Week Ten: DAYS 64–70

SO LONG, FAREWELL

Stop reading for a moment and stand up. Okay, now sit down. Okay, now stand up. Sit down, stand up, sit down. And one more time, stand up. Sit down. Are you following? Stand up, now sit. Stand up (with vigor this time! No slacking!). Now sit down. Stand, sit. Stand, sit. (Had enough yet?)

I could keep going on and on and on to demonstrate by proxy just how frustrating it is to the reader when he or she feels there is just no point to what the author is saying. I could keep having you stand up, then sit down just to demonstrate the work that reading a novel can sometimes feel like. You’ve put some real faith into an author any time you commit to reading her book. You’re saying: Hey, I most likely don’t know you personally, but I trust you enough to spend several hours with you. Please use my time wisely! And let’s face it, the average individual has plenty of other things he could be doing: playing video games, watching movies, surfing the Internet, taking foreign-language classes, yo-yoing, learning to twirl a baton, etc.

At all points in your novel you need to respect your audience — even though you can’t predict your audience. This is why we’ve been paying close attention to fictional elements large and small such as character nuance, convincing dialogue, and cohesive narrative arcs. Your reader is donating her time to you, gratis, and in return you must respect your reader enough to tell the best story you can. In no place is this respect more essential than in Act Three. Your reader has invested time and energy — yes, reading is energy (and fundamental!) — forgoing time spent cleaning, running errands, or hanging out with family and friends — and she wants to feel like the ending is worth the wait. And let’s face it — you owe it to your characters, too. Characters you’ve spent hours creating, giving history and personal-ity to. Characters you’ve given life to. (But don’t get a god complex about it or anything.)

In the last lesson and assignment, you did a lot of the necessary work to set your novel up for the resolution: Act Three. In your climax scene, your character faced a turning point; he acted and reacted. He emoted. Now it’s all down-hill, baby! Right? Well, not exactly. Endings are never easy. You still have a lot of work ahead of you. But if you’ve consciously thought through some of the choices you’ve made in earlier scenes, Act Three will write itself. Well, sort of.

WEEK 10, ASSIGNMENT 1: Bump, Set, Spike … Then What?

Have you ever seen a movie that ended too abruptly? Just as the bad guy was caught, the screen went black, and the credits rolled. The problem with an ending like this is that the director failed to include enough “falling action” to give the movie a cohesive feel. The director didn’t answer any of those “and what happened next” questions that the rising action or the climax scene of the film prompted. Moviegoers will leave a movie like this feeling dissatisfied, even if the movie was entertaining up until that quick-exit ending.

A novel that ends too abruptly is as equally dissatisfying. If your reader has hiked up that mountain of exposition and rising action with you, don’t leave them stuck at the apex. You’ll need to lead your reader back down from that mountaintop, at least partway. After the climax, life goes on in your fictional world. What does this life look like? What will be the “new normal” for your characters?

The scene following the climax scene, or the falling-action scene(s), should be treated a bit like a resting place for your readers, a time for them to pause, collect themselves, and assess the importance of what just happened in the scene they just read. Because your climax scene is — or should be — a high-stakes emotional scene, and because you want to avoid back-to-back dramatic/emotional scenes, it’s a good idea for the scene immediately following your climax to be, shall we say, lower on the scale of emotional intensity. After the climax scene, the main character often steps back from the story to give a bit of necessary perspective. What is the remaining fallout from the climax scene? How has the protagonist’s thinking changed from the beginning of the novel to the end? How has he been shaped by the events of the climax? Who is he now, and who does he want to be?

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and My Ántonia by Willa Cather, though very different novels (one is about a charming pedophile, the other is about a nostalgic Midwesterner), employ similar techniques in their respective “falling action” scenes. Both narrators, obsessed with and/or nostalgic for the women in their lives, return to visit their former flames years after the novel’s climactic moment. Both narrators, now with the advantage of distance and time, are able to reflect on what these women have meant to them and how these women have changed them. The reader witnesses the deep longing both narrators feel for these women, and also the ways these narrators have evolved through the course of their experiences.

