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This is Elizabeth Stark in the Book Writing World. Welcome to Draft Your Book, Week 9. Today we are going to talk about nailing your ending.
As you reach the ending to your book, you cannot just follow your characters around, curious to know what they might say or do. No, you’ve got to shove those folks into the trash compactor.
Remember the scene in Star Wars where Luke and Leah and the gang are caught in the garbage compactor, with a lot of junk, some snaky creatures, and thick, heavy walls that were moving toward each other, ready to crush our heroes?
This is a perfect image of what is happening, one way or another, at the end of your book. The range options for your characters has shrunk, and the importance of your characters achieving success has risen—the stakes are up. The walls are closing in.
If your ending isn’t achieving this, here are some ways to write your characters into the garbage. The garbage compactor, that is.
1) Cut off options. Really take away allies, support systems, escape routes. This can happen emotionally in the quietest literary fiction just as it can happen galacticly or supernaturally in big genre flicks.
2) Add additional reasons why success matters. Pile on the rewards for winning, add to the loses for failing.
3) As your character is changing, make the resolution of the story matter more to the character and let the character’s continued positive change rely on the successful resolution of the story.
4) Keep asking: what’s the worse thing that could happen now? What would make this more terrible? What would make me (or someone I know) absolutely invested in the outcome of this situation?
At the end stages of drafting or in revision, you are pushing your story to the outer limits of human endurance. No, I don’t mean your writing process, though it can feel like that sometimes. I mean that the experiences your characters are having must matter as much as anything can matter—and again, this is not a matter of small or large, individual or global, this is about importance to the characters and to the readers. The event could be someone’s pet dying or a nuclear war, marriage to a prince or a free lunch from the corner deli. It just has to matter a ton.
And of course, this is a draft, so there will be time to rework this in revision and finishing.
Today’s call about the ending was a very good one. First, I loved the idea of bookending the end of the book. (Wow that came out strangely). Since I am not really at that point yet, and in fact have not decided which of several ways it might end, I am working with the idea of stacking Daria’s decision about whether to give the drug against the possibility of someone else giving Sully the drug without her knowing, with her being shocked by his sudden, unexpected cure. That’s one crisis moment, and it could end the first part of the book. The second part could be the family fallout from the one-week window that they then have to look at the past and make amends – or not. As you can see I am still formulating how it will go. Which makes Elizabeth’s excellent suggestion to flip into the Planning Your Book course next cycle a worthy one. One possible end is to, in essence, trade Sully’s life for a continuing life with her Mom. Stay tuned – you’ll know when I do…
Also, as I think about it, the crisis point in Part 2 will obviously be Sully’s death – everyone will know when it will happen, so that knowledge will be the “trash compacter” of the second part.