On Endings

If you're following the podcast, you might notice that I just end the episode when I'm done.  Maybe threads are left unresolved, because life is messy and I can't solve all this character's problems in twenty minutes.  Sometimes I leave a listener wanting more.  I consider this a victory, because it's far better than the alternative when a listener is thankful that the episode is over and they are 100% done with these characters.  Sometimes the resolution a listener thinks they want would be super dull if I actually gave it to them.  They would turn against me by the time I was done.  "Well, it was fun episode about kelpies until Carolyn stated talking about the process of getting a restraining order."  Maybe the lack of conclusion will eat at them until they start a conversation with my work by creating their own.  (That would be rad, but to my knowledge has never happened.)

This method of stopping when I'm done works for the podcast (or at least, I've decided that it works) because episodes are short.  Hopefully if a listener finds an ending unsatisfying, they won't feel cheated because they've only "wasted" twenty minutes.  Hopefully, their appreciation of the brevity will outweigh their disappointment that there's not more story. 

It does not work for a novel. 

In reading a novel, a reader has devoted hours to a single story, and they will feel betrayed if they are left unsatisfied at the end.  A reader has given an author's work their valuable time and valuable attention, so not providing they a payoff is almost aggressively rude.  Some novelists like breaking that implicit contract that they will resolve a problem (or at least not resolve it in a satisfying way), but I don't want to be one of those writers who purposefully frustrates their reader and purposefully makes a novel difficult to read.

So this is all a way of saying that endings are hard.  When my agent read my last novel, she asked if I planned a sequel.  I had not.  "If you're not going to write a sequel, you need to tie up these loose ends," she said.  "This reads like there's going to be more." 

Of course, I'd intended for it to be like "everything's not always tied up in a neat bow!  Life goes on and chronic issues take time to work on!  Whishy washy wishy washy."  But she was absolutely right, and what she said has stuck with me to the point where I've gone through other novels looking for this, and sure enough, it's there.  I tie up the main plot is a satisfying way, with some big show pieces and some drama and some fireworks, but what about all those other threads that flushed the novel out along the way?  I've just let those hang, thinking they'd fade into the background after the big showpiece climax!  But you know what?  If you let too many threads hang, you just end up with a frayed looking edge.

In trying to improve, I've been looking at my manuscripts and asking myself, "What story threads feel like they're leading into a sequel?"  And then working on those.  I've been removing them completely.  I've been altering how they play out so they end up with a conclusion, which is hard when I know how the story goes and this isn't it.

The other thing she said, that I'm trying to keep in mind is that I need to be mindful of y themes.  Those themes I've been bringing up like motifs throughout the novel, need to come back at the end.  I need to bring those back up at the end so that when a reader thinks back on the book, they think back on its themes.  That's hard for me because I want a reader to think back on the big, exciting explosion at the end, and I have to wrestle that desire under control because it's not helping.  And if the themes are tied to the explosion, then they both stand out.  They're both more rooted into the story.

Someday, I'm going to nail an ending, and it's going to be great.