Tying off the threads

 Following on from last week's post, having now finished reading both the blockbuster and the short environmental novel I have a lot of thoughts about endings,  This is particularly relevant, as I'm now approaching the ending on the re-write of my own novel.

The first thing I've realised as I write this is that I can't remember the final scenes of the blockbuster.  I can recall quite a lot of the story, but not the closing scenes.  Which is interesting, given how writers are always told that the ending is just as important as the beginning.

That book is by a much-published SF author who is highly regarded in the field.  It was published by Gollancz, one of the biggest mainstream SF publishing genres.  Two of the most highly-regarded editors worked on the manuscript.  And still the ending is disappointing.  Having looked it up, I realised that it ends with the pirate the main character has been battling all the way through the book being taken into custody. Right has triumphed, which ought to make for a satisfying ending, but it doesn't.

I think the reason why it fails is because the denouement goes on too long.  After the pirate is arrested she and the main character fall into yet another argument, a re-hash of the tedious philosophical arguments we've already have far too much of in the middle of the book.  The result is that what should be a satisfying ending just fizzles out.  It's not crisp enough.

The environmental novel had a different problem.  Last week I said that it was multi viewpoint, and that it wasn't clear how the different stories were linked together.  Well, that continued right through to the end.  No narrative linking thread ever emerged, leaving the book as a collection of incidents.  And it just finished after another of those narratives.  All the scientists were still fighting the erasure of their data, and scientists were still disappearing mysteriously.  In short, nothing had changed.  I'd argue that this book didn't even have an ending,  It just ran out of incidents to report on.  And that was very unsatisfying.

We're always told that our characters must change in some way by the end of the story.  In this book   none of the characters really changed.  At the end of their narratives they were still doing exactly the same as they were at the beginning..

Reading these two books. has helped me refine the ending of the novel I'm working on.   What I had in the first draft as the Supreme Ordeal is a great scene, but it occurs way too soon, about twelve chapters from the end.  So I needed to re-think that.

I needed more danger and more complications.  So I've decided that disrupting this evil religion (my original supreme ordeal) will lead to riots in the city.  My characters will be trapped in a building there when the riots break out, and I'm going to have some of those men storm the building and threaten my characters.

That should get them properly exposed to danger, and give me a big set-piece scene.  It will be two chapters from the end, in the right place, and the denouement will be much shorter. I'm much happier with  that structure, and I think it'll work well.

Reading often informs my writing, and in this case, seeing what doesn't work as an ending has helped me to figure out what should work for my book.