Write Great Fiction--Plot & Structure

by James Scott Bell

  Your plot will have lots of plates spinning by the time you get to the end. You need to get them off safely. You need a little flourish. And you need to do it in a way that is not predictable. You don’t want readers finishing your book thinking, “I’ve seen that so many times before.”

  Which brings up another challenge: With each passing year — with every new book, movie, and television show — more endings are thrown out into popular culture.

  What was once a fresh approach may now actually be getting a little stale. We all know the old we-think-the-bad-guy-is-dead-but-he-really-is-not-and-comes-back-for-one-last-stab-at-the-hero ending. It wasn’t old in the movies twenty years ago. But if a filmmaker tries it now, everybody in the audience is going to be thinking, “He’s not really dead, and if the hero turns his back he’s an idiot.”

  That’s why endings are hard, and why we need to work on them with all the creative juices we can muster.

  KNOCKOUT ENDINGS

  The most exciting boxing matches are those where it looks like one fighter is going to lose, only to draw on reserves of strength to deliver a knockout blow to his opponent.

  Do that with your novel. Maintain the tension in the story until the last possible moment. As you near the end, it should look as if the opposition is the one who will win. He has everything going for him. The Lead is up against the ropes.

  Only when the Lead reaches deep within and makes her move will the knockout blow be thrown.

  Near the ending, you want the readers to ask, “Will the Lead fight or run away? Will the forces marshaled against the Lead simply be too much for her to face?”

  To stay and fight, your Lead will have to call upon moral or physical courage, just as in the examples below:

  In Jaws, Brody must finally head out to sea and, with help, kill the shark. He does.

  In The Rainmaker, Rudy must go all the way through a trial even though he has no experience. He wins.

  In Dean Koontz’s Intensity, Chyna must find a way to kill her tormentor. She finds it.

  In The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice stays with the case in order to stop Buffalo Bill. She stops him.

  Readers like to have the hero decisively defeat the opposing force. But that doesn’t always have to be the case.

  A good example is Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action, which we discussed in chapter four. The nonfiction book tells the story of lawyer Jan Schlichtmann’s obsession to get justice for the residents of a small town whose water supply was poisoned by two huge companies. Of course, the other side, with unlimited funds, does everything to crush him, both personally and professionally. They do. But we are left with a sense of awe at how long the hero stood up under the gun.

  ADDING THE AH! AND THE UH-OH!

  There is one more thing you need to do to leave the reader with the ultimate reading experience. I call these the “Ah” and the “Uh-Oh.”

  You get the “Ah” once the main action of the story is wrapped up. With the knockout blow administered, you need to give the reader a final scene in which something from the hero’s personal life is resolved.

  In Midnight, Sam Booker has brought down the villain’s evil plan. But the book ends with Sam returning to try to make amends with his rebellious son. Sam embraces him, and even though their issues aren’t resolved, at least the process has begun. “That was the wonderful thing,” goes the book’s last line. “It had begun.”

  This emotional resolution in the Lead’s personal life makes us go “Ah.”It’s like the perfect last note in a great piece of music. Look at the very last scenes in a number of thrillers, and you’ll see how often this is done.

  Dickens strikes this chord of personal resolution at the of David Copperfield:

  And now, as I close my task, subduing my desire to linger yet, these faces fade away. But one face, shining on me like a heavenly light by which I see all other objects, is above them and beyond them all. And that remains.

  I turn my head, and see it, in its beautiful serenity, beside me. My lamp burns low, and I have written far into the night; but the dear presence, without which I were nothing, bears me company.

  Oh Agnes, oh my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!

  A book can also leave the reader with a sense of foreboding, perhaps even uttering, “Uh-oh,” as he turns the last page. Charles Wilson’s Embryo has such an ending. The book details the search for a mad doctor and the process he uses to bring forth children outside the womb. They become evil children who actually smile when contemplating how bad they can be.

  The main story is resolved when the hero and love interest end up with what they think is a normal child. All is well. But in the final scene their little girl, Pauline, is alone outside. She finds some matches and, curious, lights one. She pitches it and it lands on her dog’s back.

  He suddenly jumped and whirled and tried to look back across his shoulder at what had stung him. Pauline realized what she had done and looked sad for a moment.

  And then she smiled.

  Uh-oh! Wilson has left us to contemplate the horror starting all over again.

  CHOOSE YOUR ENDING

  There are three basic types of endings shown in the following graph are: (1) the Lead gets his objective, a positive ending; (2) we don’t know if the Lead will get his desire, an ambiguous ending; and (3) the Lead loses his objective, a negative ending.

  Three Basic Types of Endings

  A positive ending is found in Jaws. Brody kills the shark.

  An ambiguous ending is found in The Catcher in the Rye. We don’t know if Holden Caulfield will be able to make it in the world after he leaves the sanitarium.

