Write Great Fiction--Plot & Structure (17 page)

So how do authors come up with those fantastic twist endings, the ones you don't see coming but sense are inevitable? The ones that leave you breathless and thrilled and unable to wait until the author's next book?

I'll tell you. I don't know.

I wonder if the authors themselves know. I suspect some do, but I also believe this is not a part of plotting that can be reduced to a formula.

However, I do believe there are some things you can do that will help your own inner writer generate possible twists for the ending.

First, you probably already have an ending in mind. You've been writing toward that ending, especially if you prefer to work with outlines (
see chapter ten for more on outlining systems
). And that's okay. Keep writing.

But as you get closer to the end of your first draft, pause and come up with ten alternative endings. Yes, I said ten.

And I don't mean take four weeks to do this. It should take less than thirty minutes. Brainstorm. The quicker the better. Let yourself go, and don't worry about justifying every one of them.

Once you've got your list, let your imagination cook the possibilities for a day or two.

Come back to your list and take the top four. Deepen them a little bit. Let them cook some more.

Finally, choose the one alternative ending that seems to work best as a twist — not an alternative ending at all, but an added surprise.

Figure out how to work that into your ending, and then go back into your novel and justify it somehow by planting little clues here and there.

There is your twist ending.

It is impossible to get more specific about technique here because every plot is going to be different. Remember that an ending must resolve all of the important plot issues, and those are going to vary from book to book.

Draw on the plot material sloshing around in your head. When it comes time to contemplate a little twist, you'll be ready. Give it some time and go for it just the way Harlan Coben does on the very last page of
Tell No One
. Trickster!

You may get to the end of your novel and find some loose threads hanging. There are a couple of things you can do to tie these up and prevent an infamous anti-climactic ending.

First, determine whether these loose threads are crucial or ancillary. What happened to a minor character's pants is probably not crucial to know. What he did with the stolen money probably is. There is no hard and fast way to do this. You just have to have a sense that your readers will be more concerned about some things and only vaguely interested in others.

But vague interest can turn to real frustration if those loose ends aren't tidied up.

If a loose thread is something major, you need to create a major scene, or a series of scenes to deal with it. This might necessitate extensive rewriting, but that's okay. Do it. Make it work.

With minor threads, it is often enough to have a character explain what happened. For example, in some of my law thrillers I'll have a character mention the legal fate of a character who did something bad in the middle of the book: “Oh, and they caught Smithers trying to escape into Canada. He goes on trial next month.”

Another technique is the short epilogue, though this must be well written and not merely an information dump.

In
Gone for Good
, author Harlan Coben ties up a major loose end with an epilogue that is a short excerpt from a newspaper story. It gives the feeling of real resolution without “author intrusion.”

The best way to catch loose ends is to have a couple of people read your manuscript. If they end up asking you questions like, “Hey, whatever happened to this guy?” or “What about the submarine they found off the coast of Maine in chapter two?” then you know you have some loose ends.

You want to leave your readers with a last page that makes the ending more than satisfying. You want it to be memorable, to stay with readers after the book is closed.

This is a matter of
resonance
. In dictionary terms, it is like the musical effect that comes from an
intensification and prolongation of sound that is pleasing to the ear
. It's that last note in a magnificent symphony that produces a feeling that affixes itself to the soul.

Working to make your last page like that is worth every ounce of your effort. It's the last impression, what psychologists call the
recency effect
. Your audience will judge your book largely by the feeling they have most recently, namely,
the end
. Leave a lasting impression and you will build a readership.

Think about the following.

Each word must be carefully chosen here. Not that this isn't a consideration elsewhere in your novel, but it is especially crucial here. Sometimes the words are clipped and to the point, as in this example from J.D. Salinger's
The Catcher in the Rye
: “Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

Sometimes a bit of the poet is called for, as in this excerpt from
Jewel
, by Bret Lott:

Only letters, rows of them, the first letter of her name. She's written thousands of these before, filled tablet and tablet and tablet, but on this night, they are enough. More than enough, the sky now black outside the kitchen window, the train tracks gone quiet until sometime late tonight, when the house will shudder once again, and God might wake me from my sleep, bring me to the bedroom window to see the train moving outside, that black shadow moving forward on into the night and leading me away from here, from Brenda Kay alone and asleep in the next room, from the rest of my children, from the ghosts of the lives I've been blessed enough and cursed enough to have led.

Only letters, labored, indifferent, yet full as she can make them of herself. Letters, I finally hear, singing with all they have, scores of them swirling round me in voices I'll never understand, but beautiful all the same, god smiling and smiling and smiling.

Often, dialogue works as a resonant ending, so long as it doesn't feel tacked on. How do you avoid that? By planting, earlier in the novel, similar dialogue.

In one of my novels,
The Nephilim Seed
, I have a bounty hunter helping a mother find her kidnapped daughter. He has a rather loose approach to his work. At one point, the mother asks him what they are going to do to get out of a particularly bad situation. The response:
“Improvise,” he said.

