Endings: Happily Ever After – Or Not

After my weekly writing group today, a couple of us got into a long discussion about the challenge of endings. They seem so elusive. Somehow, you know when it feels wrong or feels right, but you can’t articulate it and, until you hit on it, it seems almost impossible to see how you’ll get there.

Let’s face it. Endings are hard. They can torture you, drive you to drink, send you into endless bouts of insomnia. We put them off. We impose them. We rush them. We drag them out. We want to satisfy the reader and ourselves. We want to get the damn thing finished and we never want to say goodbye, because the ending means leaving behind characters and a world that we’ve grown to know and love.

Lucy Calkins says endings should have important action, memorable images, something that reminds your reader of the heart of your story. Tricky concepts for my 3rd and 4th graders, who are still learning how to move beyond “That’s all I have to say!” or “I hope you like my story.” So, I give them helpful sentence frames as a scaffold: “I will always remember _____.” “I will never forget ________.” “At that moment, I knew ___.” “Now I know ______.” “From that day on ________.” If only it were that simple for grown-up writers!

But maybe it is. Folktales have handed down a collection of stock endings to us. Maybe those stock endings are just the master storytellers giving us scaffolding. We just have to figure out which kind of story we’re telling and what our story’s version of the stock ending would be.

“They lived happily ever after.” Are you setting your reader up for a happy ending? If so, you have to deliver. What would it take to make your protagonist, and therefore your reader, happy and satisfied? Know this and you know how your story must end. Think how furious we would have been if Harry Potter hadn’t defeated Voldemort in the end.

“They were never heard from again.” If your story is a tragedy, you need to leave the reader with a mix of loss and devastation, and the lingering sense that it all might have been prevented, if only … I think I’d put THELMA AND LOUISE in this category.

“You can still hear his voice echoing through the night.” Expand your vision of a horror story to include anything that leaves a haunting image to cap off a cautionary tale. I think of MOBY DICK, whose final image – the boat sinking below the waves with its drowned crew – still lingers in my mind more than 20 years later.

“There goes a mouse!” I’ve always thought of this as the Grimm’s folktale version of my 3rd graders’ “That’s all I have to say” – kind of a cop-out. But really, perhaps it’s more like Bugs Bunny’s “That’s all folks!” The comedic sign-off has it’s place, when delivered with the proper light tone and humorous nonsequitur. Think of MONTY PYTHON’S HOLY GRAIL, perhaps. Or BBETLEJUICE.

What flavor does your story have? Can you think of other classic, stock endings that might point the way in your own struggle to bring your tale to a satisfying conclusion?

This is a post from the Writer’s Wavelength blog which can be found at writerswavelength.blogspot.com.

Genres and Misfits – Labels in Literature

The digital age demands categories and labels in order to sort the overwhelming quantity of data and information floating through cyber space. Search engines want to know where we fit and where our ideas fit. They want to know because there are people at the other end trying to sift through all this information to find what they seek. Genre labels can help your audience find you, and they can help you connect with the right people and places. Nevertheless, the process of labeling oneself tickles a disturbing place in the brain.

I recently checked out an online database for submissions called duotrope (my thanks to Pete Morin of the Fiction Writers Guild on Linked In for sharing this). It seemed like a great resource, but it forced me to parse things into multiple layers of categories. Duotrope’s lists were not only sorted into 9 genres, but also into innumerable subgenres and each of those were sorted into styles. I struggled to determine which of my stories fit into which categories, or whether my stories were misfits.

Agents and publishers use genre labels, too. So often, the bio information for editors or agents at a conference or in a newsletter includes a list of genres they seek and those that “need not apply.” Meanwhile, authors struggle to decode what each agent’s definition of these terms might be. Do they interpret “horror” the way I interpret “horror”? How are they defining “magical realism“? What’s their issue with “inspirational,” or do they really mean “anything at all to do with religion“?

I suppose it’s better than being back in high school, where people assigned labels and categories to human beings. Still, I can’t help but notice that same, rebellious piece of my brain fighting against the boxes, whether it’s “jock, brain, stoner and drama fag” or “horror, romance, mystery and thriller.”

