First act: cat runs up tree.Congratulations. You’re now in the final strait. If the preceding acts have gone to plan you have the end of the tale in sight and can’t wait to race to the finish. It’s pleasurable watching a story take shape. It’s a relief to negotiate the stormy waters of the second act. Finding that finished book in your hand is a moment of deserved pride. But you know what? Nothing, absolutely nothing, beats finishing the damned thing.
The third act is the section that begins when your protagonist believes he sees a resolution to the problem that lies at the heart of the book. It ends, naturally, at the close of the book. This is often a fairly short section, as was the first act. The act structure is sometimes summarised this way:
First act: cat runs up tree.
Second act: protagonist throws stones at cat in effort to get it down.
Third act: cat falls.
This part of a conventional story should feel confident and fluent. By this stage we know – or think we do – where we’re headed. The race is on to get there. Do books fail in the third act? Of course – they can fail anywhere. But most books expire in the first and second acts. Many die at the beginning because they carry insufficient weight and conviction. Even more fall apart in the second act when they drift off course and lose momentum.
Provided the preceding story elements are in place, the principal problems with the third act are likely to be quite basic. Instead of worrying about structural issues you should be able to focus on delivering what the reader expects: a satisfactory conclusion. And that, in itself, is a contradictory exercise because if you give them the ending they want, they’ll turn around and say, ‘I saw that coming.’
The third act is an exercise in balance – between speed and exposition, between delivering some unforeseen bombshell and confirming the reader’s expectations. It can make or break the book with just a few well-timed or misplaced paragraphs. You are on that last knife-edge walk to the summit of Everest. It’s not a long way and you can see the peak very clearly. But there’s an abyss on either side.
Here’s a suggestion.
Usually if you’re bursting to write something it’s worth sitting down and getting it out of your system. There’s a cathartic element to writing. Sometimes ideas are best expelled. The third act works that way occasionally. If you have the time and the patience, though, I’d sit back from the project at this point. You’ve been through a lot to get here. You deserve some respite from hammering the keyboard.
As always, the story won’t disappear in your absence. If you’re lucky it will get richer and deeper, for which your readers would thank you if only they knew. At this stage of the game we’re dealing with small yet crucial elements. The last 5 per cent you add to a book’s character and texture can turn a middling project into an exceptional one. Given the labour you’ve put in to get this far, there really is no point in dashing to the end, however tempting that may sound.
I will often set a project to one side for a week or two and do something else. The story is always working away in my imagination and from time to time I may return to the computer to make some notes or check something. At some stage I’ll usually print out the draft so far and read it on paper. As we’ll discuss further when we come to revision, everything will look different when we see it this way. I’ll also make several very careful passes through my book journal, noting what points I took up along the way, what I rejected and asking myself how wise some of those decisions were.
When I sit down to start work on writing this closing section of the story I want to know that everything leading up to it is in as good an order as I can make it. Minor tweaks will always be possible later, but I don’t want major, structural blips at this stage. They will dislodge the direction and momentum of the third act, and by doing so damage the entire book. I do not want to be midway through the denouement only to find myself dogged by some nagging worry that an element a few hundred pages back will derail the whole exercise.
There’s no rush here. You’ve waited years to write this book. If it works it will still be years before it appears. A week or two of reflection costs nothing, and can add greatly to the final manuscript.
When you do reach for the keyboard, things are likely to happen very quickly. In my last book my normal daily target was 1,500 words. In the final week of writing I produced 15,000 words in three days. I knew every step that would be taken towards the end. I could scarcely wait to get there.
Should you be worried when writing becomes this easy?
No. You should be thankful. Work that comes this easily is often better than work you have to slave over. But you do have to keep an eye on writing produced at speed. Here are some of the problems to look out for.
Literals and typos
When writing quickly you’re setting down the words as they form in your head. They may be right in your head, but wrong when they pass through your fumbling fingers. All work needs reading carefully. Passages that have been written quickly deserve proofing with special attention. Spellcheckers are useful up to a point, but they won’t pick up issues of sense. Take extra care to read the previous session’s work before starting a new one.
