writing

Like us novelists, readers want validation.

We want others to confirm our genius.

Readers just want you to confirm that the story is over.

The validation readers need comes at the end of your story. It’s the scene or scenes following the climax, after the main plot closes.

You must provide a clear signal that the story is over. For good or ill, the adventure is done.

In Star Wars its the awards ceremony, where Luke, Han, and Chewbacca receive medals from the rebel alliance in recognition of their heroism.

In thousand upon thousands of other movies, its the scene where the main couple kiss and everyone looks on, smiling at each other. Every side character gets a few seconds on screen, smiling, clapping, dabbing a tear. This signals that yes, everyone and everything is accounted for. Even the dog we saw once in Act II comes in and barks happily.

This is where any remaining open loops need closing.

If you feel like your book is over but you don’t feel like you’ve nailed the ending, this may help you sort it out.

But there’s another big moment you should acknowledge when you finish your first draft.

And that is your accomplishment of finishing it. Regardless of what you think of your story, celebrate the achievement of this important milestone.

For just a few hours or days, sit in the glow of having done it.

If I’ve convinced you of nothing else, I hope you’ve at least entertained the idea that writing doesn’t have to be like pulling teeth, or tedious drudgery. If we are to spend so many hours doing it, it’s only sensible to do it in an enthusiastic state.

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Readers say they hate cliffhangers.

But readers reward cliffhangers . . . at the end of chapters.

There are all sorts of cliffhangers, and you can use them throughout your book to create suspense, intriguing confusion, and surprise.

At the end of every scene and/or chapter, end with a Tease, Twist, or or Unresolved moment.

The Unresolved Moment is the typical cliffhanger.

Your hero is chased by rabid wolves to a cliff, where he nearly falls and is hanging by one hand while the wolves slobber over his head. Below, flaming snakes hiss and writhe, eager to bite, burn, and consume him alive. [End scene.]

The reader absolutely must start the next chapter.

Or the love interest gets down on one knee and produces a ring box. [End scene.]

The reader has to start the next chapter.

The Unresolved Moment makes the reader keep reading To find out what happens.

These sorts of chapter endings can feel heavy handed, so mix it up.

The Tease leaves a different sense of unresolvedness.

At the end of an argument scene, the hero’s teenage daughter answers her phone. Then drops it and says, “Oh my god. I got it.” [End scene.]

What did she get? We have to know.

Or maybe we know from context that she got the lead in the school play. But now we want to see immediately how this changes her next day at school. Do the Mean Girls give her stink eye? Does her Charming Crush who’s All Wrong for Her suddenly shower her with attention? Does her bestie get jealous? I MUST KNOW!

The Tease makes the reader keep reading to learn What does this mean?

The Twist is similar, but it sends the plot in a much more unexpected direction. Same scenario, but the daughter puts down the phone and stares in shock at her father. He says. “Did you get the part?” And she says, still dazed, “Not the one I tried out for. I got the lead.”

Or in a thriller, maybe we’re at the end of a legally dubious break-in by our maverick detective. She’s finally gotten into an office where she planned to copy the villains hard drive to a USB stick. But when she starts the download, she notices a photo on the desk. It’s not of the villain and his socialite wife. It’s of the villain and the detective’s mother! End scene.

The Twist makes the reader keep reading to find out What just happened?

What follows these end scenes?

If you’re mean like me, you keep the cliffhanger alive for a while by changing viewpoint characters and building to another cliffhanger. Then switch back to the first character and repeat the cycle.

But it’s fine to just jump right into the next chapter where the last one left off. Because as the reader compulsively leaps over a chapter break to start the next, they get the sensation of I Can’t Put This Book Down.

There are subtler forms of these cliffhangers. If your ending a somber scene, where your main character is reflecting on the disaster that has come from their choices, you might have an interior monologue of sorts that poses a thematic question, or conveys the characters internal conflict, ending at a point where the reader is curious about what choice will the character make next.

Or the last line could simply be, She shouldered through the crowd and fled, leaving her guitar behind, leaving the cheers of her fans behind, leaving everything behind.

Doesn’t look like a cliffhanger, and it surely doesn’t have that same pace-driving feel. But if that’s the end of a chapter, the reader will feel a question. Maybe we know she’s fleeing because of bad news she received earlier, or because she’s performing a type of music she doesn’t respect. Knowing why she flees doesn’t answer where is she going? If we care about this character, that ending will force us to keep reading.

Or say your band of fantasy characters have found the secret entrance to a hidden valley. End the scene as they cross through, but don’t reveal what they discover until the beginning of the next chapter.

Or have them go through and show their reactions, but not what they see.

Or have them go through and show the wondrous vista and then have the sage wizard speak them an ominious single line of ancient history. “And so we come to the realm of Glinok-Tyl, not seen by mortal eyes these six hundred years.” The hero blinks at the awesome beauty. “It doesn’t look dangerous.” And the sage says, “That, my young friend, is why it is dangerous. Touch nothing, stay close.” [End scene.]

