Last week, I finished the first draft of The Goblin Emperor (::wild cheers::), and in the last five to ten thousand words or so, I gained a new appreciation for why mystery writers so frequently resort to the last chapter In Which The Great Detective Explains It All. And so today I’m going to talk about ending a novel.

Ending a novel is harder than it looks.

For one thing, how do you figure out where the story ends? How do you choose where to stop? For another, unless your novel is exceptionally spare and stripped down, you’re not finding an ending point for one monolithic story, you’re finding a point where you can bring together the ends of several different story-strands, spatially, temporally, and as Captain Jack Sparrow says, ecumenically. And still make it look quote-unquote “natural.” This is where “Rocks fall, everyone dies” becomes a major temptation.

And there’s also the problem–again, unless your narrative is so minimalist Raymond Carver would be proud of you–that you probably have more than three characters with names. You don’t have to explain what happened to all of them, but you also don’t want your readers’ first response to the brilliant, touching, masterful end of your magnum opus to be, “Hey, what happened to whatsherface?” Hence the Great Detective gets all the characters together to explain whodunnit to them. Or, in Victorian novels (which often evade the problem of having to collect all the characters in one room by being in omniscient) there will be a sudden rash of marriages in the last chapter, to get everybody tided out of the way. Both The Great Detective Explains It All ending and the Mawwiage Is What Bwings Us Togethah Today ending are artificial in the extreme, and frequently–as Elizabeth Bear pointed out when I mentioned it to her–awkward, obtrusive, and unsatisfying, but the thing is, I understand why people do them. Because it gets everybody to hold still for FIVE FUCKING SECONDS so you can END THE GODDAMN BOOK ALREADY. And I don’t care if your eyes WERE closed, Aunt Mabel, this is the picture that’s going to the newspaper.

But understanding the temptation is not the same as thinking it’s a good strategy. It isn’t. The more artificial and obvious the narrative structure is, the more likely your readers are to be distracted from the brilliant, touching, masterful end of your magnum opus by the creaks and groans of the machinery. All the more so as the Great Detective Ending and the Mawwiage Ending are cliches, and the majority of your readers will recognize them the instant they hear the oom-pah-pah of the calliope, and you will have to work twice as hard to get their attention back.

So, okay, Mole, you say. Cliches are bad. Clunky artifice is bad. What do we do instead?

Well, you try to make your artifice look natural. You can’t, by the way, avoid artifice: that’s all writing a novel is: artifice and sleight of hand. If you aren’t writing a novel predicated on artifice–like John Myers Myers’ Silverlock or Jasper Fforde’s Tuesday Next books or Tristram Shandy–you want to camouflage it as much as you can, so that the reader will forget to look for the zipper down the monster’s back, or for the wires enabling Peter Pan to fly. Even if you’re writing category romance, in which part of the attraction of the genre is its patent artifice, you still want it to look like your characters reach their Happily Ever After because they love other, not because the plot made them do it.

To be perfectly clear: I don’t think artifice is bad. I don’t think patent artifice is bad, either–otherwise I wouldn’t love revenge tragedies, or the work of Georgette Heyer, as much as I do. But part of the artifice of writing a novel is that you’re trying to make it look not-artificial. Renaissance rhetoricians had a word for this: sprezzatura, the art of making the difficult look effortless. And that’s really what I’m talking about. Not how to be natural in your writing, but how to appear natural. Sprezzatura.

You can try for sprezzatura with regard to your ending in several ways:

1. Limit the number of artificial interventions in your story. To tell a story at all, you have to choose an artificial starting point, and a trigger: a murder or a visitor or an earthquake. The more you can set up your starting point and your trigger so that the rest of the story follows naturally from them (remembering, of course, that like I said a couple paragrahs up, “natural” is also artificial in the world of a novel), the less the mechanics of your narrative have to be visible, and the less likely the artificiality of the ending is to call attention to itself.