Deviations from the script
Speed can mean stray ideas keep popping into your head. Treat them with even more caution than they received in the second act. If your third act is still loose and open in some respects, they may work. But if you set out with a plan and decide to divert from it halfway through because the idea just seems too good to ignore you may be setting yourself up for a logistical fall.
Missed opportunities
I’m a great believer in squeezing scenes for all they’re worth (in moderation, if that makes sense). When you’re writing quickly that doesn’t always happen. Simple example: in the last book I had a key climactic scene which happens in an unusual Venetian location. In the first, rapidfire draft this was on ground level in a deserted little square near the Rialto in the dead of night. Fine, but looking at it, and reading the first effort through, it was immediately obvious how much more resonant this scene would be if it took place in an underground room – a basement, a cellar, somewhere out of the way and hidden from view. Had I been writing at a more considered pace I would have seen this immediately. Hammering away to get to the end, that possibility escaped me.
Writing quickly is good. But never forget books consist of nothing more than text. Architects have to tear down walls to correct their mistakes. Film directors have to reshoot or recut scenes. All we need do is find new words at no cost to anyone but ourselves.
So keep your eye on them, especially when they’re flowing.
Another issue with that race to the finish is pace. We want it, of course. But do we want nothing but pace? The third act is our readers’ reward for sticking with the book. If it’s just one quick, straight dash to the finish might it not appear a touch mechanical and cheat them of a little depth along the way?
Shakespeare had some interesting ideas on this subject. In Macbeth he has our eponymous villain murder the rightful king, Duncan, offstage in a bid to usurp his throne. Pretty soon both Macbeth and his evil wife are wandering, deed done, trying to wash the monarch’s blood from their hands. The audience knows we’re heading for a key moment in the play: the announcement of Duncan’s death.
Does Shakespeare go straight to this climactic moment? Not a bit of it. Duncan’s murder is ‘discovered’ and unconvincingly blamed on some servants Macbeth then happened to kill, supposedly out of fury at their deed. But the scene in which the unwinding of Macbeth’s bloody plot commences actually starts with a ribald, knockabout comedy act. The castle porter opens the door to Macduff and Lennox, two thanes who will eventually bring vengeance down on Macbeth, and embarks upon a cheeky riff about the effects of strong drink:
… nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance: therefore, much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him.
What’s going on here? We’re aware Duncan’s dead even if Macduff and Lennox aren’t. We know all hell is about to break loose. The two perpetrators have just been waving their bloodied hands around like lunatics, which doesn’t bode well for a convincing performance of grief. And Shakespeare’s got a minor character performing a dubious nightclub routine with a couple of important players, one of whom is due to behead Macbeth at the conclusion of the play.
In a word: tension. Instead of taking us straight to the place we expected – the bloody murder scene – Shakespeare teases us with the last thing we’d expect, a brief moment of rude comedy. He’s playing with the rhythm of the piece, slackening the pace for a moment in the sure knowledge that we’ll sit up on our seats even more as a result, wondering what black deed is round the corner.
Not all stories can play this trick. If you’re writing a very direct, fast-moving linear tale, some diversion is probably the last thing you need. Nor is ribald comedy a device most modern writers would use. There are plenty of alternatives. A row among the cops before they go in to make an arrest. Some unforeseen interruption in the narrative – traffic, weather, the intrusion of a world that is utterly unaware of the drama taking place within it. Sudden, swift changes in point of view can jolt the pace in a way that will leave the reader nervy and on edge. So can flashbacks revealing key plot elements that might otherwise have been handled in a more conventional form of explication.
It’s important to realise, however, that ploys like this must be used sparingly. Shakespeare lingers with his hungover porter for little more than a minute before Macduff drags us back into the drama with the line, ‘Is thy master stirring?’
A minor diversion can have the unexpected effect of drawing the reader into the story more closely. The danger is that, if you dwell too long on your cleverness, you may make them think, ‘What on earth’s going on here?’ Brevity, please.
It’s axiomatic in this business that some people will find your ending unsatisfactory. If you’re beastly to your protagonist and leave him in a hole a few will accuse you of cruelty. If you let him win the day unreservedly others will say you lack the godlike impersonal distance all writers should feel towards their creations.