Chapter endings are fun, especially during your revision process. And you’ll often discover you wrote past the ending. Find that spot of suspense and cut there.

Have you written a chapter-ending line that will make readers click that Kindle button to the next page?

Writing tips, tricks, and inspo straight to your inbox. Bi-weekly except for November when I send a daily email to keep you on track for NaNoWriMo.

I can’t watch gross-out tv shows or movies.

I don’t like close-ups of extreme emotional anguish either and most readers don’t either. But sometimes we have to write scenes of extreme events.

When we subject our reader to discomfort, we’re making a choice that might cause them to put the book down. This doesn’t mean we eschew difficult situations or topics in our novels. Quite the opposite.

If you’re writing horror, that’s what the audience wants.

But what if you’re not writing horror, or over-the-top brutality a la Quentin Tarantino?

There’s a technique that allows us to spare the reader the gory details so they can keep reading.

Zoom out or cut away.

And why would we want to do that? Well, we want them to keep reading, right? Just because an emotion or scene is “real” doesn’t mean anyone wants to suffer through it.

Imagine a scene in a PG movie, where the badguy has a kidnapped victim in his control. The ransom has been refused, and he’s going to make an example by shooting the victim in the head.

What does the filmmaker do? How does she convey the murder?

Not with a gruesome close up. Not even a quick blast and splatter.

The filmmaker might show a close up of the villains face, we hear the gunshot, and then the drop of a body. But we don’t see it.

OR the filmmaker zooms out to a wide shot of the warehouse and we see a flash in one window as the gun goes off.

OR the scene cuts to next morning as cops throw a sheet over the body on a gurney.

These choices spare the viewer the gross-out and the high-discomfort of such a moment to different degrees. Remember, I said it was PG. So, generally okay for older kids to see.

In a Tarantino film, we see a lot more viciousness and blood.

So this choice is about audience.

Let’s look at a different example. In Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, the audience is subjected to horrific WWII battle scenes, bodies blown to bits, shaky cam, confusion, explosions, gore, death, hopelessness.

And that’s just the opening ten minutes of the movie.

But later, when a pastor and army officer drive up a long farmland driveway to tell a mother that three of her four sons have been killed in action, Spielberg doesn’t show us her hearing the news.

He shows everything leading up to it.

He shows her collapsing in the doorway before the men have even gotten to the house. She knows what this visit means. We don’t hear her scream or sob. We’re behind her, we can’t even see her face in this moment.

The scene cuts away, respectfully, so she can mourn in privacy.

We’ve been spared the full barrage her agony. This sort of distancing is a kindness to the audience, and when handled deftly, adds enormous heft to the moment.

Watch it, imagine this in prose.  

We want our audience to be moved, feel joy and pain, experience the range of emotion a story provides. But we don’t want them putting the book down. We don’t want our audience so repulsed by the telling that they miss the story.

Contrast this to the death of Boromir in The Fellowship of the Ring. We see very arrow strike, we see Aragorn comforting him, hear Boromir’s final words. Not a dry eye in the theater when I saw it. So why did director Peter Jackson keep us so close? Why didn’t he cut away to spare us?

Boromir tried to steal the ring from Frodo just prior to this, an act he instantly regretted when he realized the effect the ring had on him.

So when the hobbits Merry and Pippin are best by orcs, we need to witness his valor and thereby earn his redemption. But note that Jackson keeps it fairly bloodless. He’s not trying to gross us out because that would draw our focus away from the emotion of the moment.

Put these ideas in your creative toolbox, and the next time a scene of extremely uncomfortable emotion or repulsiveness comes up, you can choose to zoom out or cut away. Show the shadow of the stabbing taking place, rather than the stabbing itself. Or cut to the POV of someone else disturbed by the sound of screams. Or cut to the next day when the body is found. All valid choices.

Or . . .  show it all in excruciating detail. Whatever is appropriate for your audience.

I’m surprised by how many writers I meet who misunderstand the 10,000 hour rule.

Popularized by Maclom Gladwell in his quadrillion selling “Outliers,” the idea is that a person needs 10,000 hours of intentional practice to master a complex skill like playing an instrument.

My respose: who cares?

Gladwell’s premise seems to have been inspired by a paper by Anders Ericcson in the Harvard Business Review.

The upshot of the paper:”Consistently and overwhelmingly, the evidence showed that experts are always made, not born. These conclusions are based on rigorous research that looked at exceptional performance using scientific methods that are verifiable and reproducible.”

That’s great news.

It tells us that skill is not reliant on talent. Talent is fundamentally having an interest in something. If you are attracted to it, you’ll have a keener interest in the subtleties, and therefore a better knack for mimicking good work.

This is why I only compliment people on their skill, never their talent. Skill is the product of work, dedication, and persistence.

But this doesn’t mean we must wait to share our work until we’ve put in our 10,000 hours.

This leads to a much more important book for creatives: Show Your Work by Austin Kleon.

We live in an age where it is possible to go right around all the old, traditional gatekeepers that stood between us and our audience. And you can attract an audience by sharing your progress. Share your journey and let people watch you grow as an artist.

