Again, two fixes present themselves:
alter the events of your conclusion so you don’t need to introduce a new viewpoint character
or insert scenes that occur considerably before the Escalation Point in which that character becomes the source of our perspective and thus our hopes and fears
Both require more than surface alterations. In the second instance, be sure that the new scenes moving that Viewpoint transition to an earlier point also genuinely serve the narrative when they appear. Otherwise they will read as gratuitous sidetracks that do not advance your story or invoke its throughline or core question.
Dramatic Resolution
Resolution for dramatic protagonists takes the form of a final event that changes them forever, doing one or more of the following:
ending their inner conflicts, moving them permanently to one or the other of their two dramatic poles
ending the power that the unmet desire holds over them, by:finally achieving the desire
changing conditions so that the desire can never be met
bringing about the character’s final renunciation of the desire
Dramatic characters, particularly in tragic forms, may not survive the resolution of their poles, or face destruction soon afterward.
In the complicated resolution of an ensemble piece, all the key players experience a permanent change of relationship to their unmet desires and/or dramatic poles. This may occur in a set piece scene that brings them all together, or in a series of mini-climaxes. More often, only some of the characters undergo full resolutions, revealing the rest as mere foils to the true protagonists. Their scenes reflect the theme or throughline, contrasting with the characters you find important enough to warrant wrap-up.
Circular Conclusions
A circular ending may look like an example of an ambiguous or unresolved conclusion but in fact shows a protagonist resolving her dramatic poles not just once but twice. The character begins on one side of the arc, seems to land on the other side, but then is pulled back to the same conditions that prevailed at the story’s beginning. This ironic conclusion befits a worldview that sees the possibility of true internal change as an illusion. It depicts characters trapped by deterministic social conditions or the indifferent cruelty of fate.
A circular ending occurs in After Hours (1985) whose protagonist goes from drab conformity to embrace of adventure back to conformity again.
Such bleak and/or ironic endings tell us that life’s great problems remain eternal. Readers prepared either by genre expectations or by the progress of your individual narrative savor this fatalism.
“What Next?” Codas
A close cousin of the ironic coda answers the question you pose at the beginning, but then leaves the hero at a crossroads, facing a new question. In want of a separate term to distinguish it from all the other ambiguous endings we’ve identified, we might call this the New Question coda. The archetypal example of this appears in The Graduate (1967), leaving Ben and Elaine in the back seat of a bus after he has convinced her to abandon her groom at the altar. They stare ahead, stunned, as if to ask, “What next?” Another famous New Question coda occurs in The Candidate (1972) when the Redford character wins election and then has no idea what that entails.
Open-Ended and Provisional Conclusions
When you start a story and pose a question you create the expectation that you will at the end of your story answer that question.
If you reach the end of your narrative and don’t see your dramatic protagonist being conclusively moved to one or the other of her poles, ask yourself what would have to happen to bring that about. Ask yourself if those events are the ones you really ought to be writing.
Writers wishing to portray the ambiguity of life sometimes prefer to leave their endings unresolved.
In an ambiguous or open-ended conclusion, the hero attempts to resolve the inner conflict represented by the dramatic poles but fails to do so, winding up just as torn between them as ever. The realization that the tension is presently irreconcilable is itself a point of conclusion—provided that realization occurs, to the audience if not the character.
Resolutions may be provisional or tentative when you write a realistically drawn character’s life in installments. Although dramatic characters do not typically recur the way iconic heroes do, some do resurface in literary sequels. Examples include Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe character (as first seen in The Sportswriter) and the cast of Darryl Ponicsan’s The Last Detail, who return thirty-five years later in Last Flag Flying. Writers who draw on their own lives may return repeatedly to the same alter ego, as Philip Roth does with his Nathan Zuckerman character. When embarking on a new dramatic piece starring a dramatic protagonist you’ve used before, you’ll assign revised dramatic poles or invalidate the apparent conclusiveness of the original ending to show the character once again torn between his usual impulses. The act of depicting the same dramatic protagonist multiple times bends toward a naturalistic approach, in which internal truces and small epiphanies replace the momentous character change of classical literature. Even a character forever caught between dramatic poles can gain an unmet desire, lose all hope of doing so, or choose to stop pursuing it.
When an Unresolved Ending is a Cheat
Truly unresolved endings occur when the question posed by the narrative would naturally be answered in one way or the other, but the author cuts off abruptly before revealing what happens.
If the main question your story poses is, “will Dragana attend her father’s funeral?” and you end the story while she remains undecided, expect your audience to react with frustration spurred by betrayed expectations. Whether Dragana will go is a binary question: she either will, or won’t. You may have a broader artistic reason for wanting to leave your audience unsatisfied. If dissatisfaction is not your goal, resolve your story.