2. Misdirection and distraction. Brilliant prose style! Wacky characters! Dialogue that your readers will be unable to prevent themselves from quoting to hapless friends! The brighter and more wildly the surface of the novel shines, the less attention readers have to spare for noticing things like plot. Concomitantly, the more likely they are to forgive the artificiality they do notice. I don’t mind when Lord Peter Wimsey Explains It All, because listening to Lord Peter talk is somewhere between half and three-quarters of the reason I showed up for this book in the first place.

3. Try to find an ending point that doesn’t look like you’re going for a merit badge in knot tying. I know many readers are frustrated by the endings of my books because the arc of the characters’ lives can’t be predicted (“What’s going to happen to X?” they ask plaintively–but please notice that that’s a different question than “Hey, what happened to whatsherface?”), but for me, that’s a feature, not a bug. I think you should feel at the end of a book that the characters’ lives are going to continue and, like real people’s lives, be unpredictable. Even if you like more closure than I do, getting it too pat will make the game look rigged.

Of course, the game is rigged. But your job is to make people feel like they won it on their own.

Hate is a relatively simple emotion. Stupid, but simple. Oh, people can cook up extensive mythologies to fuel the engine of hatred. And the mechanism itself can be elaborate – really, pick any brutal, self-destructive regime, past or present, and sift a while through the careful orchestration of grandiosity and paranoia. That’s not intelligence. No critical thinking involved, really. That’s just a flailing need from the ego to justify actions that appear, relentlessly, sometimes inescapably, to be inhuman.

But when it comes right down to it, hate doesn’t need justification. It is a primitive, primal monster and sustains itself, quite simply, on the worst in us.

That guy just doesn’t look right, or this one here talks funny, or this fella I knew once said he’d come from across the river and you know how we all feel about those folks and so that’s why we call this the Hanging Tree. It’s all the same. That other guy is different. That scares me (because I’m a punk) so let’s all kill that other guy before he does something bad (like show us up for the punks we are).

Hate does only one thing.

The heart of hate is very small.

The same – that it is a simple emotion – could be said about love. Not by me, at least most of the time, but certainly lots of folks believe you find yourself a beautiful woman or a handsome guy, find something/anything in common to take you through the next 50-60 years, and presto, you’ve got love.

Others believe you marry someone with good “potential” and love will grow like a fern, or perhaps a flowering bush.

Some folks focus on a thing or two, about a real person, or an imaginary one, and put all their energy and attention and “love” into the fetish, whether it winds up being large organs or bank accounts, out-sized personalities or talents, fishnet stockings or bouncing pecs.

Sometimes you fall in love with the feeling of love, and being loved. Not the other person.

Sometimes this stuff works. Other times, there is the sadness and the grief of losing someone, or sometimes a part of your self. Or just the feeling of loneliness that digs deeper into the soul, carving out deep pits no joy can ever fill, no sun can ever illuminate.

The bloom fades, the love becomes intangible, a memory, a ghost, until at last even the shadows and echoes are gone and there is nothing left but an empty, desolate house. The feeling of love and being loved blows away because there was nothing there for it to grow roots into, no real person to feed and sustain it.

It’s been said by at least one poet that you’ve got to get naked to love. Physically, well, people have worked all kinds of techniques for that. Emotionally, that’s true for certain kinds of people. Being open and honest, not holding back, exposing one’s self and vulnerabilities and emotions, is certainly a turn on for some. But not for everyone. In fact, that kind of openness is probably scary to a hell of a lot of people.

Sometimes you only show enough cards to get yourself loved, and you only pick up enough cards from the other person to get invested in your love of that person. For a while.

Then, of course, there are the kinds of love we have for family, friends, community, that can be as deep as the kind of love we speak of when we draw little Valentine hearts, and as intimate in their own ways.

There is love based on biological chemistry, the kind that draws bees to pollen, and love that has little to do with other people but is drawn to things. Or ideas. The abstract realms rather than the world of flesh and blood. Riddles. Words, or music, or forms and colors.