The scene following the climax should also, of course, answer some of the questions set up by the climax. If your narrator discovered that her husband and his secretary with whom he was having an affair were the ones who stole the half million dollars from the megachurch where they belonged, will she turn him in? Or begin planning a move to that big house for sale that she’s always envied? Will she leave him? Will she blackmail him into staying with her instead of that cheap, blonde floozy? You’re going to have to answer these questions for your reader. And, moreover, the answer to these questions will depend to a large degree on how you’ve set up your novel, how you envision your protagonist changing, and what you see as the ideal ending for the book.

If the climax dramatizes the themes of your novel, the scene immediately following the climax should underscore or reiterate this theme. But a word of advice: Don’t be too obvious. That is, your reader can glean your intended message without your protagonist overtly explaining: “I have been changed dramatically by the events of the climax, and here’s how.” By this point in your novel, you’ve included several scenes that reveal the emotional core of your characters — and subtlety is often the best path to tread. Check yourself to make sure you aren’t being too heavy-handed in the scene following your climax. Some good advice: Save the drama for your mama. (Apparently, mothers like drama.) Readers, however, don’t want messages pressed upon them; instead they will be more satisfied if they feel they’ve arrived at these thematic connections on their own.

Write the scene that immediately follows your climax — the first falling-action scene — paying close attention to answering the “What next?” questions your climax gives rise to and to stepping back from the emotional/dramatic intensity of the previous scene. How do you plan to transition from the climax to this scene? What kind of perspective does your character have now? How has she evolved? Remember to address your character’s internal state and external surroundings.

WEEK 10, ASSIGNMENT 2: Tying Off Mini-Threads

Act Three is often referred to as the resolution, but this term can be tricky since it denotes a positive finality, which is not often the case. If you resolve a problem, you are finding a solution to it, and some endings aren’t quite as clear-cut in fiction. Many novels don’t end on a happy note. Remember the varieties of endings we examined back on Day 16. Your character can either:

a.) Get what she wants.

b.) Not get what she wants.

c.) Get what she wants but realize that it was no longer important to her.

d.) Not get what she wants, but get something even better than what she wanted in the first place.

Often Act Three leaves the reader feeling cathartic, anxious, defeated, or even uncertain. You must remember, these are resolutions, too, even if nothing has been definitely resolved. Perhaps your character found the true identity of her father — only to discover something much worse, a family secret she wished had remained buried.

Think of our dear Gatsby again. How was this novel resolved? With a gunshot, I’m afraid. Gatsby dies in his pool, and the older-and-wiser narrator, Nick Carraway, now longs to return to the simplicity of his Midwestern roots as a consequence. He’s seen the ugly side of wealth; he understands what a “voice full of money” can do to a man who hears it. We’ve already discussed the ways in which the climax of the novel leads directly to the final plot points in your fictional world, but you must also pay attention to what other mini threads of your narrative must be resolved. In The Great Gatsby, several mini threads are tied up at the novel’s conclusion. For one, the reader learns of the great mystery of Gatsby’s identity. Jay Gatsby was Jimmy Gatz, a man who tried to reinvent himself, and isn’t this reinvention a big part of what the American Dream is all about? We learn that all those partygoers from earlier in the novel, all those people who populated Gatsby’s lavish home, drank his booze, and took moonlight swims in his pool, really aren’t his friends. None of them came to his funeral, and it’s likely none of them will even miss the old sport. How sad would it be to spend your life in the company of people who don’t really care about you? We learn that Nick breaks up with his sometimes girlfriend Jordan, and Daisy and Tom remain together, despite the marital infidelities committed by both parties.

Spend some time perusing your outline and spot reading through some of your scenes. By now you should have a good amount of work in front of you, so this may take an hour or more of skimming. Which plot points do you still need to resolve? Which loose ends need to be tied up? What is the outcome of the climax scene? And, importantly, how has your central character changed?

