Endings
How to end a book is much on my mind right now because I’m racing like an an out-of-control train toward the end of THE EDGE OF RUIN, book two in my series. Two scenes, that’s all I have left two scenes. I was going to try and finish last night, but at 9:30 I realized I was beat and couldn’t think anymore so I shut down. I then stayed up too late to try and finish the latest novel I’m reading. I didn’t make it, but I came close enough to realize that this author has developed a habit that doesn’t work for me, and as a matter of craft I don’t think it works.
Last week I completed another book by this writer, and discovered that the big climax, the thing to which we’d been building for three volumes was completed on page 624. Then the book goes on and on and on ending on page 914. There are some minor loose ends that get tied up, people who are dead don’t stay dead (a particular pet peeve of mine. Check out my posts about HEROES and you’ll get the full rant), and finally we reach the happy ending with our hero at rest with his lady love and a new family.
I don’t think it works. Some of this is probably due to my long years working as a screen writer, but give me the big climax, and then within a few pages I better be hearing the violins and trumpets and the credits better start rolling. If you did a graph line for a book I think it should be a steady trending up. You can throw in a few dips to the tangent to give the readers a chance to breath, bond more with characters, have a character moment, but the overall direction should be up. Then you hit the pinnacle and the line should drop almost vertically down and you get out. For me this long dragging conclusion feels like watching a slow death.
Or maybe I’m missing something here. Has the taste of readers changed are they just reluctant to let go of a world and the characters, and want to luxuriate in an ending? See every step of the Happily Ever After coming toward them?
Melinda
February 28th, 2008 at 9:08 am
I’m with you on endings. Wrap ‘em up and wrap the story up too. But I think we’re in the minority on this these days - a lot of readers don’t seem to be as focused on story as much as they are on enjoying the world, hence the success of Neverending Fantasy Series. They’re the same readers who were delighted by Harry and Hermione’s extended camping trip in HP7, whereas I nearly stopped reading the book.
Tolstoy noodled his way to the end in War and Peace, right? Why shouldn’t doorstop righters be able to do the same?
February 28th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
I mostly agree with you. On the other hand, I’ve read a few books by writers who seemed to get to a certain point in the narrative, and then just decide “I’ve been writing this thing long enough!” and chop the story off, with a brief epilogue, instead of either doing a longer book or going back to cut the earlier parts so the story isn’t too long for the book they’re writing. The first book that struck me this way was Rita Mae Brown’s High Hearts, and it left me less interested in reading more of Brown’s fiction. It’s really unsatisfying to have a story end before the narrative is complete, too. So perhaps some writers are reacting against that?
I’m with S. C. Butler on the long middle of Deathly Hallows; it was like reading Frodo and Sam’s trip through Mordor, except that it seemed to go on several times as long, and with Frodo and Sam alternately turning into Gollum.
I run into this in gaming, incidentally. My practice is to hand around a prospectus listing possible games, pick something the players like, and run it for a planned length of time—normally two years—at the end of which I wind up the story and close down the setting. And this gets odd reactions from a lot of people who seem to expect a campaign to go on forever, and think that one that ends has failed. Of course, if you don’t plan for a termination, your campaigns probably do mostly end by failing. It took me a while to learn to work in this kind of frame, but I think my viewing games as participatory fiction may have helped.
February 28th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Ack! What a horrible typo! Righting?
Please forgive me.
February 28th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
So how do you feel about the “Scouring of the Shire” section of LORD OF THE RINGS? It certainly goes against the “wrap it up” philosophy that you’re propounding. You have the big climax on Mount Doom… and then hundreds of pages of homecomings.
February 28th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
The Scouring of the Shire is different and here’s why. It is set up in the very beginning of the book. Everything that plays out in those final pages is foreshadowed in the long scene between Frodo and Gandalf when Frido learns about the ring.
Tolkien also made damn sure that the marriage of Aragorn is front and center with the delicate references to “my greatest hope,” etc. It is also not the endless wedding, just going on and on.
Finally, the farewells are heartrending. This is not an endless tying up the protagonist’s life with a big pink ribbon, and giving him everything he wants. Tolkien shows there is a cost to all of this and so it feels fresh and not like a long slow dribbling toward a (sort of) ending.
Also, I just went back and checked. From the end of the scene where Sam gets to hear the minstral sing about Nine Fingered Frodo and the Ring of Doom it is exactly seventy-four pages. Not hundreds of pages.
February 28th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
I like the whole Shire-focused ending, for several reasons:
*Symmetry with the opening
*Making it clear that the War has had a real impact on the Shire, and vice versa, what with Saruman recruiting the Sackville-Bagginses to help provision his army of orcs
*Building up to the valedictory scene where Frodo, like the elves, goes off to the West, leaving Sam behind to go on with his life and to preserve the memory of what has been lost
I think that last is what Melinda is pointing at, too, and I’ve come increasingly to think that memory and regret are a central theme, perhaps the central theme, of the whole novel. So Sam’s memory and regret don’t seem to me to be intrusive, but to be the natural conclusion of the story; and in a way it makes Sam the real hero of the story.
Though it’s probably just as well that Tolkien’s friends talked him out of the epilogue. I’ve read it just lately, and it’s well written, but it has some of the same effect as the epilogue of Deathly Hallows. Putting it in really would have been going on too long.
March 3rd, 2008 at 9:34 am
William, you’ve summarized my own feelings about the Shire-focused ending of LOTR better than I could have. I can’t claim to bring a sophisticated analysis to the table, but as a reader I’ve always found this ending to be entirely appropriate to the overall story.
I didn’t know about Tolkien’s epilogue to LOTR. Where can that be found? I’d love to hear more about how he was talked out of including it, too.
March 4th, 2008 at 8:04 am
Take a look at
http://www.freewebs.com/memoirsoftheshire/epilogue.htm
for the epilogues. The story of his being talked out of including it can be found in The Company They Keep, a recently published book by Diana Pavlac Glyer (wife of well-known sf fan Mike Glyer) on the Inklings as a literary circle.
I wrote about the theme of memory in The Lord of the Rings at more length in an essay, “Simbelmynë: Mortality and Memory in Middle-Earth,” that’s up on my friend Bob Franson’s Web site:
www.troynovant.com
Glancing over it, I see that I did discuss Sam’s being left behind in Middle-Earth, at slightly more length, if you’re interested in seeing more.
June 27th, 2008 at 11:57 am
There also is a point of symmetry in “The Mirror of Galadriel”, perhaps one of LotR’s under-appreciated chapters. Visions in the mirror help pin the central action of the story to both its beginning and possibile endings.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
That’s a really great point, Robert. I loved that chapter. Galadriel’s temptation is so well done. (Not well done in the movie, however. I hated the whole black light effect thing), but I digress.
Those hints that pay off later are what make reading so rewarding. On the movie front Michael Clayton did that really well with the image of the horses in the field tying back to the book his son was reading.
Walter Jon Williams does that kind of crunchy goodness really well too. You read something in chapter three, and then it’s back in chapter 27 to slap you up the side of the head. He does it that very well in his wonderful Praxis series.