Finding the Ending

Every part of a story poses its own problems and challenges. I often find multiple solutions but one usually jumps out as the best. Writers spend hours crafting the perfect opening sentence and then the opening paragraphs, thinking this is the most important part of the book. If the opening doesn't grab the reader, the following pages will remain unread. I don't know if the opening is the most important or not, but certainly I spend a fair amount of time on it.

The middle, after the crime has been committed and the sleuth is drawn into the investigation, has the challenge of keeping the reader engaged, maintaining the desired pacing, laying out clues to keep the reader intrigued, and developing characters to make the reader care as much about them as about the solution to the crime. The middle often threatens to sag, and one solution is to introduce another crime, another murder. This is the land of complications, and the more the better.

The ending would seem to be the easiest part to write. The sleuth pulls together all the clues, applies brilliant deduction or magical intuition, or whatever her particular skill is, and the villain is caught. The ending, however, is more than the climax, more than the capture of the bad guy. The ending is, in one measure, the definition of the story the reader has been following. If the sleuth has been working with or intermittently encountering one who could be a romantic interest, the ending could focus on that, and that by itself redefines the story. Or, if the sleuth has been struggling with a particular burden and overcomes that at the end, either through confronting the villain or discovering something in the process, the story shifts from romance to personal journey. Or, suppose the sleuth has learned something important about family, her own or another's, that changes the tone of the story yet again.

I am grappling with these choices now as I come to the end of a story about a young woman who was born into a family of healers. Through a deathbed confession, she learns about a theft from her home before she was born. When she attempts to reclaim the stolen articles, she uncovers a body. This is a story of family, a marriage that never happened and one that did, the sacrifices made by another to preserve her marriage, and learning to care for a dwindling parent. I have written all but the last one or two scenes, and in choosing the final ones I will be choosing how readers will look back on the entire story. Through the frame I construct, will they see a romance, a definition of the role of the paranormal in ordinary life, a story of families undermined by years of lies, or families preserved at all cost?

I have read several books lately that have powerful stories but weak or extremely unsatisfactory endings, as though the story is enough for the reader and when it's time to end, the writer just stops writing, plugging in any scene that will serve to end the story. In my view the ending is much more organic than that. This week I'm finding the ending for the story of Felicity, a young healer living in a farm community who discovers truths about herself, her family, and the world she lives in. And I have to decide on which one to explore in the final scene.

The Middle (the part between Beginning and Ending)

Critics and writers talk often about the three-act play, or division of a story into beginning, middle and end. We recite this division as though all three parts were equal in length and purpose. But they are anything but.

The beginning must be intriguing and do its work in a matter of one or two sentences, and after that perhaps in a matter of paragraphs or a few pages. Writers learn to craft strong openings in order to get the reader into the story, and it is not unusual for the opening to be the most polished part of the book. Writers think hard about the perfect opening, the perfect first sentence, the perfect early revelation to capture the reader's imagination. First lines are studied and replicated, practiced and fretted over. No writer gets far with weak openings.

The writer often knows the ending before any other part of the book, except perhaps for who will be the protagonist. The ending has a promise and a shape that may be malleable, fluid, but it exists as a gravitational pull as soon as the writer has the idea for a story. The ending tells the writer where she is going and if she's on the right road, on a detour, stuck going round in a rotary, or going over the wrong bridge. The ending is the target, the reward, and the most fun to write. I sometimes find myself speeding up as I see it approaching because I'm excited to be there, to have the fun of finishing it off and letting all the secrets fall out. Of course, the ending may change as I slog my way through the writing, but it retains its promise of a safe harbor after a storm.

The problem is the middle. The middle is the story. If the beginning is the promise, and the ending is the reward, the middle is the reality, the reason a reader picks up the book and sees it through to the end. The beginning has the pleasure of anticipation, the ending has the excitement of the reward, but the middle is work. The middle is also the biggest challenge to the writer.

I'm in the middle of my current work-in-progress, and at every scene I check myself to make sure I'm moving forward, that I'm playing out the threads introduced in the first few pages and chapters. I can introduce complications, new characters, deepen earlier discoveries with new interpretations, but I can't change direction without such a change being first promised in the beginning.

To make sure I keep moving forward in a manner true to the opening I keep a list of items that have been alluded to or referred to explicitly that the protagonist must deal with by the end. If she encounters a character who suggests that someone is not telling the truth, she must follow up on that, and determine which one is lying, or concealing something, and then why. If she thinks in the beginning that someone is hiding something from her, she has to spell that out and then follow up. What is being hidden? Where is it? Why is it being hidden? Who hid it?

The protagonist of my current WIP is Lissie, a nickname for Felicity, and the story opens with the observation that she has never known fear. I don't mean the fear of being late for a train or missing a flight, or the fear of being caught in a lie, but the bone-melting fear and terror that may come only once in a lifetime. There is a reason for this, and even Lissie doesn't know why this hasn't happened to her because it has happened to all the other women in her family, and it's one of the reasons they are able to do the kind of work they do. Intrigued? So am I.

Lissie has reached middle age without experiencing certain crucial passages that her female ancestors went through, and she knows it is preventing her from achieving something important. She is a healer, and her life is circumscribed by tradition, but she has long been committed to this life. When she discovers a dead body where she had gone to search for something else, she is pushed off the track of her life as a healer. This is the content of the middle of my WIP.

The middle plays out the promises of the beginning, and links those with the ending. Lissie finds a dead body instead of what she was searching for. She must first solve the murder before she can recover the real goal when she broke into an empty house to dig up a cellar in the middle of the night.

Her personal journey is tied to this discovery of a body and her search for a solution for the crime. When the crime is solved, she'll be that much closer to understanding her own journey. This is the middle, and this is the real work of the writer.

I've reached 39,000 words. Wish me luck for the rest of the journey.