None of us like being pigeonholed. Maybe that’s because so many voices coexist inside us. We are filled with selves – dark selves, humorous selves, adventurous selves, argumentative selves. Each self has it’s own collection of stories, and those stories take many different forms. Perhaps that’s the beauty of the whole genre and subgenre game. I’m not labeling myself. I’m just labeling one story. And I have an unlimited supply of stories inside of me, stories of many different stripes.

Classifying and categorizing is part of human nature. Even as young children, we sort our world into categories – people who look like our parents and people who don’t; men with beards and men without; humans, animals and clowns (their own disturbing category). It’s how we store memories and organize data in our brains. The danger comes when we exclude things from our world based purely on labels and categories, when we shrink our world to fit those categories, when the labels serve as boundaries to our vision of the possible. Narrowing the search shouldn’t mean narrowing your mind.

This is a post from the Writer’s Wavelength blog which can be found at writerswavelength.blogspot.com.

Stumbling Into Genre

First, let’s get the shameless self-promotion out of the way. My short story, DAEMIEL WATCHES, just won 2nd place in the Kay Snow Awards. External validation is a lovely thing. But here’s the bloggable part. This is the 2nd short story I’ve written that has won an award, and both of them have been in the horror and suspense genre. “Big deal,” you say. Well, since I’ve never particularly thought of myself as a horror and suspense writer – or even a horror and suspense reader – it is kind of a big deal. Or at least a mid-sized deal. It’s left me asking myself what this means for me as a writer.

The realization that I have more than a few horror and suspense pieces to my credit had been gradually creeping up on me, enough so that I made a special page for them on my website. But this latest turn of events has put it all in a new light. Mind you, I don’t plan on throwing my lot in with horror writers and ignoring everything else from here on, but I do plan on examining more closely the kind of writer I am and wish to be and the kinds of stories that draw my best work from me.

It got me thinking of the time I was browsing the shelves in Powell’s Books and stumbled upon a copy of John Steinbeck’s first novel, CUP OF GOLD, a swashbuckler based on the life of pirate Henry Morgan. It wasn’t terrible, but it really wasn’t Steinbeck. He so clearly had not yet found his true writing home, as if he was trying to live in someone else’s skin.

I’m still not sure exactly what conclusions to draw about myself as a writer from all of this. At a minimum, it’s a reminder not to pigeonhole myself, but rather to keep my mind open to stories of any genre, write the stories that demand I write them and attend to the characters who insist on attention. Still, I think I may have to take a look at some Stephen King.

This is a post from the Writer’s Wavelength blog which can be found at writerswavelength.blogspot.com.

The Epistolary Novel Reborn

A while back I posted on facebook about a blogged novel that a writer friend was working on called MURDERER’S MOM (murderers-mom.blogspot.com). The writer, Jan Bear, is in my critique group. I’d watched her developing her ideas for this book over the past year or so, but when she decided to dive in and start writing it one blog entry at a time, online, it leapt off the screen with a life and immediacy that it never had before. The immediate past tense vision and the intimacy of the blog format were the perfect fit. When I posted about Jan’s work, another friend, opera soprano Jennifer Wilson (www.jenniferwilsonsoprano.com) made the insightful comment that this form hearkened back to the old epistolary novels of bygone years (eighteenth century?).

Jennifer’s comment set me to ruminating a bit on the blog form in general and the way in which it seems to have revived the voice of letter-writing, albeit with a twist. Blogs have the length, contemplative tone, humor and individuality that used to be part of the lost art of letter writing. The difference – we now write not for the highly specific audience of one, but as if our letters were already intended for posterity, cleansed of all mundane details of daily life (one hopes!) and raised to a higher level by drawing conclusions about our world, engaging in humorous observations and waxing vaguely philosophical.

Perhaps email and facebook and twitter have irreparably altered the epistle as a literary form. Or perhaps it has merely shape-shifted into a new guise.

I wonder … are there any courses or books examining online content as literary form, the way we examine other genres? What defines it? What are its limitations, its strengths?

This is a post from the Writer’s Wavelength blog which can be found at writerswavelength.blogspot.com.