NaNoWriMo Tip #5 – Choose An Ending
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C.S. Lewis: "Maybe you should give the ending more thought."
These are my personal tips for NaNoWriMo. You know the drill. Take only what works.
Brainstorming is still in progress. It’s going to be open season on ideas until the rich outline / rough draft is hammered out. Early on, it’s important to ask, “Where is this going? What concrete action will the hero take to show he’s won?”
I
was talking to a writer friend recently about his new novel and asked him for
the story synopsis. He gave a wonderful premise and what sounded like the first
chapter or two. But there was no story arc, no goal and no ending in sight.
If
you plow into a 50,000 word or 100,000 word novel not knowing your ending, I
think you’re just asking for a life of pain.
As
I’ve looked back over the many books I’ve started to write and never finished,
I realized something. If I didn’t know the ending to a book, I didn’t finish
it. If I knew the ending, I might leave it for a while, but I always came back
to it.
Wow.
How mind-numbingly obvious is that?!
There
are two stages to knowing your ending: knowing what concrete goal your hero
seeks, and knowing whether or not he finds it. That’s it. Easy-schmeasy! How
could I have missed that for so many manuscripts?
A
concrete action is something like throwing the Ring into the heart of a
volcano, or marrying Rosie and having a dozen baby hobbits or departing Middle
Earth forever on Elven Ships. You know there’s no going back to the way things
were before. If you’re ambitious, you can include all of those, like
Tolkien—but you must have at least
one.
Now,
if you are writing a literary novel, you might think I am full of pulp fiction
crap, what with my concreteness and all. Nonsense. Even literary novels
culminate, and they usually have some concrete manifestation of that
culmination, even if it’s terribly subtle. My friend Michelle Argyle Davidson’s
book Cinders (now available as part of the collection Bonded) ends with the
heroine releasing white flowers into the air. You won’t know what significance
that has unless you read the story, and it’s subtle even then, but it’s a
physical manifestation of the heroine’s transformation.
Choosing
an ending goes hand in hand with the most important thing you need to do if you
want to know the plot of your book: choose the hero’s goal. If you know what
the hero wants, and needs (they usually conflict), and how these are
reconciled, then you’ll know the ending.
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