Occasionally, and I hope for all of us more often, love is simple. Without boundaries. Intimate. Innocent. Raw in its purity, and vice versa. Unencumbered by the expectations of self or others. Unconditional. Honest. Wise to the marrow about self and others.

Love, it would seem, does only one thing. As hate destroys, love creates.

But for me, love can create all kinds of things, not necessarily healthy or wise. That kind of love is dark.

There is the love that is possessive and destructive. There is the love that is delusional, or focused on the self rather than others. There is the love that picks and chooses what to love in a person, and hopes to ignore what may be terrible. Or inconvenient. Or too painful to accept.

There is love that destroys innocence, and love that annihilates self and/or the other.

Love in these cases builds dark palaces, torture chambers, mental emergency rooms for trauma victims.

The seven deadly sins – wrath, greed, sloth, lust, envy and gluttony – can all be said to root in love gone bad, though you might have to work a bit for sloth.

So why am I nattering on about love?

Because someone once said every story is a love story, and it doesn’t hurt to think about the truth of that in the cold, dark, bitter heart of winter when we have a holiday celebrating love (or open heart surgery….sorry, I get so confused).

Or maybe it does hurt.

Whatever the case, love is the heart of every story.

And because, if every story is a love story, a writer can and should ask, what kind of love is at the heart of the story you want to write? In the heart of your characters?

And, for the sake of symmetry, balance and all-important structure, someone needs to ask, what hates that love, opposes it, perhaps even resides next to or in the very heart of that love?

Yes, sadly, the conversation turns not completely to love, because that is a topic more vast than all that the eye can behold and requires a very different venue. I ask only to glance at love.

Keep it at the periphery of vision, if it is too bright and painful to stare at until your eyes and heart burn out.

Romance is, of course, the obvious genre of the love story. The popularity goes back a ways. The Illiad and the Odyssey. Gilgamesh. Grendel. Oedipus Rex. Okay, okay, chivalric poetry. The Tales of Genji. The Ramayana.

I’d argue, if I was 36 years younger and still a freshman, that there is love in the existential heart of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In the heart of darkness. In the Nausea that inhabits the space once reserved for the soul…though I admit, I’m a writer, and thus frequently full of crap if not an outright liar.

So. Love, and hate, like tattooed knuckles that can either caress or batter, stand somewhere in every house built of story. Could be front and center, or perhaps deep in the background like faded wallpaper. But if you’re writing to be read by human beings, and you’re dealing with characters related to humanity, then somewhere in there you’re dealing with some form of love. And, I’d submit, if your work hard to eliminate it (like some classic puzzle-oriented science fiction), love’s absence is itself a thematic statement about the story.

Love and hate are other lenses through which to view the idea of telling a story. Clues to open up characters and plot. Maybe a key to unlocking what kind of story you want to tell. Or maybe just more crap to confuse you….

I started a novel back at the beginning of November.  I wrote well beyond the required fifty thousand words required for Nanowrimo and the annual challenge, and sometime in January, I finished.  The book came in between 80,000 and 90,000 words.  I immediately set it aside.  I don’t know how many know or remember, but things in my personal life took a sock to the teeth at the end of November, and I was in need of time to re-boot my brain and get the creative engines firing on all cylinders again.

Still, I have this novel.  I had a good pack of readers signed in who read it in installments as I wrote it, and I got some amazing feedback.  Overall, the response was very positive.  I also got a suggestion from one of the readers – a guy who took time out of his own busy life to help me put together a “bible” for this series of novels.  He suggested that I should read some of the novels by Jim Butcher about the character Harry Dresden.

I was leery of this advice for the simple reason that I did not want someone’s style (other than my own) to leak into my work.  Still, I wasn’t ready to do the revision yet, and I had / have a lot of nagging doubts and problems with my manuscript as it stands.  I went on over to Audible.com and downloaded the first Harry Dresden novel.  I listened to it on my recent trip to Baltimore, and I have to say – I’m a fan.  It’s quick moving, it immediately provides you with  a nice comfortable stable of regular characters and settings.  I don’t believe the books are remarkable in the way that you’d remember them for years to come – but that they ARE addictive in the way Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and other shows of that type can be.  I am currently reading the second in the series and will no doubt slog my way through every one of them.

