May You Write Interesting Books — Part 10

The Peak And The Fall

Sometimes books that up till the last third were holding my interest finish and leave me curiously unsatisfied.

To make things clear – a good novel is like climbing up a mountain.  Yes, there are rest stops, there are sheltered areas and small peaks from which you can see the beauty of the surrounding countryside.  But the overall motion should be ever-upward towards your goal in that snow capped peak.  And the peak allows you to look out over everything that came before and in a way encapsulates it and gives it meaning.  Then there SHOULD be either a gentle descent on the other side – at least partway – or a shot of the people at the base of the mountain again, or even (in novels that are one of a tightly connected series) a few moments at the lodge at the summit, relaxing over hot chocolate and doughnuts.

One of the mistakes, of course, is to just get to the peak, give a brief glimpse of the countryside, then end the novel there.  This drives me bonkers though for a good while it was advised by all the how-to books and it still might be.  But some of it is not stylistic and on purpose.  It’s either incompetence of simple lack of interest at the end.

It is, to use our mountain metaphor, as though your characters were climbing up the mountain, battling fatigue and blizard.  And then, when the top is within view a helicopter picks them up and sets them on the summit.  Wouldn’t you feel cheated?  I do.

The cause for this is usually “creating a challenge so big your characters can’t face it.”  I.e. the way you setup the bad guy is so perfect, so massive, so strong, that your character could never win.  So in the end the bad guy has a nervous breakdown, or makes a stupid mistake, or – and unfortunately at least one major talent in fantasy uses this consistently – the gods or their equivalent intervene and takes your heroes’ fat out of the fire.

You can tell when you’re approaching one of these climaxes because you’ll be building up to the big confrontation and have four pages left on your book.

My advice if you have this problem is that you brainstorm it.  Get two or three of your writing buddies together, order a pizza, tell them the problem and let them shoot solutions at you.  The sad thing is that we’re not that smart.  We might set up a problem WE can’t solve, but everyone has blind spots, and your buddies will see them and suggest ways for character to get around “invincibility.”  If all else fails, go back and seed a subtle weakness in the villain.

Then you have the problems I had with my last two books.  The first had a climax before the climax, so that the climax felt like deja vu or a let down.  I went in and toned down the first climax and heightened the second.  There’s still a break – can’t be avoided – but now it feels intentional rather than an author goof.  (I hope.)

For climax par excellence I recommend the cave scene in Thud by Terry Pratchett.

Or the second, where the villain is not a person and is really too big for the main character.  Bambi can fight Godzilla, but he needs to do it in stages and over several books.  I had to add and heighten the climax then give a hint of future victory.  I took the technique from old war stories, which I used to read.

Now, after you’ve reached that summit…

When I started writing mystery, the how-to books informed me that a) cozy mysteries weren’t real mysteries, because most crimes were solved by the real pro.  (And fiction, naturally must be real.  Oh, wait.)  b) mysteries should end the minute the bad guy was caught, because that was the whole point of the book.

Honestly, the first should have served as warning that the second was full of er… hot air.  Because the first misses the whole point of mystery as a morality play.  The fact that an average person solves the mystery has important symbolical and moral echoes that are totally lacking in “professionals” doing it, for one.  For another, mystery, even hard boiled is not and can not be an accurate depiction of murder investigations, because most of those are about as exciting as any other day-to-day job.

However, I was young and very stupid, and though I couldn’t follow the first, I tried to follow the second.  With the result that all my first readers moaned and asked what I was doing.  “I feel like you left me in the air” was the common complaint.

So now I try to have at least two or three pages where I show the world back to its place and everything well.  This is sometimes just a conversation (A Few Good Men) or Tom’s father coming into the diner (Draw One In The Dark, Gentleman Takes A Chance) to order the title of the next book (Noah’s Boy) as a dish.

This “back to the normal world” or “they lived happily for at least a little while” is apparently ancient, being part of the hero’s journey.

It is also, judging by my fan mail, often what makes a book for the fan.  They went through the climax with the hero and they bled virtually if not in fact with the hero.  Now they want their wounds bound and their world set right with the hero.  When you give it to them, they’re ridiculously grateful.  And they’ll walk away wanting more of your books.