Plotting the End of Your Novel

Anyone who has ever watched Gone with the Wind  knows how it ends.  If they remember absolutely nothing else, they remember Rhett Butler’s final words: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”  And so goes one of the most memorable endings in the history of film.

Just as your beginning needs to hook the reader, your ending needs to satisfy.  As a long-time reader of fiction, I have to say that there have been endings that have disappointed me.  I have narrowed the disappointments down to two main categories: the flat and the unrealistic.  

Some endings fall flat because they promise more than they deliver.  Novels that fall into this category are usually ones that have a great deal of build-up.  They hook the reader at the beginning and don’t let go until, well, the end.  And then the end goes splat.  A flat ending doesn’t quite deliver what the story promised.  Don’t create an adrenaline-laced story only to have the ending be anticlimactic.  Always deliver in the end what you promised at the beginning.

In other stories, the problem is not so much a flat ending but one that leaves you saying, “Really?”  Believability is to a story what oxygen is to the human body.  If you can’t make your story believable or plausible, you can’t expect your readers to stick with you.  One of your jobs as a writer is to make the impossible or unthinkable possible.  It is not that you can’t test reality or veer from reality in your stories.  You just need to make sure that the end fits realistically with the rest of the story.  Don’t have your story happen in one reality and then end it in another. 

Successful plotting requires that you have some idea of how you want your story to end.  If you know how you want your story to end, you are less likely to have an ending that falls flat or fails the believability test.

Six Tips for Plotting

Author James Frey offers six tips for plotting in his article titled “The Philosophy of Plot,” written for The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing, that I think are worth exploring. 

 

1.      Chart each major character’s development through actions.

In all good stories, the characters must experience some form of transformation.  In other words they must change, for better or for worse.  And, you must have a general idea of how you want your characters to transform prior to writing the first page in order to work out the actions that must accompany these transformations.  Granted the transformations may evolve in ways you don’t expect, but they are required for a strong plot.

2.      Chart each major character’s actions and indicate his or her motivations.

Motivations lead to actions, and actions reveal who your characters are.  Your characters will seem more real if you, the writer, understand the motivations of your characters.

3.      Spend some time brainstorming.

Of this point, Frey says to “make lists of what the character might do.”  He also goes on to say that you should write whatever comes to mind.  Later you can weed out the actions that don’t work.

4.      Conduct interviews with your characters or write diaries in their voices.

These are good ways to get to know your characters apart from yourself.  You can get inside their heads and in a sense become them, which helps you create more realistic characters.

5.      Follow the “Would he really?” test for believability.

The key here is to not have your character do something out of character.  Don’t confuse the reader with the unexpected.  If your story is going to end with your character doing something brash or outrageous at the end of the story, prepare the reader by having the character do something early on that fits the behavior.

6.      Make sure your characters are well orchestrated.

Which would be more interesting: a cop pitted against another cop, or a cop pitted against an alien?  I think it is safe to say that most would say the latter.  Why?  The larger the contrast, the more curious the reader becomes about the outcome. 

Frey uses the example of a “sweet, naïve, refined young ballet dancer” paired with an “old, sour, burned-out, cynical, former prima donna.”  Just keep in mind that there needs to be contrast.  Same verses same will often make for a stagnant plot.              

Frey also says, “All good plots, whether for serious fiction or for entertainments, result from dramatic characters who are on fire to obtain goals and who work like hell to achieve them.”

Handling Subplots in Your Novel

You may find that in plotting your novel you have additional smaller plots that pop up in addition to your main plot.  These are called subplots.

Subplots can add a great deal of depth depending on the type of story you have.  They can also keep the story moving during a lull in the main plot.  But just as a main plot must follow the path of conflict, crisis, and resolution, the subplot must do the same.

For instance, in Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson, a family gets shipwrecked on a deserted island.  Initially, they must face the daunting task of finding food and shelter.  Later, the two oldest boys decide they want to explore the island in hopes of finding other inhabitants and end up rescuing a girl disguised as a cabin boy, whom of course they both fall in love with. To complicate matters, the girl had been the prisoner of some pirates who decide to come for her. But the main plot is the family’s struggle to make the island as much like home as possible while maintaining the hope of getting off.

The battle over the girl’s affection is a subplot with its own conflict or complication, crisis, and resolution.

Complication or conflict: the brothers find out the cabin boy is actually a girl, and they both find her attractive.

Crisis: their jealousy leads to heated exchanges and eventually escalates into a fist fight.

Resolution: the girl makes her choice, and the losing brother accepts the reality. 

One way you can handle subplots is by weaving them together as you would a braid.  Ansen Dibell describes it this way in her book Plot:

In long fiction, plots don’t merely alternate with subplots: they’re often woven together in something very like a braid.  One strand loops around to the outside, out of sight, then warps in or under to briefly become the central point before warping off for another turn.

Once you have the initial situation running, with the major characters established and facing some crucial problem the reader can tell isn’t going to go away, a braided plot won’t just continue on. You’ll bring in a new subject, one that has some new plot thread which you make clear but leave unresolved so that the reader can see that there are more developments to come.

She also writes that subplots work best for stories with plots that are direct (A and B meet, A and B lose each other, A and B find each other again) because it can give them an added dimension and make the stories less predictable. Conversely, subplots may be a problem in stories with central plots that are slow to unfold and are less direct.

The thing to remember is that subplots should only be used as long as the main plot is strong enough to handle the diversions.

Tips for Planning Your Novel Part 2

When writing your first novel, it is always good to have a plan.  You need a map that helps you know where you are and where you are going.

I mentioned in my last blog that a good place to start in your planning is to get a notebook or binder and to create three main sections in it: plot, characters, and outline.  

Here in your notebook you can write freely about the plot ideas that pop into your head. As a result, your plotting section can grow to be many pages, which is why binders are helpful.

Plotting helps you work through the scenes and events that will ultimately communicate the point of your story.  Think back to your favorite novel or movie.  What was the theme? What events occurred in the story that helped to communicate the theme?

Simply put, plotting is crafting the story so that it makes your point. 

Once you have decided on your problem situation you can begin to think more clearly about your characters. Here you can start jotting down ideas for your characters including their names. 

This may seem unimportant, but the names you pick can be significant, as novelist and creative writing professor Phyllis Whitney points out in her book Guide to Fiction Writing. She writes how she slipped up in Listen for the Whisperer by using the names Leigh and Laura. By the time she realized the confusion it created, it was too late to make any changes. 

Some writers, she says, fall into a first-letter obsession without realizing it.  For instance, using Jim, John, and Jack in the same story may cause the reader to spend extra energy keeping them straight.

To keep from doing this in your story, I suggest writing down a list of all the first and last names of your characters and going through them to make sure you are not using too many names that start with the same letter.

You can also begin the process of getting to know your characters: what they look like, what they do for a living, whether they are married or single, et cetera.  Here you can decide who your characters are and what parts they are going to play.

    

Lastly, I want to discuss the outline.  When I say outline here, I do not necessarily mean the Roman numeral variety with points A, B, and C.  This is just the point at which you can decide what you want to have happen in each chapter of your book.  Begin each chapter on a new page and write down the main events and scenes you would like to include in each of those chapters.

Know, however, that nothing is set in stone. You may find that once you start writing, your story evolves into something quite different from what you had mapped out in your outline. 

 

As the old saying goes, a map is not a journey.  It’s just a starting point.