You can’t win with everyone, though you can try to comfort yourself with the idea, ‘They’re just mad at me for bringing their much-loved story to an end.’ Perhaps. The plain truth is there’s no perfect, universal way to close a book. Two complaints are particularly common. Someone will say, ‘I saw it coming.’ Or ‘Nice book but the ending is unbelievable.’ Let’s deal with the first one.
Is it really a complaint? Not always. Some readers see books as puzzles to unravel. They’re familiar with their genre and understand its conventions. They may want to be able to see the ending, and be made to work their way through the maze of possibilities you’ve presented in order to find the right solution. They won’t like it if the puzzle is too easy or the riddle too cryptic. But they won’t mind so much if they get the right answer. It may even make the book better for them. This applies particularly to the procedural form of classic ‘whodunit’ crime story which sets up five or six possible culprits and, after many twists and turns, unveils one as the bad guy. If your reader can spot the right one that reaffirms how smart they are. If they don’t you’re in danger of meeting that second objection, ‘It’s unbelievable.’
Both these comments relate to the way an author manages the expectations of his readers. We focus constantly on how to bring some element of surprise into our work – and rightly so. It’s less often appreciated that a smidgen of predictability is essential in popular fiction too.
Think of the basic three-act structure – setup, pursuit, denouement – as a silent conspiracy between storytellers and their audience, entered into a couple of millennia or more ago when Homer was touting his tales around the eastern Mediterranean. Readers begin a story with a clear idea of the kind of journey they’ve embarked upon. They want to be entertained and have some twists, thrills and shocks along the way. But much of what they encounter will be expected. A horror story will entail terror, a ghost story a ghost. Crime books invariably entail a hunt for the perpetrator of a misdeed.
Popular fiction is, in many ways, an improvisation on a set, classic theme. Originality matters, but it’s not open-ended. The context of the tale is important to readers because it defines the landscape through which the story is supposed to take place. When they say ‘This ending is unbelievable’ what they usually mean is they feel an author has broken that context or extended it beyond limits they find acceptable. You can’t lead your audience down a path they think they understand and then, at the very end, remove the veneer of your fictional world and reveal that – aha! – it was actually something else all along.
Take Charlie and the Mermaid. Can I close out the book with Matt Giordano whipping off his human head and revealing that he’s actually an alien/vampire/Arcturus Sprout, Beelzebub’s chosen lieutenant in the Seventh Circle of Hell?
Of course not. I exaggerate a touch. Among the seven billion or so people currently alive on the planet as I write this sentence there may be one out there who could pull off a trick like that. Best work on the assumption it’s not you. Most of us should work within accepted limits and try to make something unique and original inside those boundaries. No one wants the old clichés but they will love you to bits if you can provide them with a few new ones.
If aliens or vampires or demons had a place in this tale they should have made their presence known earlier. It’s all very well to end a story with an unexpected twist – but not one that turns everything that’s gone before completely on its head. Authors sometimes try too hard to find an ending they regard as inventive. Most crime stories end with the bad guy getting his comeuppance in some fashion, and the mending of that tear in the fabric of the universe. It’s fine to close a story in this field with failure too – the criminal escaping, the wrong one going to jail. In truth, though, all the reader expects at the end of a story is some sense of finality. A feeling that the wound in the world has healed a little, perhaps not perfectly or for long, but at least for a while.
It’s also worth pointing out something that’s rarely conceded, by authors or readers: endings are important but they’re not a make-or-break factor. Books are judged in their entirety, not on their finales. Sometimes those last few pages will disappoint, but not enough to spoil your overall enjoyment of the story. Try for the best ending you can, one that surprises, if that’s what you want, but doesn’t generate a groan. And be aware that someone, somewhere will always find it wanting, whatever you write.
If you hope your book is going to be the start of a long-running series you need to give a little extra thought to its conclusion. The story must come to an end, but you have to leave some element of its characters sufficiently unresolved that readers (and publishers) will want to know more.
You can try that old stalwart the cliff-hanger, but if you do you must accept it will be at least a year, and possibly more, before the reader gets the next episode – which you still have to write. Will they remember enough detail of what went before to allow for any direct, linear connection between one book and the next? Possibly. But even so, if your series works, before long much of your audience will be reading it out of sequence.
