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ters. I wanted to leave the book ambiguous and open-ended. I
want readers to decide for themselves what happened." This is
usually a response to criticism that the story feels as if it "just
stopped."
Unfortunately, the "let-readers-decide-for-themselves"
stance is usually a failed defense. Readers don't want to decide
what happened to the characters. They want you to decide, on
the dual grounds that you're the writer and that they've just read
four hundred pages of your prose anticipating this very informa-
tion you're now withholding. Except in a few rare instances, a
story is not helped by being left, from the readers' point of view,
uncompleted. Provide the closure your readers want. Write the
denouement.
114 BEGINNINGS, MIDDLES AND ENDS
When you do, keep it brief. Brevity is important to a denoue-
ment because if it goes on too long, it will leach all emotion from
the climax. End while your reader is still affected by your big
scene. Anything else will feel anticlimactic.
As a rule of thumb, the more subtle and low-key the climax
in action and tone, the briefer the denouement should be. The
climax of Jurassic Park is highly dramatic: the destruction of an
entire island. Such intense action creates enough momentum to
carry the reader through the two-and-a-half-page denouement
without risking anticlimax. At the other end of the intensity spec-
trum is a quiet short story in which the climactic action is a
change of perception inside the protagonist's head. If such a
story has a denouement at all, it will probably be only a sentence
or two.
Similarly, dramatization ensures that your denouement feels
like part of the story, not a chunk of exposition tacked on after
the story's over. Try to show what happens to your characters by
showing them in action. Jurassic Park ends with a conversation
between one of the survivors and a researcher not connected
with the dinosaur disaster. Gone With the Wind's denouement
portrays Scarlett alone, but she's having an intense conversation
with herself. A note of caution, however: Whatever action you
choose to dramatize, your denouement should be fairly mild.
Otherwise it may compete with the climax.
TO EPILOGUE OR NOT TO EPILOGUE
The Jurassic Park denouement is set off in its own chapter, which
is called "Epilogue: San Jose." What do you gain by labeling your
denouement an epilogue?
Although there are exceptions, contemporary novelists gen-
erally set the denouement apart in an epilogue only if it differs
significantly from the main narrative in time or place, or if it's
going to be in a radically different style.
Thus, the action of Jurassic Park's epilogue occurs off the
island, in a city more than twenty miles away, days after the de-
struction of the island dinosaurs. The epilogue in Bonfire of the
Satisfying Endings: Delivering on the Promise 115
Vanities takes place a year after the main story, and consists en-
tirely of a newspaper article in the New York Times. The epilogue
of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale occurs hundreds of
years after the book's action. The protagonist is dead. This epi-
logue takes the form of a symposium transcript: historians dis-
cussing the novel events from their own far-future, radically dif-
ferent perspective.
If the events of your novel require wrapping up in a different
place, time or narrative style, consider calling the wrap-up an
epilogue. This alerts the reader that something different is com-
ing up, softening the sense of discontinuity from the main narra-
tive. The label "epilogue" can also shift reader expectations
about tone, from the immediacy of the climax to a longer, more
contemplative view of what that climax might mean. " 'An epi-
logue,' " wrote John Irving's character T.S. Garp, " 'is more than
a body count. An epilogue, in the disguise of wrapping up the
past, is really a way of warning us about the future.' " (Irving
evidently believed Garp; the epilogue in The World According to
Garp warns us about the futures of fourteen characters.)
THE SPECIAL CASE OF THE SERIES BOOK
Every book in a series (except the last and are you sure you're
not going to write another one?) bears a special burden. In addi-
tion to standing on its own as a satisfying reading experience, it
must also leave the door open for the next book. This means
that things can't be too thoroughly wrapped up. If the hero is
dead, the town destroyed, the war over and the lovers married,
what will you write about?
Actually, there are three kinds of series books, and what you
write about depends on which kind you're creating. A series like
Sue Grafton's "alphabet mysteries" (A Is For Alibi, etc.) features
the same protagonist in every book. This means detective Kinsey
Millhone must finish every book alive, still willing to be a detec-
tive, and enough unchanged that readers who enjoyed her in
one book won't find her with a different personality in the next
book. If you write this kind of series, you need to make sure
116 BEGINNINGS, MIDDLES AND ENDS
your protagonist ends up in roughly the same professional and
emotional place she started. You'll have to emphasize plot over
character development.
In the second type of series you have more freedom, because
the books don't feature the same character but only the same
setting, or the same family, or maybe just the same universe.
Two very different examples: John Jakes's Kent Chronicles, which
follow several generations of an American family; and Isaac Asi-
mov's science-fiction Foundation series. In both series, the pro-
tagonist of one book doesn't necessarily appear in the next. Only
the conceptual framework a chain of descendants, or a future
controlled by the predictive genius of "psychohistory" remains
the same. Within that framework, anything can happen. Charac-
ters can change, die, or exit the story. When the author finishes
one story within the framework, he shifts focus to another pro-
tagonist.
The third kind of series also permits characters to change,
but without shifting focus from the initial protagonists. These [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]