sarah – but I hear different accents / voice timbres for different characters, just as I see their faces when I read. For instance, C.S. Lewis is “educated British”. Douglas Adams is … a bit lower, but still British. Louis L’Amour is American West. Yes, in my head :-) Constant movie with sound going at the speed I read (and I read very fast) but not in the slightest does it seem “speeded up”.
I hear my characters voices each differently, also, when I’m writing. Some have different cadences and inflections than others, too.
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In one of the books I have recently been reading there were something like four major plot threads. While there was speculation by the heroes that the threads were connected, when it came right down to it the “connections” were minor at best, almost incidental.
One of the things that I’ve seen in good, satisfying, strong endings is that the various plot threads which may have appeared unrelated earlier in the story all come together in the climax. Resolving the four plot threads over the course of the last five chapters or so dilutes and weakens the ending.
But then this was an award finalist so what do I know?
Answer: I know what _I_ like in a story I read.
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the everything tying at the end is HARD (Imagine this said with furrowed brow.) I am managing it more as I get more practice. the level of connection keeps getting deeper. MEANWHILE SOME books, you need to resolve a thread at a time, so you GET what the solution to the main one is. But in general it’s best to set them all off in a grand climax.
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If you don’t want to bother with ending a novel at all, sell it as a Literary novel. I just finished reading “No Country for Old Men” by Cormac McCarthy. Well written, reads like a thriller, a few chapters from the end, the fascinating, hideous villain Anton Chigurh (great name!) breaks his arm in an accident and wanders off, next couple of chapters, the hero sheriff talks to his uncle, traces Chigurh’s abandoned pistol, retires, talks to his wife, The End. WTF?! Flip, flip, flip, is my copy missing the ending? Nope, I have a proper copy, right number of pages, that’s it. McCarthy creates a villain you want to see die painfully and spectacularly, and the bastard just wanders out of the novel.
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Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”
So she was considering inher own mind, (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid,) whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a white rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.
… So Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she ran, as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been.
Another exception, although quite properly telegraphed (knowing that not just anyone could aspire to be Lewis Carroll — from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.)
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