As the novel progresses, they are drawn to each other, but each has personal reasons for not wanting to get involved. At the end, however, the mutual attraction can't be denied. The last lines:

He took her hand then, and faced her. “I've been alone for so long,” he said. He didn't have to go on. Janice knew that this was his way of asking her if there was any way she could find a place in her life for him. In his voice and look were the collected vulnerabilities of a man who had been fleeing from life for years and didn't quite know what stopping would mean for him.

“It's been so long I guess I just don't know what to do next,” he said.

Janice smiled. She reached her hand behind his neck and pulled him gently toward her, kissing him softly on the cheek. It was warm and a little stubbly, but resilient. Then she whispered something in his ear.

“Improvise,” she said.

If there is a particular description of setting or character that is just right, this can make for a perfect ending.

In Stephen King's
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
, the rescued girl, Trisha, taps the visor of her cap and points her index finger up at the ceiling, a gesture that resonates because it has been explained earlier in the novel. She doesn't have to say a thing for the meaning to be clear.

Or a description can carry haunting reminders of what's been, and what may be to come. As in Daphne du Maurier's
Rebecca
:

He drove faster, much faster. We topped the hill before us and saw Lanyon lying in a hollow at our feet. There to the left of us was the silver streak of the river, widening to the estuary at Kerrith six miles away. The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.

There is a way to sum up the feelings of a character without making it seem like author intrusion. As we saw earlier, this is exactly how Dean Koontz does it in
Midnight
. Sam Booker has had a hard time with his teenage son, Scott. After all that has gone on in the novel, Sam returns home with people he has come to care for, and is able to embrace his son. Both begin to cry:

Looking over Scott's shoulder, he saw that Tessa and Chrissie had stepped into the room. They were crying too. In their eyes he saw an awareness that matched his, a recognition that the battle for Scott had only begun.

But it
had
begun. That was the wonderful thing. It
had
begun.

It is a tough slog to write a novel, so it's understandable that near the finish line writers might want to take a short cut.

Sometimes writers rush through their endings because they're so anxious to finish the novel after being at it so long. Professional writers working on deadline are especially prone to this.

How can you avoid getting tired and rushing your ending? Here are some suggestions:

[1] Dream.
The most original material in our entire writer's body dwells in dreamland. And the nice thing is it can happen all the time. You can dream at night involuntarily, or you can daydream at will.

So as you go through your novel, carve out times when you allow your imagination to feed you images, even if you already have mapped out an ending.

Get in the habit of jotting down your dreams when you get up in the morning. Keep a dream journal. Ask yourself how that dream might relate to your ending. Maybe it won't have any direct bearing, but it will give you a starting point for thinking more deeply about the ending.

You can encourage daydreams by listening to music. I like movie soundtracks for their various moods. Do some daydreaming and make notes. What you come up with may be the perfect image or scene for your ending.

If you do this periodically when writing your novel, you won't feel like you have to rush toward the ending.

[2] Think big.
Don't pull your punches at the end. Pour everything you have into it. You can always scale back during the rewrite. But you need good material to work with, and that comes from being passionate and working at optimum creativity on your ending.

[3] Take your time.
This requires discipline. Don't back yourself into a tight deadline corner. If you need to take a daylong break before you begin writing your ending, have the flexibility to take it. I don't recommend longer than a day because you want to keep the flow of your material coursing through your veins. But you don't want to feel like you have to break the sound barrier in order to finish.

Reread the last couple of chapters from five novels you love. Analyze each of them. Is it closed-ended? Up or down? Does it have a twist? Why does it work for you? This will help you understand your own writing preferences.

What sort of ending do you have in mind for your novel? Try writing the climactic scene. This does not have to be the scene you'll actually use, but it may be. At the very least it will get your writer's mind working on the end and allow yourself to understand your characters more deeply. Use this information in your writing.

Come up with two or three alternative endings. List as many as ten one-line possibilities. Then choose the two or three most promising, and sketch out the scenes in summary form (250 words maximum). If an alternative seems stronger than the one you've had in mind, use it. Keep the old ending as a possible twist at the end. Or keep your original ending, and use one of the alternatives as a possible twist.

Make a list of all the loose ends in your novel. You can do this as you write by keeping a separate document and recording the items as they come up. Create a strategy for tying them up with plot developments, minor characters, or using a newspaper story.

The novel of a thousand pages begins with a single scene.

— Proverb in Waiting

A good plot is about disturbance to characters' inner and outer lives.

Scenes are what we use to illustrate and dramatize those disturbances. Scenes are the essential building blocks of plot. And a plot is only as strong as its weakest block.

Readers may be willing to forgive other writing sins if they are reading scenes that plop them down on an emotional roller coaster. On the other hand, flat scenes are like the trams that take us to and from the park — slow, crowded, and hardly worth the ride. And readers aren't likely to take a ride like that more than once.

So make your scenes count, every one.

A scene is a fictional unit. If you string scenes together and they somehow relate, you can write a novel.

If you can make each one of your scenes truly unforgettable, you can write an unforgettable novel.

An unforgettable scene has something fresh. It has something surprising, and emotionally intense. It has characters we care about doing things that we
must
watch. You create unforgettable scenes by freshening what is forgettable, making the scenes come alive with tension and originality.

Write a scene for all it's worth, and then look at it again later. Change the dull parts. Try something new.