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Writing Excuses 19.51: And That Was That
Dec. 25th, 2024 02:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mbarkerWriting Excuses 19.51: And That Was That
Key points: Endings! Climax, plus wrap up (aka denouement). Compare end to the beginning. Not just a return to home, but something that reminds us of the beginning, but shows the change. Who, where, what, why do I care? Surprising, yet inevitable, with a lean towards inevitable. Don't just stop, let us see the characters settling into their new status quo. Give the reader a little dessert, some candy! Beware the new question or problem ending! Sometimes cliffhangers are okay. Just make sure the ending is satisfying to the reader. Watch out for shoving the unanswered stuff in the closet! Cliffhangers... how do you give a sense of conclusion while the plot is still open, and there are still big questions hanging? Different kinds of questions: character/relationship questions versus plot/world questions. Use the M.I.C.E. quotient! Lingering effect. Resolving shots. Where will the reader's head canon take them? Think about things you have read that you liked the way they made you feel. Emotional beats, body beats. Playlists!
[Season 19, Episode 51]
[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.
[Season 19, Episode 51]
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] And That Was That.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
[Erin] So, we're going to talk a little bit about endings and how you have your big moment of climactic excitement and then how you wrap it all up for your reader. When I started thinking about this, I was really thinking about fantasy fiction. Because I feel like in fantasy, the world , like, often changes in these very big, dramatic, like, big ways, and then has... You have to make sense of all that and still bring it back to something that hits home for the reader.So I'm worndering how you all do that?
[Dan] Well, earlier this month we talked about Toy Story, and Toy Story does this wonderfully. That birthday scene at the beginning where they're all freaking out, oh, no, we're going to get a new toy, how is it going to disrupt our status quo? We get that exact scene at the very end, but we get it instead of we need to see if Buzz Lightyear is the new toy, and instead it is Buzz Lightyear is my best friend and we're working together to see what the next toy is going to be. What this is doing, and what I try to do in my writing, is compare the end to the beginning. It doesn't have to be a let's go back to the Shire and see how we've changed. That mythological return to home kind of idea. It can just be something that reminds us of the beginning but shows that it has changed. Recontextualizes it, sees it from a different perspective, so that we can go, oh, okay. Things have changed. A doesn't exactly equal A anymore, because we've added B to it.
[Mary Robinette] I found that I… I do a very similar thing, that I try to look for those resonance moments. I often think about it as doing like the beginning and inverse. And at the beginning of a story, a novel you're attempting to do, to ground the reader with who, where, what, why do I care. At the end, I find that I actually also need to hit those beats again. That I need to let people know who we are with, like, how my character change… Has changed, who they are now. Where we are. Sometimes it's a literal different place, but also, like, what the environment is. And then, the reason to care. It's like why is this important to my character and in giving some aspect of interiority to the character, really helps, for me, like to bring that sense of oh, we're home. This is the return. Even in stories where it's not, oh, and happily ever after. But this is moment.
[Howard] I'm a big fan of the surprising yet inevitable. And if I have to choose between surprising and inevitable, I will choose inevitable. Because that lets the reader feel smart. If I choose surprising, but non sequitur, then I often just make the reader angry. And so… Am I always clever enough to surprise the reader? No. Frankly, I'm not. So I look at surprising, yet inevitable, as the high bar, and reach for inevitability first.
[DongWon] When I think about authors who are famously bad at endings, or at least people complain about their endings a lot…
[Laughter]
[DongWon] So… The safest one to mention is Steven King, for example. Right? People hate Steven King's endings. Especially in his earlier novels. The thing that I notice about these is that they end abruptly. They don't give space for the dénouement, to use the fancy term for it. Right? That beat past the declining action where we get to see the characters entering their new status quo. The reason… I think that that is so unsatisfying. Right? And I think you guys are talking about really excellent points in terms of closing these parentheses, referring back to the initial moments, but also, as the reader, I want my candy now. Right? Like, I've eaten the full meal, but I do want dessert at this point. I want that last bite to leave with that gives me a sense of this was all worth it. Right? And sometimes that bite is a reward of, like, seeing the happy ending for them. Right? To go to Lord of the Rings, Samwise Gamgee getting married, having a good time. That is a candy for Sam. For me, also, the candy is Frodo having to leave the Shire, because he's too traumatized. Right? Because that's something that tells me this journey meant something. It was so weighty and so difficult that poor sweet Frodo is shattered at the end of it. Right? To me, that makes so much of the arc of the whole story feel so heavy and rich and bountiful to me. Because I had that emotional moment at the end. People complain all the time that Lord of the Rings has four endings. I think it's important that it has each of those endings. It tells us that this… I spent the last however many months of my life reading these massive books or however many hours watching these movies that I did something worthwhile. Because the writers took me seriously enough to make sure that I felt good at the end of it.