Before I give the impression this is a book review, let me shift gears.  I did learn some things from the Harry Dresden novels that will affect how I revise “Heart of a Dragon,” which is an odd duck.  It’s the second Donovan DeChance novel, but if and when I get a mass market deal on the series, it will probably be the first released.  When I wrote and sold Vintage Soul, I did so in a bit more cavalier a manner than I should have.  I have learned some things, and I intend to make use of the knowledge.

For one thing, revising this novel very carefully and noting characters and settings that will recur.  I’m also trying to provide a bit more explanation of the magic involved to lend some weight and “gravity” to the prose.  Originally I intended to write these as if I were writing one of the World of Darkness novels I penned early in my career, only without the restrictions of writing in someone else’s world.  What I neglected to do was set proper restrictions for my own.

So…this revision is a careful one.  I’ve revised Chapter One three times and have had four passes at the ending of Chapter Two.  The book will be stronger for it…but it’s going to take some time.  I believe the outcome will be worth it.

Meanwhile – any blogs / websites / book reviewers out there willing to interview, review, or take a guest blog spot to promote Vintage Soul…contact me.  I’m ready and willing.  The book has gotten very little press, and it’s been out since December.

Now, back to my revision…

-DNW

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:

1. 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
2. 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.

This week I realized something that made me squirm; there’s a sacred cow in movies that I hate. And I’m ashamed to tell people. I’ve never heard of anyone disliking this movie. When I mention I don’t like it, people act like I’ve kicked Mother Teresa in the mouth. After I shot her. And peed in her shoes.

Cow!

It got me to thinking that we internalize our media, our consumption of things, so much that when someone doesn’t like our sacred cows, be they Star Wars or the Boston Red Sox or Ford or Apple, it’s a direct attack on us. This wonderful thing is so much a part of me, we think, that clearly you can’t understand me if you can’t understand it.

Of course, that’s where it falls apart. I went to UNC-Chapel Hill and one of my best friends went to Duke. I didn’t read The Lord of the Rings until my adulthood and couldn’t really see the OMG factor that others hold so dear, but my husband still manages to love me. (Incidentally, I showed my husband Emmet Otter’s Jugband Christmas, a sacred cow from my childhood, and his response was, “This is horrible! It’s like a selfish, twisted, ‘Gift of the Magi!’” He was right, but little Mur hadn’t seen it that way.) I own an iPod Touch AND a Blackberry and manage not to punch myself in the face. People are multi-faceted; I am more than my love of Star Wars, Neil Gaiman, Connie Willis, video games, sushi, and cheesecake.

But that got me thinking. Fuck logic, we still get into arguments when a new Apple product comes out (iPad anyone?) and people have died in arguments about sports. I’ve had friends walk out on me for mentioning that the Star Wars dialogue could have been a little tighter. People care about these sacred cows; for some, insulting The Princess Bride is akin to insulting one’s mother.

So everyone has their sacred cows. But what makes them? Cause I sure as heck would like to write something that people want to punch others for insulting. And yes, I know if there was a formula for a bestseller or a sacred cow, we would all be cranking them out. There’s certainly a nebulous something that, if right, makes the people give a damn, and if missed, creates nothing. So we don’t know if we hit that bullseye when we throw the dart in the dark room, but what do we know, what can we maybe have a little control over?