Unless you are writing a very specific, sequenced series, tying the end of one book to the beginning of the next will make no sense whatsoever for someone picking up something mid-series. Readers hate to feel they’re being denied knowledge they need in order to understand the present book. They think they should have everything they need in the title they just bought – and they’re right.
It’s much easier to look to a more general and subtle sense of unresolved issues. It might be an awkward ‘will they, won’t they?’ relationship between two characters. In a cop drama it could be the growing realisation on the part of those involved that, though they may have fixed one tear in the universe, there are a lot more out there waiting for them than they realised. What you ought to avoid is specifying what exactly that next tear will be. A weekly TV series can try to do that; an annual book will struggle to maintain the continuity.
If you’re writing a series and produce on time publishers will have the opportunity to insert these come-ons more effectively for you by printing the first chapter of your forthcoming hardback in the paperback of your previous book. That’s their job, not yours. Write the book you want – not one you think the ‘market’ needs.
Some stories simply don’t lend themselves to a series. Charlie and the Mermaid, the way it’s developing for me, is one of them. This is a coming-of-age tale, about Charlie’s brave and painful entry into adulthood. Once he’s crossed that threshold he’ll be rather less interesting, I suspect. You could return to the scene for another look at these characters a year or two on. But I’d rather deal with them here and then go on to something else. There’s a lot to be said for that old show-business saw, ‘Always leave them wanting more.’
Had the story taken on a different character there could have been a series here. Imagine the young adult thriller scenario. Charlie finds himself in the midst of a bunch of spies and turns out to be so good at the job they recruit him at the end of the book. The fantasy idea could spark a quest which, once Charlie and Sally complete it, only reveals a larger, deeper mission. The possibility of a series, then, lies in the nature of the book as much as in the characters that populate it.
Some writers hate the idea of writing a series, of course. If you’re one of them there’s a simple way to try to avoid being pushed into that episodic corner: kill your protagonist in the final scene. The trouble is publishers are smart and persuasive people. If you do that and they still think there’s a series you’re likely to get a contract tempting you to dig him out of the ground and rewrite that ending so that he lives, poised to enter the second book firing on all cylinders.
You will, of course, bite off their hands with gratitude.
We’ve established that popular storytelling revolves around a pressing problem of some kind. The answer to a problem is usually a solution, something that closes the door on what went before. An answer, as firm and unequivocal as a mathematical sum – one plus one equals two.
But this is fiction, not algebra. Are we really looking for something quite as certain as that? In some kinds of books – stories for small children, for example – we might expect a closing line indicating that everyone lived happily ever after. Most fiction inhabits a world that’s a touch more realistic and grey. We may dream that our problems will one day be solved. The adult realist in our heads tells us it’s more likely they will be resolved, in other words brought to a conclusion but not necessarily the one we’d prefer.
Murderers get caught if we’re lucky, but that doesn’t help their victims. Damaged relationships can be healed, but there are usually a few scars left behind. Happily-ever-after sounds attractive as a concept. It carries an inherent idea of justice, of symmetry, of good triumphing over evil, right over wrong. In execution this can be difficult to carry off with any great conviction. Resolutions tend to be more like the world we know: asymmetrical, awkward, incomplete and occasionally unjust.
Fifty or a hundred years ago it was acceptable to produce a popular tale that defied conventional resolution altogether and dared the audience to interpret it. Think of Hitchcock’s movie Vertigo, made in 1957 and often acclaimed as one of the finest pieces of cinema ever made. It reaches a tragic and heartbreaking close as Scottie, the detective, sees the woman he seems to love fall to her death.
But nothing’s quite as simple as that. Hitchcock leaves the storyline open to interpretation in several different places. How morally culpable is Scottie in his obsession? How guilty is the woman who pretended to be Madeleine Elster? He never tells us. We, the audience, are left to decide. Logically, seen as a procedural crime story, Vertigo scarcely makes sense at all. Yet it’s a wonderful movie precisely because it leaves several key questions unresolved and challenges us to fill in the gaps.