I encourage you to buy Show Your Work in paperback, not ebook. It’s a little, square book, with illustrations and very short chapters. The sort of thing you can pick up and dip into to discover inspiration. I’ve read it many times and I recommend it to everyone.

Forget talent. Practice for skill, and publish your practice. A fulfilling creative life isn’t about the chore, but about the journey.

Writing tips, tricks, and inspo straight to your inbox. Bi-weekly except for November when I send a daily email to keep you on track for NaNoWriMo.

The best advice I ever heard about writing endings was this:

“If you can’t write your ending, read your beginning.”

Do yourself a favor and refresh your memory on the first couple chapters, especially the opening pages of your novel, and ask:

Where is this taking place? Does your character need to return here for the story to feel complete?

What was your main character thinking? Are those thoughts different now? Revelant, irrelevant?

What was your main character’s problem? Is it resolved? Has your MC gained a new understanding and acceptance?

Did an external event throw your character’s world out of kilter? Is a “new normal” established, and has the passing of the old normal been acknowledged.

Not every question will be relevant, but a couple of them should be. You don’t need to think too hard about these, just ask them and answer them quickly. Let your creative mind ponder them.

The direct answer isn’t what you need to write. They just give you the loose end of a thought thread you can follow to your ending.

Readers don’t keep track of plots as a whole. But just as you have a creative mind, they have a simulated world in their subconcious mind. It knows when an ending is lacking, even if they can’t say what. It’s just a feeling.

Often that sense of incompleteness is because one of the above questions wasn’t answered clearly enough. Those questions are posed in the beginning of the story, so go find them and answer them.

You might be surprised, once again, to discover your accidental genius was already planting the seeds you now need to reap.

Writing tips, tricks, and inspo straight to your inbox. Bi-weekly except for November when I send a daily email to keep you on track for NaNoWriMo.

Your hero has helpers. These characters make up his team.

I didn’t realize this when I wrote my first novel. I just threw names out and characters started having conversations and then plot happened.

But ten chapters in, I had these hangers-on, these useless louts who took up my brain power but didn’t do anything except run in fear when bigfoot burst from the forest.

It was too much to keep track of, and each had little mini plots going that were boring.

The solution was easy, if a bit tedious to execute. I had to merge some of them into a single character, and others I simply removed.

If someone had told me about teams, my creative mind might have known to fill out the roster more efficiently.

Your main character’s team will also help you, the writer.

If you’ve watched any TV cop show, you’ll quickly recognize that the hero has all sorts of experts they can call on to do stuff for them. Think of the specialists in Oceans 11. You’ve got the master of disguises guy, the technology nerd, the suave con-man, the stealthy ninja.

Or how about The Fellowship of the Ring. Frodo is aided by a wise wizard, a burly strong dwarf, a noble ranger, a deadshot elf archer, and his loyal friend Samwise.

Remember the A-Team? It was an awesomely silly 1980s action show about a band of Vietnam vets, discharged from the military for “a crime they didn’t commit,” and who now take on heist-style missions. (The 2010 movie remake lived up to the stupidity of the original.)

✅ Hannibal: Master of disguise, and mastermind (the leader of the group)

✅ Murdock: Pilot and jack of all trade (mentally unstable)

✅ B.A.: Strong man who can drive or build anything (afraid of flying) Mr. T!

✅ Face: Charming con-man who can source any vehicle on short notice (disgustingly good looking)

They only take on jobs that pay, but also that are just.

I loved this show when I was a kid. Especially the midpoint montage where they inevitably got cornered in a barn and had to build a monster tank from a delapitaded tractor and 50 gallon barrels.

CSI in all its variations feature teams in support of the main detective. Forensics can discover anything, if the plots needs them to.

Arrow, the comic adaptation TV show, has a team surrounding the Oliver Queen. I love how Felicity Smoak can do anything with technology to help Oliver stop criminals.

Smoak: “I just picked up the bad guy’s phone signal in the Glades!”

Arrow: “Track it!”

Smoak: “To do that I’d have to install a virus on his phone that pings the doohickey with the interflooser wangfidget.”

Arrow: “You have five minutes.”

​

So if you’re mired down with a bunch of characters who seem to have no point in existing, it might be time to ask your creative mind to sort them into buckets of abilities.

What can this character do that my hero can’t do?

Some archetypes in popular teams:

The Tank: strong man who can beat up guys and absorb huge amounts of abuse

The Brain: super smart, explains the science/history of what’s happening, builds the “tech machine” that solves a problem.

The Charmer: master of persuasion, can elicit info from anyone, ease tensions

The Thief: sneaky and silent, can unlock doors and pick pockets

The Sage: sees the big picture, knows the ancient history, might be weaker than others, but makes up for it through experience. Often the mentor to the hero.

The list goes on, and you should pay attention anytime you watch a show or movie to see how a character fits into this sort of role.

Oh, BTW, badguys have teams too: minions. Watch Die Hard again, and take note.