[Mary Robinette] This is something that I had a hard time with when I transitioned from writing short stories to novels, is that I would hit the landing and I'd get out, and I wouldn't give the audience time to breathe and to have that candy. I love that metaphor of the way to describe it. One of the things that I see people do who are historically bad at endings, in addition to the and now we just stop, is that they will introduce a new question, a new problem. And this is very tempting to do all the time, especially, I think, with fantasy. It's like, and what about the other dragon?
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] And it's like, uhuh. Because that's… You're gearing up for a sequel. Not every book has to have a sequel. Often, if you do that, it doesn't feel like the book's ended. So try not to introduce a new story question at the end, trying not to like wrap… Ramp the tension up as you're heading towards the end. So the trick that I've found for myself is that I write that last chapter, my dénouement, my epilogue, I kind of write it as a standalone short story with the same characters and on the same theme.
[Howard] For… [Sigh] Okay. There are a bazillion different structures that we could be working within. And, primarily, when I talk about satisfying readers, I'm talking about satisfying myself and my own familiarity with structures that are primarily Western. And so within those structures, I try to make sure that for the first two thirds… After I hit two thirds of the book, I'm not allowed to introduce new characters, new technologies, new settings, new anything, because I don't want to do that exact thing, Mary Robinette. I don't want to drop a big fat question at the end, and I don't want to drop something that feels like a deus ex machina. The last third of the book, I have to use the toys that I put on the table in the first two thirds. And for me, for the structures and genres that I work within, that's pretty effective for forcing me to narrow my options for an ending.
[Dan] Well, I think it's important to remember that there is a difference between an open-ended ending and a cliffhanger ending. Look at the first Star Wars movie. We know when the Death Star goes down that the Empire's much bigger than this. We know that Darth Vader is still alive. But because of the order in which they present that information to us, we end on an incredibly final satisfying note. It doesn't feel like a stretch to keep telling this story in more movies. But also, we're not left with lingering questions. There's no last minute stinger scene of Darth Vader tumbling in his tie fighter and we go, dumdum-dum, he's still alive. We already know that because that was given to us during the climax. So you can have these kinds of things. You just need to end us on that moment that helps us feel resolved and satisfied.
[Erin] That's sort of reminds me of something we said all the way back when we were talking about beginnings, which is about building reader trust by asking questions and then answering them. I think there's a little bit of that at the end, too. Like, you want to make sure you've answered enough questions in this book that if you raise, like, one additional… Not raise, but if there is an additional piece of information out there, there's more to the world, it feels as if the reader's still got the questions that they had for this book answered, and that they trust that you will answer those questions, like, in the future. I will say that, like, as a… I am… People who are horrible at endings, it me.
[Laughter]
[Erin] So I… Like, one of the things that I do that's a, like, an in between mistake, is the shove everything in a closet. So, this is, like, you're cleaning your room, and you get to the point where you've taken a lot of things out because you were organizing everything, but it looks really bad at that moment. You're like, oh, gosh, everything is everywhere. You could put things in the new places you've picked for them, or you could shove it all in a closet and then, like, close the door. So, sometimes, when things feel like they've ended… When I've written endings and I'm like, this feels unsatisfying… It's because there are things I just didn't want to deal with. Like, I was like, I just didn't really want to answer how they got to this place. So I just decided to ignore it.
[Laughter]
[Howard] In act one, you hang a snow shovel and a trash compactor on the mantle, and everything will fit in the closet in act three.
[Erin] Exactly.
[DongWon] Well, speaking of unsatisfying endings, I think we need to go to break for a couple minutes, and then we'll be right back.
[Mary Robinette] Hey, friends. The 2025 retreat registration is open. We have two amazing writing retreats coming up and we cordially invite you to enroll in them. For those of you who sign up before January 12, 2025… How is that even a real date? We're off… [Background noise] As you can probably hear, my cat says we've got a special treat for our friends. We are offering a little something special to sweeten the pot. You'll be able to join several of my fellow Writing Excuses hosts and me on a Zoom earlybird meet and greet call to chit chat, meet fellow writers, ask questions, get even more excited about Writing Excuses retreats. To qualify to join the earlybird meet and greet, all you need to do is register to join a Writing Excuses retreat. Either our Regenerate Retreat in June or our annual cruise in September 2025. Just register by January 12. Learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.