Twenty-first-century popular fiction can, on occasion, be less than tolerant of this open-ended approach to the conclusion of a narrative. There’s a feeling that every question raised in a story must, at some point, be answered. You need to strike a balance here. If your narrative entails key ‘who did what and when?’ questions as it progresses then the answers will need to be injected into the narrative at some stage. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for doubt in modern storytelling. You may not be allowed to be as free with the exposition of your tale as Hitchcock was with Vertigo. But you don’t need to explain every last motive, every decision or statement a character has made throughout the book.
We’re back to algebra here. It’s not the same as storytelling. There’s one very good reason you should be wary of an ending that boasts, ‘And now all is revealed.’ Exposition of this nature can come across as very artificial indeed. The most primitive form of all is to lay out the plot flatly at the conclusion, in a series of exchanges between the characters who retell the ‘truth’ of the tale, ostensibly for one another, in fact for the reader. It’s a bit like an extended, concluding version of the ‘exposition in dialogue’ problem we discussed earlier. This kind of thing:
Charlie listened to his father, amazed. ‘You mean you’ve been following Matt Giordano all along, Dad? And I never knew?’
‘That’s right. Ever since Giordano started going back into that pier I knew he was a bad’un. I’ve been tailing him for a week, day and night.’
‘So the mystery man I saw down by the beach? The one I told you about? It was you?’
‘Correct. Why do you think I came on that scooter? I couldn’t let you see the car. You’d know.’
‘And that poster I saw?’ Charlie asked. ‘The one with Mr Whitby?’
‘I made sure you wouldn’t miss that one. I knew you wouldn’t be able to keep quiet about it. Once you’d told Giordano we had him.’
Artificial, forced and wrong. I repeat: you can’t put big chunks of exposition into the mouths of your characters in some quick wrap-up section like this and expect readers to believe it. Stories need to be revealed through action, behaviour and character, all the more so at the end.
That doesn’t mean you can’t have conversations between characters in which answers appear. In the instance above we could cut the revelation down to a single fact and make it appear in Charlie’s head as a sudden epiphany.
Charlie remembered that pitch-black evening on the beach, the faceless man sneaking off beneath the pier as if he had something to hide. Things were starting to fall into place.
‘That was you the other night, wasn’t it?’ he said. ‘Not Giordano at all. You breaking into the pier?’
‘Maybe,’ his father muttered.
‘You ought to tell me why, Dad. I’ve got a right to know.’
Written like this, the exchange has conflict, which is a good and gripping element in any narrative. More important, Charlie becomes an inquisitor, someone who’s genuinely curious about the truth through his own character, not as some proxy device for the reader, there simply to generate the necessary explanations required for the plot.
Avoid disgorging your mysteries all in one go, ticking off the answers like some pub quizmaster. Spin out the resolution process, feeding the revelations into the action. Try threading them into the narrative directly so that they spur what comes next. That way your characters can discover them, untangle the problem and move to the following scene naturally. If your revelations come across as little more than one long recap scene, tidily tacked on to the end of the book, they’re likely to be unconvincing and leave your climax feeling distinctly anticlimactic.
Sometimes stories don’t end at the obvious moment. If you read books – and I trust you do – you’re familiar with this trick already. We see the bad guy taken down, we’re led to believe the world is back the way it should be. Then there’s a sudden about-turn in the plot and the last person we suspected – or so the author hopes – turns out to be the villain after all, triggering a final confrontation. False endings are an established narrative device and may even present us with several red herrings before we see the actual resolution. They can be very effective. As always, don’t push your luck by stretching them too far. False-ending sequences that extend much beyond one or two fake conclusions can become tiresome.
An epilogue is very different. This is a chapter that happens after the denouement of the story and offers some reflection and perhaps explanation of what has gone before. Sometimes an epilogue will run on directly from the preceding action. Sometimes it could take place years later, or be in the form of a letter or some kind of false document.
Epilogues can serve a variety of purposes. They can elaborate on the preceding plot or tell you what happens to characters in the book after the main story. If you’re planning a sequel the epilogue can point the way forward to the coming book. Note I said ‘sequel’ – in other words two books designed to be read as a pair, such as Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and Claudius the God – not a series. If there really are only two books involved you are entitled to raise hopes for the second at the end of the first. If this is just an open-ended series you should avoid this link, for the reasons I’ve outlined already.