Transformative Resolution
The transformational hero’s resolution occurs when the hero achieves his tactical goal. Where an adversary exists, the hero puts a definite kibosh on the adversary plan. This victory conclusively moves the hero to the end point of his arc.
The external benefits to society of achieving the tactical goal, and the internal benefit of completing the arc may both be shown in the denouement.
Most transformational hero stories function on an aspirational level. They end on an up note, leaving viewers happy that the hero achieved the goal, and pleased to see the character arc completed. As part of the delivery of the hoped-for conclusion, they see the villain punished and order restored—or a cruel order replaced by a just one.
Certain genres, most notably horror, war, satire, and noir crime drama, admit the possibility of conclusions that fly in the face of reader aspiration. Their heroes might still meet their tactical goals and undergo positive transformations. However, they might just easily:
undergo a corrosive transformations, paying a price and moving from a better to a worse state
fail to achieve the tactical goal
or both
Audiences know what they’re getting into when they choose a piece in these genres and so are less likely to recoil from a shocking conclusion than people primed for genres that implicitly promise happy outcomes. An anti-aspirational romantic comedy in which the couple winds up hating one another will arouse greater ire than a horror tale in which the hero goes from blissful unawareness to terrible knowledge and is destroyed in the process.
Iconic Resolution
Iconic resolution occurs when the iconic hero overcomes and conclusively ends the disorder, through a surprising yet satisfying application of his iconic ethos.
The adversary plan is shown to have failed, and some form of justice likely meted out to the antagonist. Where these are not obvious, the denouement shows the benefits of order’s restoration.
Heroes expressing a dar
ker worldview may be shown to have paid a personal price for again exercising their ethos. Codas to their stories may emphasize the price of victory, depict only a partial triumph, or remind the viewer that the hero’s work is cyclical and thus never fully complete. For example, the antagonist might escape, leaving the hero to ruminate on the likelihood of an even more difficult rematch.
Denouement
You may choose to end your narrative immediately after its culminating moment. A drama with a downbeat ending will typically do this.
Alternately, you can ease the viewer out of your story with a denouement or coda wrapping up procedural loose ends or showing the characters in their final emotional state.
In a procedural this is where you show the rewards of achieving the tactical goal or restoring order, reaped by the hero and/or society at large.
In puzzle narratives, like the classic murder mystery, Reveal beats may tie up loose ends, delivering information important enough for the reader to care about but not so important that you allowed it to consume audience attention during your resolution.
In procedural sub-genres the denouement may add the burning spice of a down note to an otherwise positive conclusion. We might see that the hero cannot relax her vigilance, because it won’t be long before disorder rises again, requiring her to once more put her iconic ethos into action.
Reviewing Your Completed Map
The process of making your map probably helped you to crystallize scenes and sequences. Along the way you may have already spotted stretches where the emotional rhythm veered too consistently in one direction for too long.
Once you complete the map, you can then test it for a number of common flaws, switching from the creative mode to the analytical. (I would say “from right brain to left brain,” but unfortunately for easy metaphors about the writing process, that turns out to be pop-psych hogwash.)
Trajectory
Zoom out to look at the overall line your beat map follows. This is your trajectory.
You may be familiar with a line of rising action and climax from high school English classes. This measures the rising stakes of a story. Beat map trajectories don’t look like this.
They almost always consist of a slowly downward sloping line, like these lines for Hamlet, Casablanca, and the film version of Dr. No.
Hamlet
Casablanca
Dr. No
Does your line look like those, more or less? You’re golden. Continue to the next step.
A nonstandard trajectory doesn’t necessarily signal a flawed structure or unsatisfying emotional line. It might perfectly suit your intentions.
However, if that wasn’t what you were aiming for, check the bits of the line that deviate from the norm and affirm that they result from decisions that you made on purpose and want to stick with.
Sections that slope consistently upwards or downwards for many beats suggest sequences that occur all on the same emotional level, either positive or negative. Either way, the effect can prove deadening and repetitive. Take a close look at these sections to find places where you can add the spice of threat or disappointment to otherwise over-cheerful passages, or leavening humor or small victories to sections that descend into a slough of despond.
Be especially wary of stretches of unvarying development, which happen when too many lateral or crossed arrows clump together. These mark a stagnant narrative that fails to develop, or feels to the reader that it’s taking one step forward and one step back.
You may look at an apparent problem section and decide that there’s no way to alter its rhythm while staying true to your vision for the piece. When that’s the case, stick to your guns—and be ready to articulate to your editor, producer, or other collaborators why your story follows its unconventional path.