1. The work creates emotion: The more we care about the characters, the more we like the work. Although I’ve not read it, I understand that despite what people say about the writing quality of Twilight, people fall in love with it because it taps perfectly into the heady rush of adolescent love girls experience. She made millions remember that feeling, and heck, that feeling was almost like a drug. Remember? With the Harry Potter franchise, I wanted Harry, Hermione, and Ron to be my friends, and I longed to visit Ron’s house, no matter how many adverbs JK Rowling used. (On the other hand, I hated all of the characters in Geek Love and still managed to greatly enjoy the book. But it ain’t no sacred cow.)
2. A rivalry stems from it: Would Apple have such fanboys if people weren’t fed up with Microsoft? If Apple hadn’t been the underdog for so many years? I doubt it. While all sports teams have fans, I do know from first hand experience that teams with strong rivalries have a much stronger following than teams that just hate everyone. Red Sox/Yankees, Carolina/Duke, Army/Navy, even if the other team is having an off season, those are still THE games to watch. But with media, do we have such rivalry? We have Star Wars/Star Trek, and DS9/Babylon 5, but those, like sports teams, come from long-running media licenses, not one-shot movies or novels. Incidentally, the Star Wars/Star Trek rivalry seems odd because one is largely a TV show and the other is largely movie properties. Would the rivalry be the same if they didn’t both have “Star” in the titles?
3. It breaks new ground: I know that The Lord of the Rings and many other classics of SF/F are considered so not because they were best, but because they were first. I’m not saying they’re bad, but I’d bet that if LOTR was written today, the editor would send it back, begging about 100K words to be cut from all the wandering ’round bits. This breaking new ground reason is why Avatar is doing so well with a tired, unoriginal script: it’s shown to us with mind-blowing visuals. But will it be a sacred cow? Sacred cows stand the test of time, so we’ll have to check back in ten or so years to see.

There are speculations, but certainly things I’ll be carrying with me into my next creative project. Breaking new ground is hard. Writing things that people care about requires practice and attention to detail. And setting up a rivalry in fiction? With social media, that’s more possible, at least through creators, if not their work. I’m not good at public arguing, so that might be out. But you never know.

This is just me speculating; what do you think makes those sacred cows?

(And the sacred cow I don’t like? The Princess Bride. It’s got three women in the movie: two hags and a “pair of perfect breasts,” the latter of whom spends most of the movie being led around like a drugged sheep. Marry someone I don’t want to? OK. Get kidnapped? Sure. Get kidnapped again? Why not? Get caught by the king and then led to the altar? OK… Yeah, brilliant dialogue, awesome supporting characters, but overall, I can’t get past the fact that Buttercup is a macguffin at best. Whoever holds Buttercup holds the power! Oh no! We lost her again! Must get her back! Bleh. There. You may hate me now.)

I am a child of the Diaspora. My parents and grandparents, together with a few other family members, fled Nazi Germany in the mid-thirties. The rest did not make it out. Those who did are, even now, spread around the world: Australia, South America, Israel, London, Austria, and South Africa. To say that we were a dysfunctional family is a redundancy, but since I knew no other way and thought all children had homes like mine, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

Am I scarred by it? Probably. Does it matter? Not really, except in that I am who I am because of it.

When I was six, my mother married for the third time.
During her periods of adjustment–which never quite happened–I was sent to live with my beloved grandparents. As I recall, the third one was shortly before Passover. Their flat was a’flutter with cleaning and cooking. My boredom quickly became a nuisance to Oma, my grandmother, who decided my grandfather, Opa, should teach me to play Canasta.

I learned fast. After a Passover game to help digestion after the Seder, I was declared a natural.

“But I didn’t win,” I said.

Oma left to make a pot of tea. “You explain to her, James,” she said in German.

Opa took out his small, oval snuffbox. Delicately, he dipped into it with his left pinky. Holding one nostril closed, he inserted snuff into the other and inhaled. There followed a gigantic sneeze, a shudder, and a satisfied sigh.

“This is the most important lesson you will ever learn in your life–it should only be a long and healthy one. We cannot influence the cards we are dealt in life. What we can do is learn to see the opportunities opened by those cards and have the courage to grab them by the throat and use them. That is what you did and that is why you will be a winner.”

And so they began to teach me — my grandfather about
always being just a little bit kinder than necessary, my grandmother about opportunity, and both of them about the value of listening more than I talked.