I like epilogues, but then I write stories that are often suited to them. They can change the pace of the story and offer you the chance to insert insights that aren’t easily added any other way. In my part-historical Venetian standalone, The Cemetery of Secrets, the epilogue consists of a false document, a diary entry supposedly written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau describing his accidental encounter with the book’s protagonists years after the main story. It gives me the opportunity to describe what happened to them and, at the very end, insert a surprise link to the modern half of the story which connects both sides of the tale. I can’t think of any other way this could have been achieved. But if your story has no need of an epilogue then don’t write one.
That depends. In the UK we usually measure books in terms of words. In America some people still doggedly use the term ‘pages’, going back to typewriter days when everything was written on typewriters, with a monospaced font and double line spacing. Some software can try to make an estimate of page length. But I’d still ditch the pages idea – it’s increasingly meaningless and both agents and editors on both sides of the Atlantic are now familiar with the concept of words instead.
Most of my books tend to come in at up to 125,000 words these days. That is somewhat shorter than some of my earlier work, which often ran to 160,000 words or more. But books were bigger in the nineties, and those early ones could have used some judicious editing. I’m probably coming in a touch longer than most of my peers. In the UK the average book length for popular fiction is between 90,000 and 100,000 words.
Budding writers often ask about word counts in a rather meek and tentative fashion. They’ve written something that’s come out at 60,000 words or so and they’re wondering whether anyone will publish it. Probably not in the UK, where thin novels are a rarity. In the US, though, publishers will consider some kinds of book, such as romance and light mystery, at this length.
The market for novellas, say of 40,000 words, is pretty much nonexistent for unknown writers, and pretty thin for established ones too, though the rise of ebooks, where length seems less of a consideration, may change this. Unless you are brimming over with confidence, I’d think twice about delivering some gigantic doorstopper of a quarter of a million words or more unless you’re in a field, such as some areas of fantasy, where massive tomes are occasionally acceptable.
The honest answer to this question is: as long as the book needs. Market conditions will demand a minimum length, say from 90,000 words up in the UK, and deter you from writing something massive. But let the narrative flow naturally to its own rhythm and work out when it is starting to call for the resolution. You can’t pad out a thin book with verbiage as a makeweight – everyone will notice. Stories have a natural balance and cycle from beginning to end. Publishers will be looking to see that you’ve spotted this rhythm and stayed with it throughout the story. Bucking the feel of the piece by inserting needless chapters and diversions will be very obvious, hopefully in the first instance to the writer. You should know when you’re faking it, so stop.
The wild card in all this, of course, is the ebook. Novellas and long short stories, sometimes selling for peanuts, do seem to be reaching readers through digital sales, though how sustainable that market is remains to be seen. If you want a conventional publishing contract, deliver a book that comes in at a conventional length.
Charlie and the Mermaid seems to me a relatively straightforward story, linear, with a single location and a small cast of closely linked characters. My guess is it would fit comfortably into that 90–100,000 benchmark with a first act of around 25,000, a second of 45,000 and a third of 20–25,000. No epilogue either. When this story ends, it’s over.
Here we go …
Sally is still with Giordano. Charlie sends him a message saying he knows what’s happened and they need to meet. There’s a final confrontation on the pier. Charlie’s dad hides while Charlie puts it all to Giordano. Matt Giordano is a big man. He’s brought Sally with him ‘to finish this once and for all’. They’re in the wrecked theatre where the fire began, charred posters on the walls, gutted seats, a chill wind whipping through the roof. Sally listens and starts to chime in. Giordano responds in a strange and unexpected fashion, talking wildly about murder, calls her mother a whore, a bad mother. Not loving and caring like him. She was selfish, like her father too, who’d come round the night before asking for her back, demanding. No one demands anything of Matt Giordano. Not even Eric Whitby, and he admits to killing Sally’s grandfather. Says he had to. He was going to ruin it for them all.