Testing for Aptness
Now go through the entire map from start to finish, reviewing all of your beats to ensure that they invoke the theme and throughline. A beat that does neither is inapt—it might belong in a story, but not this one. Check the beats around it too, in case this one off note alerts you to the presence of an entire sequence that has meandered away from your throughline and other core elements.
Inapt passages can strike any writer, but are a particular hazard when writing sans outline and then working back toward structure.
A beat that brings in your throughline and/or theme will almost invariably also show movement toward answering your story’s core question. Though unlikely, you might decide that a beat involves the core question without relating particularly to theme and throughline. Ideally you can rewrite it to do both, but might be able to get away with leaving it as it is.
When you spot an inapt beat, several choices present themselves:
If it can be lifted out of your story without affecting anything else around it, cut it entirely. (It probably persists as the fossil of a direction you wound up abandoning as you developed your story.)
If a story point becomes unclear or incomprehensible without it:rewrite the moment to bring in theme and/or throughline
write a replacement moment that fulfills the same plot purpose while also bringing in theme or throughline
Check Pacing Issues
Clusters of non-foundation beats in certain stretches of your maps indicate the presence of pacing problems.
Study Your Climax
First, check your ending, from the Escalation Point onward.
From this point on, you should be doing nothing but completing your story. Nothing that fails to advance the narrative should survive in those rarefied waters.
If you see flourish beats, cut them.
If you see new Question or Pipe beats, reconfigure your story so you no longer need them. All information necessary to follow your story should be in place before the final turn.
Big Reveals often usher in the final acceleration to the climax. You may need to sneak a few in the denouement, though in most genres this too is best avoided. Take care, though, that they answer previously established Questions, rather than opening up new topics of exposition. Once you’re in the final turn any explaining the audience hasn’t already been primed to want will reduce momentum to a wobble.
Lateral arrows in your climactic sequence also point to a deadening of momentum. Adjust their accompanying beat so they move the dial up or down, or remove them.
Take a hard look at any crossed arrows: they may convey the entire point of the piece, or they could be fogging up the audience’s understanding of the proceedings. Any such beat that achieves more of the latter than the former needs to be firmly pointed in one direction or the other.
Activate Your Introduction
Now take a similarly close look at your opener.
Is there a point at which you can say the story proper really begins?
If this occurs later than the first handful of beats, ask yourself how many of those prefatory beats you really need.
Older stories often take a long time establishing a status quo before disturbing it with events that threaten to launch a narrative.
Ask yourself how many beats you can remove while still establishing that status quo and inviting the audience to either hope for, or fear, its continuance. Then remove those beats.
You have now tightened the crucial beginning of your map, placing the real launch point of the story as few beats after the first beat as possible.
Now look for lateral beats, especially Pipe and Reveal beats, setting up the information needed to follow the story, and see how many of them you can energize by introducing a Dilemma, a situation that activates our hope and fear (further detailed under The Dilemma).
While writing introductory sections you may be tempted to write scenes that simply establish an element of your storyline: a character, a location, a key detail about the workings of your world. Even the mildest sliver of a Dilemma can act
ivate an otherwise flat or passive moment.
Let’s say, for example, that you want to establish the pretty obvious point that your child protagonist, who you have named Uko, loves his mother. This becomes important when he is brutally separated from her a few beats into the story, You could just show her cooking in the kitchen as he gazes at her adoringly. But if it looks like she’s about to catch her sleeve on the handle of a bubbling pot of water, the audience now has cause to fear for her. When Uko cries out to her and she smiles and moves the handle, avoiding disaster, our hopes have been realized. We’ve still been introduced to Uko and his mother, and seen their relationship, but that knowledge has been reinforced by a down beat and an up beat.
Eliminating Repetition
Perhaps worse than an inapt beat is a beat so apt that you include it more than once. This is a particular hazard in dramatic writing, where repeated moments don’t stand out as obviously as they do in a plot-centric piece. It’s harder to miss the fact that you’ve already had the character find the bloodstains behind the wallpaper in the attic than to notice that you’ve had two characters conduct the same argument to the same conclusion more than once.
Spotting and Fixing Dramatic Repetition
Scan the map looking for beats that:
feature the same characters
revolve around the same basic conflict
and resolve to the same outcome
When you find a repeated Dramatic beat, first see if you can cut it entirely. If for some reason you need to leave it in, you probably don’t and still should cut it entirely. However if there’s a particular bit about it you really love, that’s totally a sign you should cut it entirely. Having been warned three times, that scene might serve some other key purpose, in which case you can reshape it so that it no longer registers as repetitive. Do this by:
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