[Erin] Chants of Sennaar is one of my favorite games that I've played in the last year. I'm not the only one. It was nominated for the Nebula award for game writing. So it is a great experience for anyone. Here's what happens. You basically show up in a tower, and people are speaking to you, and it's like, "Mum, mum, mummum." You're just seeing symbols and you have to figure out from context what their words mean. That's what the gameplay is. You're figuring out, oh, okay. Mammut means plant, and blah blah blah blah means upstairs. And you're figuring it out and you're putting it together. And then, you move to another level where people are saying cheek check bawk bawk… Whatever. They're using a completely different language, and whatever it is, you have to figure out that one. Then you have to figure out how to understand what each of these different level people are doing, what their language is, and figure out that, like, tick-tock in one language means rawr rawr in another, and bring people together through puzzle solving and language. It's amazing. The art is great, the music is great. And if you've ever thought hey, writing can drive people wild, this is a game that I know that you'll love. So, check out Chants of Sennaar.
[DongWon] Okay. So we were talking about this a little bit before the break. But I was wondering if we could talk about cliffhangers more specifically. Right? Because I think there's a specific art to ending on big open questions leading into book 2, leading into book 3, whatever it is, but still giving readers a sense of completion. Right? I was thinking… I re-watched the second Spiderverse movie the other day, which ends on an incredible cliffhanger. But also I… When I watch that movie, it's such a satisfying sense of completion, because questions were answered about the characters. Things were closed off about when Stacy started here, she ends here. Miles starts here, Miles ends here. So how do you get people… Characters to a sense of conclusion while the overall plot clearly is still hanging open and there's huge questions about what's going to happen to these people?
[Erin] I think… I love the Spiderverse as well as an example, for one thing, because it's just a great movie.
[DongWon] It's incredible.
[Erin] Also, it reminded me that there are different types of questions. I think sometimes we forget that. That there are character questions and relationship questions that we're answering that are different than plot questions or world questions. So I think figuring out what the core is of the story, going back and looking at the beginning. What was the promise you were making? I feel like Spiderverse, for example, is a movie that promises an emotional… That there's going to be an emotional and character development. And since it delivers that and answers some of those questions, I don't care as much about the theory dangling plot questions that are going to be…
[DongWon] Yeah.
[Erin] Answered in the next movie.
[Dan] Yeah. For me, a lot of this comes down to making sure that you really know what your story is about. I… For example, and this is a very thin example. I'm sure I could think of better ones if I tried. But, Fellowship of the Rings… The movie, in particular, ends on this, well, and now we are out of time. Please come back next year. But that's the plot. Emotionally, what most of this story has been about is Frodo trying to decide is he in control of his own destiny, and is he willing to put other people in danger? And that emotional plot conflict gets resolved very solidly at the end when he's like, yes, I am in control. No, I won't put anyone else in danger. I'm going to go do this myself. So, from that perspective, it does feel done and satisfying. Because we have tied off a major thread. Even though there's clearly many others. So… Fellowship, I think, is an example where they could have tied that off better if that had been a priority for them. But making sure that you know what the story is actually about. I just watched a really wonderful movie called Polite Society which is a Pakistani British action comedy thing about sisters. These two sisters start off best friends, and then this huge rift shows up and it ends up with this giant like martial arts punch out. They defeat the villain, and a lesser movie would end there. This movie remembered, nope, this is a story about sisters. So we get that breathing room denouement at the end where they are back together, best friends, doing the things they used to do, and that lets us know that the real story is over.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I will surprise no one. So, the M.I.C.E. quotient…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] But, the M.I.C.E. quotient is a very useful tool for thinking about these and categorizing them. So. Sometimes what I will do at the end is I will sit down and look, okay, I started with an event story and then I've got a character story. Most of my middle is actually spent in a milieu, and then I wrap that up. But then I still have my event and character that I have to wrap up at the end. And I will often make a plan to go back and revise the beginning so I'm opening things in different orders. But at the end, going back to something Dan said earlier about the order in which you present the information to the reader, that's what I think about most when I'm doing these endings is what emotion do I want the reader to walk away with. If you think of it like a drug, what is the lingering effect? Like, you put up with a bunch of side effects, but there's this one long term effect that you want. What is that one long term effect? So, for cliffhangers, the long term effect that I want is what happens next? So that's the beat that I'm going to land on at the very very end. And if I don't want that cliffhanger, the what happens next, then I'm either going to not raise that question at all or I am going to put it earlier so that the beat of oh, I feel good about these characters and they seem healthy right now.
[Dan] We have talked so much this year about establishing shots. But we haven't really talked about this kind of resolving shot. The satisfying shot at the end. How do you want… What promises do you want to make at the beginning, but then what emotions do you want to leave them with at the end? I think that's a really smart thing to think about, and I'm going to call it a resolving shot.
[Mary Robinette] That's great. I'm going to claim that and copyright it right now.