Charlie hears this and calls for his dad who’s been hiding with a voice recorder. He reveals himself and hands the recorder to Giordano. He’s been intending to do this all along. There’s money involved and Giordano says, ‘I’ll look after the boy from now on. I’ll keep him straight. Good man.’
Sally looks into Charlie’s eyes and he realises. Matt Giordano really does possess everything. This is his world. Charlie’s dad leaves. Charlie, for the first time in life, stands up to his father and refuses to leave with him. Now it’s just the three of them. Giordano is mad but scarily serious all at the same time.
Giordano says he’s got something to show them. Something to prove who he really is. He leads them to a magician’s cabinet at the back of the fire-blasted dressing rooms, opens it and inside is a body, charred, but not so much you can’t see the showgirl’s costume and the remains of a feathered headdress: Sally’s mum. There’s a look on Giordano’s face – a look of insane, obsessive love.
We break to a flashback. It’s fifteen years before and we’re in Giordano’s head, seeing the real events, realising that his confused words about murder weren’t quite what they seem. It was Sally’s mum and her musician boyfriend who were trying to murder him, Giordano who was fighting for his life against them. He hits the boyfriend, knocks him unconscious. Then turns to face Sally’s mother, telling her he loves her, wants her, will do anything for her and their child.
‘It’s not your child,’ she says, then performs the magic trick we know from Eric Whitby, clicking her fingers, bringing flames to the tips, and approaches him. But the flames brush against one of the velvet drapes by the stage and in an instant we’re amid a sea of flames.
Back to the present. Sally is looking at Giordano intently. She clicks her fingers the way her grandfather did with that magic trick. Flames appear. Matt Giordano is frozen to the spot. She looks at Charlie, glances at something in her bag. He sees a bottle of some kind of liquid there, gets the messages, reaches in and sprays the stuff on Giordano. Sally reaches forward and touches the man.
Second flashback. We see that Giordano is trying to save Sally’s mother but she’s crazy and won’t accept his help. He burns his right hand badly as he reaches into the fire as she’s consumed by the blaze, explaining the black glove Charlie has seen.
Back to now. Giordano bursts into flame, and so does the pier around them once more, the fire reaching the raw wood of the boarding and building work Giordano had been ordering as he tried to bring it back to life. There’s another inferno. Giordano retreats screaming into its maw, to his death. The cabinet with the corpse of Sally’s mum shakes and the corpse inside shatters on the floor.
Final brief flashback. Giordano searching through the wreckage the day after the first fire. Finding her corpse. Hiding it, dressing it in a costume, going over the edge with his obsessive love.
Back to now. Sally disappears. Charlie is lucky to escape with his life. Breathless, anxious, he makes it back to the beach.
There’s only one place she can be. Charlie just sees her disappearing beneath the waves. He dives in to rescue her, but it takes an agonising time to find her still, cold body in the waves beneath the stanchions. Charlie rescues her half-dead from the sea and places her on the sand.
He’s fighting for what to do, then remembers the first time he saw her in the swimming pool. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Sally recovers, coughs up the salt water from her lungs, turns away from him sobbing. He stays there all the same, close by. After a while she turns back and they hold one another on the beach beneath the pier as the structure is once again consumed by flames overhead.
Charlie, who’d been aching so much to kiss her, thinks: finally I did, in a way. It wasn’t the kind of kiss he’d expected, craved. It was more important somehow. And she tasted like a mermaid.
End of story …
This is a bit of a guess, if I’m honest. I’m not the kind of writer who can outline in great detail in advance, so the synopses here are best efforts. They would not, I’m sure, reflect the finished article if I were to write in full the story of Charlie and his mermaid. And I’m not sure the part about Sally’s mother’s body, a charred skeleton still dressed for the stage, is something I could pull off.
What else might I change on the page if I set about writing? A few things, mainly to do with Sally and Giordano. Is she actually very like her mother, wicked and vengeful? Did she engineer this conclusion in some way? And is there a side to Giordano I haven’t explored? A gentler, loving man who was destroyed by Sally’s mother in a fashion that – the story might suggest – Sally might one day try to destroy Charlie?
Don’t know, and the only way a writer like this one could find out would be to write the whole book and see.