Finish it.
There came a day when I ended the new novel – the story arc had done its job, started out and then ramped up the tension and then came to a climax and then began to wind down and then came to an end. All the elements were there. The bones, the skeleton, of a book.
A week after that day, I actually FINISHED the book.
There IS a difference, here.
An imperfect but somewhat helpful analogy would be the baking of a cake. You start out with the ingredients – the flour, the eggs, the butter, the sugar, chocolate, maybe a bit of brandy or candied fruit, whatever it takes – and they are all disparate elements at this point, existing in their own elemental form, the little pile of flour over here, the little pile of sugar over there, the eggs (often separated into the whites and the yolks, for these have different roles in cake-making…) neatly set side someplace else. None of it seems like it particularly wants to go with anything else, and certainly not with EVERYTHING else – but there is something that ties it all together, the overarching vision, the “arc” of the storyline if you will, the recipe in which all these “plot” elements appear and must find a role to play. So you get to work, and you sift the flour, and you melt the butter, and you combine the ingredients in certain ways, and you stir it all together and finally you arrive at a stage where you have “ended” the preparation of the cake – all the ingredients are inside, in proper proportions and properly mixed together – but it should be painfully obvious that there is something else that is still needed. An extra step.
So you put the cake into an oven. And then you close the oven door, and you leave it for a little while for the magic to happen.
In half an hour or an hour, you open up the oven and take out the cake pan. The contents has transformed itself into something that is unrecognisable from the gloopy mess you put into the oven just a short while ago. Depending on your recipe you have something that’s crusty, or moist, or crunchy… and it smells like heaven, and it tastes even better.
That’s what I mean – the finishing step.
In my case, I had written a wrapping-up sequence of events which tied up the loose ends of the plotline and left the reader with closure. The trouble was, it didn’t. Quite. It was at the gloopy stage, with all the ingredients tucked into the mess but with no real cohesion or meaning to it.
So I stuck it into the metaphorical oven – went back over the book once again, saw where major ingredients were playing an important part, figured out what they meant, figured out what they (as it were) foreshadowed and what still needed to be stirred in and where – and then I looked at it again, and lo! It was now baked, and tasty, and ready to serve.
Many a writer starting out has discovered that ending a book is one of the hardest things that an author is called upon to do. Endings, by virtue of the fact that they are the last thing that your reader sees of your novel, are the last chance you will have to make that reader’s experience a satisfying one. And it’s tough balancing act – you have to provide closure without writing something so impossibly and unbelievably pat that nobody in their right mind would believe for a moment that anything of the sort could possibly have happened (and blam! Goes your willing suspension of disbelief – and once it’s gone it
S GONE and that is all your readers are going to remember – that you couldn’t end the book in a way that left them satisfied and still believing in your world….) You have to balance a certain amount of cliffhangerism with a certain amount of fatalism – it’s two sides of the same damn coin, and sometimes it feels like the coin is a Moebius coin with only one face and the only way you can provide EITHER of those things is by providing both at once. And that is hard, VERY hard.
There is also the inexactitude of the matter, up to a point, which is why it’s sometimes so hard to step on a story’s tail. Some beginners will cope with this problem by cutting off the story too soon, leaving the reader gasping for air at the end and going, yeah, and THEN what happened…? Others will compensate in the other direction, and will still be telling the yawning reader EXACTLY what had happened, many pages after the story had actually ended.
And there is little in the way of educating yourself on this that you can do, as a writer, other than by doing copious amounts of two things:
- READING – the more you read the easier it will become for you to learn to recognise the perfect ending in the perfect time frame, or lack of it, and that will percolate into your own work eventually; and
- WRITING – the more you write the more of a feel you are getting for your own style, for your preferences, for the things that you are GOOD at – and the more stories you tell the easier it becomes to figure out where best they are ended. This may never become an infallible skill – all of us still make mistakes, even years into our publishing careers – but you get better at seeing it, the more practice you put in.
For those of us lucky enough to have them, beta readers are invaluable at this stage. If a reader points to a spot which is a chapter and a half back from where you ended your novel and tells you that the story ends THERE, you’d better pay attention – because that extra padding of a chapter and a half may have muffled that last resonant phrase or event that you wanted your reader to take away with them when they finished the book, rendering those things too distant and too muddled to stay in the memory. Result? Your book’s ending fizzles. The reader puts it down… and forgets it.
Ask someone about last lines. Go look at the concluding paragraphs of your favourite books or stories. As a perfect example of what I am talking about, go and re-read “Nine Billion Names of God” by Arthur C Clarke for as perfect an ending as you can have in a story. I defy you to forget the words of his last sentence, or the image they are leaving in your mind.
Writing has many suggestions, lots of advice, much of it contradictory or confusing – but there are two very important things that will help carry you through a sagging middle, if you have that problem. The two things are BEGIN WELL and END EVEN BETTER. Those are the things that your readers carry with them when they put your book down. Make them remember your envoi, and they’ll remember the book, and they will remember your name.
The best thing you can ever do, as a writer, is come to a good end.
So. When you end a piece of work, remember that all you’ve done is mixed the proper ingredients together. Remember that there is one last step left before you can call it quits.
It isn’t enough to just END it.
You have to FINISH it.