[Laughter]
[Howard] One of the questions I ask myself when I'm writing and ending… And I ask myself this question because I'm the sort of person who consumes a thing and then immediately does what I'm going to get to in a moment, and that is where will the reader's head canon take them after they read the last line? What's the story they are automatically going to try to tell themselves next? I don't control that. I… They're going to take what I wrote and then they're going to… If I don't write an ending, they're going to write their own ending. If I write an ending they don't like, they're going to email me.
[Laughter]
[Howard] If I… But what is the head canon that I want to leave them with. And often, that… Using that as a framing for the resolving shot, that's… The cowboys riding off into the sunset. Well, you know, there's another Silverado down the road that will need their help, and that's the head canon that we get for that kind of thing.
[Erin] I'm wondering in setting up these sort of resolving shots, how do we know? I think that we've been assuming that you know exactly the feeling that you want to end with. But what if you're not sure? Is there anything you can look to, sort of in your writing so far, in order to figure out what is the best way to end things? Where… What is the thing that will satisfy the reader and yourself as the writer?
[Howard] For young writers, and when I say young, I mean writers who are new to writing, what are the things that you read that you liked the way it made you feel? Model your writing on the feeling map of those things, and… That's a great place to start. For writers who are more advanced, you already have a million techniques that are better than anything I can tell you.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Just write.
[DongWon] Yeah, I mean, really it is digging down to what is the emotional thing that you want to leave. Right? Like, what's the thing that will make your reader feel the book in their body, when you leave them with it. Because that's the thing they're going to be the most excited about. So, if you're me, how do you make them as sad as possible in the last scene?
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Right? Or, in the case of Spiderverse, ending on a beat that is so exciting everyone's jumping out of their chairs and yelling. Right? Like, it really depends on what you're trying to accomplish. But I think leaning into the genres of the body is the way to go for these last beats. Making them laugh, making them cheer, making them cry. Those are the kinds of things. Or making… Feeling a saccharine sweetness. Right? I think that's… When you want to leave that lingering taste, think about how do you do it with this kind of intensity.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I want to say that that feeling in the body is really the key because sometimes I will see writers say I want them to think, ah, that was a really clever twist. It's like, that's not… That's a… That's not a…
[Dan] That's not an emotion.
[Mary Robinette] That's a beat and a moment, and it's not something that lingers with you. It is not something that you necessarily feel in your body. Sometimes… But, ah, that writer was clever. It's like that's not… That's not a useful goal.
[Howard] Yes. Surprising yet inevitable is not satisfying if it doesn't also have the body shot…
[DongWon] Right.
[Howard] Accompanying it.
[DongWon] Horror movies end on that last jump scare because they want you feeling bad and nervous as you walk to your car as you leave the theater. They want you to be afraid as you leave because that is going to be the thing you remember about that movie. If you feel that way, then you're going to get home and be like, yo, you gotta go watch that movie. I was so scared the whole time. Even if you were only scared in the last 10 minutes of it. Right?
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that you can do if you're… We've talked about looking at other media that you consume, but the other thing that's really simple is you can make yourself a playlist.
[Yeah]
[Mary Robinette] That encapsulates the moods that you want. If you listen to a song and you're like, that! That's what I want my book to feel like. A lot of times it is because you're feeling that song in your body, and you can start to reach for what are the tools that I can use. Some of the tools that we talked about earlier when we were talking about character, some of the tools that are coming… That were coming out of language. These are all tools that you can use to manipulate that last moment and, yes, manipulate your reader so that they have that body feeling.
[DongWon] Think about mood [garbled], think about playlists, those kinds of things.
[Erin] What I love about all this is we talked earlier about looking at the beginning, and then look at the beginning and the ending. I love that, because I'm thinking on my playlist, maybe I want to relisten to that first song…
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Erin] That got me excited at the very end. Because that reminds me of the feeling that got me into the story, and that's maybe the feeling that I want my reader to have going out of it.
[Erin] And, with that, I have your homework for the week. Which is going to be to think of how your story, how your novel, how what you've been writing this month is going to end. Think of the first ending you can think of, and then think what might be the next scene, then write that. And then, the very last thing that we want you to do, is to celebrate yourself. Because no matter where you started, no matter where you end up, you have tried something really difficult this month, and we're really excited for you, proud of you, and really want to see whatever story that you have. I can't wait to read it.
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.
[Howard] Have you ever wanted to ask one of the Writing Excuses hosts for very specific, very you-focused help. There's an offering on the Writing Excuses Patreon that will let you do exactly that. The Private Instruction tier includes everything from the lower tiers plus a quarterly, one-on-one Zoom meeting with a host of your choice. You might choose, for example, to work with me on your humorous prose, engage DongWon's expertise on your worldbuilding, or study with Erin to level up your game writing. Visit patreon.com/writingexcuses for more details.
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