Then write any scenes (except for the last) that resolve these mini threads.

WEEK 10, ASSIGNMENT 3: Good-Bye is the Hardest Word

The final scene of a novel, or even a movie, often leaves the most lasting impression. Think of it as the end of a relationship — you always remember how you said good-bye. Was it fiery and brief? Long, sentimental, and drawn out? A confusing set of unreturned voice-mail messages? These last moments probably stuck with you long after you moved onward and, hopefully, upward.

While there is, of course, no magic bullet for writing your final scene, these pages should do the following:

• Connect in some way to the beginning chapter/scene. (This will add a feeling of cohesiveness to your novel.)

• Be slower in pace and reflective in tone.

• Show how your character has changed since the beginning of the novel and what she has learned.

• Imply what the character wants for the future. (In other words, if there were an epilogue, what might it say? Did Josephine go on to change her ways? Did she enroll in cosmetology school and finally quit obsessing about her father?)

In an earlier lesson, we took a look at the opening sentences of Alice Sebold’s best seller, The Lovely Bones. Let’s now take a look at how she concludes this novel. These final paragraphs, remember, are narrated by the novel’s dead protagonist, Susie Salmon:

But now let me tell you about someone special:

Out in her yard, Lindsey made a garden. I watched her weed the long thick flower bed. Her fingers twisted inside the gloves as she thought about the clients she saw in her practice each day — how to help them make sense of the cards life had dealt them. …

Samuel walked out to Lindsey then, and there she was in his arms, my sweet butterball babe, born ten years after my fourteen years on Earth: Abigail Susanne. Little Susie to me. Samuel placed Susie on a blanket near the flowers. And my sister, my Lindsey, left me in her memories, where I was meant to be.

***

And in a small house five miles away was a man who held my mud-encrusted charm bracelet out to his wife.

“Look what I found at the old industrial park,” he said. …

“This little girl’s grown up by now,” she said.

Almost.

Not quite.

I wish you all a long and happy life.

Here, the pacing of the novel slows considerably. Lines like “I watched her weed the long thick flower bed. Her fingers twisted inside the gloves …” are more languorous details that seem to extend time, draw out the final pages. These paragraphs are reflective, too. Susie examines her family’s obsession with her death — the way they were, for many, many years, unable to move on from it. But Susie notes that they’re finally able to move forward now; her sister “left me in her memories….” Yet we also know Susie’s not been totally relegated to the past: Lindsey has named her first daughter after her deceased sister: Little Susie.

The language and tone of these final paragraphs also connect to the first pages, where Susie was also directly addressing her audience. The baby was born “ten years after my fourteen years on Earth,” which, not coincidentally, situates the novel’s end ten years after those first moments narrated in the opening pages of the novel. In the end, Susie directly addresses her audience once more, bidding them adieu: “I wish you all a long and happy life.” This seems a strange last line for a novel, but it is one that resonates and gives us the lessons of the novel: The dead are at peace, and so, too, should be the living.

Take a look at your outline’s last scene. Will the tone be reflective? Will it show what your character has learned? Now reread your first scene. How can you connect the final scene to this one? Return to the twenty final lines you wrote for your assignment on Day 16. Are any of these lines strong enough, now that you’ve written most of your novel?

Endings are never easy, but they carry a certain amount of emotional weight. If your readers arrive at the final scene only to find a character who is not authentic to himself — or an ending that feels contrived and unnaturally out of place — they’ll be disappointed. In other words, your ending must be earned. The final scene — and especially the final line — is your final opportunity to leave a lasting impression on your reader before she closes the book for good. How do you want her to remember your character? Think about fictional characters from your favorite novels that live on in your mind, and then find a couple of those novels and reread how the author ended the book. In some ways, your final words should be the strongest, the most poetic, because these lines will be the last ones your audience reads, and so the first they’ll remember.

POP QUIZ

Do you know to which novel/author this very famous last line this belongs to: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”?