  The test of a good ambiguous ending is that it causes strong feeling, feels right, and can generate discussion. Indeed, that’s what happened with Holden. Take the haunting last line: “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”

  Will Holden therefore detach and never speak of anything deeply again? Will he then become a “phony” like those he deplores? Or is this some sort of Zen koan that shows a step toward a new grasping of life, a healing through trial?

  A negative ending occurs in Gone With the Wind. Scarlett loses her true love, Rhett. (Margaret Mitchell cleverly added a note of ambiguity, with Scarlett thinking surely she will be able to get him back.)

  To the three basic endings, we can add a couple of complexities, which are outlined in following graph. For it may be that in gaining his desire, the Lead really has a negative result. Similarly, the Lead may lose his desire, yet gain something better.

  Making Basic Endings Complex

  An example of the first type, a gaining of desire but at a terrible cost, is found in Jack London’s Martin Eden. Human achievement and Nietzche’s will to power do not bring Eden what he’s looking for. Rather, life as he chose to live it is “an unbearable thing.” He jumps off a ship into the ocean:

  He filled his lungs with air, filled them full. This supply would take him far down. He turned over and went down head first, swimming with all his strength and all his will. Deeper and deeper he went. His eyes were open, and he watched the ghostly, phosphorescent trails of the darting bonita. As he swam, he hoped that they would not strike at him, for it might snap the tension of his will. But they did not strike, and he found time to be grateful for this last kindness of life.

  Down, down, he swam till his arms and leg grew tired and hardly moved. He knew that he was deep. The pressure on his ear-drums was a pain, and there was a buzzing in his head. His endurance was faltering, but he compelled his arms and legs to drive him deeper until his will snapped and the air drove from his lungs in a great explosive rush. The bubbles rubbed and bounded like tiny balloons against his cheeks and eyes as they took their upward flight. Then came pain and strangulation. This hurt was not death, was the thought that oscillated through his reeling conscio
usness. Death did not hurt. It was life, the pangs of life, this awful, suffocating feeling; it was the last blow life could deal him.

  His wilful hands and feet began to beat and churn about, spasmodically and feebly. But he had fooled them and the will to live that made them beat and churn. He was too deep down. They could never bring him to the surface. He seemed floating languidly in a sea of dreamy vision. Colors and radiances surrounded him and bathed him and pervaded him. What was that? It seemed a lighthouse; but it was inside his brain — a flashing, bright white light. It flashed swifter and swifter. There was a long rumble of sound, and it seemed to him that he was falling down a vast and interminable stairway. And somewhere at the bottom he fell into darkness. That much he knew. He had fallen into darkness. And at the instance he knew, he ceased to know.

  What about the other kind, the loss that is really a gain? I must use an example from Casablanca, which has perhaps the most famous ending in film.

  As the Lead, what is Rick Blaine’s desire? Simple. He wants Ilsa, who is married to war hero Lazlo. By the end of the film, Rick can have Ilsa; she’s consented to go away with him, but Rick gives her up and insists she go off with her husband.

  He actually sacrifices his greatest desire for a greater good. The war effort. And for a marriage. Had he taken Ilsa away from Lazlo, it would have been at a moral cost.

  So Rick is freed from the ghost of Ilsa (“We’ll always have Paris”), comes back into the fight, and joins the human family again. And he gets a new friend in the bargain, the little French prefect, Louis.

  Sacrifice

  What makes the ending of Casablanca so popular?

  The element of sacrifice. Rick gives up his object of desire for a greater good.

  Why is that theme so powerful? Because it is wired into our cultural consciousness. In giving up our own well-being for a greater good, we tap into the deepest yearnings of man.

  As Viktor E. Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, argued, man is on a lifelong search for meaning. Meaning does not come from isolation. Meaning is a community thing.

  When someone sacrifices himself for the good of someone else, that is powerful on a gut level.

  In our Western culture, the idea of sacrifice is embedded in our foundational texts and myths. Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac. For that he received a reward, becoming blessed by God.

  Yet even Ayn Rand, the atheistic voice of “rational selfishness,” included this philosophy in her novels.

  The Fountainhead is about a man who is willing to sacrifice his own career and work, rather than let either be changed by the collective. In Atlas Shrugged, her heroine, Dagny Taggart, gives up the power and prestige of her railroad to uphold the dignity of human worth.

  Whether you buy Ayn Rand’s philosophy or not, as a fiction writer, she tapped into the right fictional dynamic.

  In the final choice type of ending, the hero is on the horns of a terrible dilemma. He can choose a course that gets him to his objective, but at a moral cost. Or he can “do the right thing” but lose the most important goal, the thing he’s hoped for throughout the novel.

  As illustrated above, in Casablanca, Rick sacrifices his love for Ilsa for the greater good.

  In the final battle type of ending, the hero has to sacrifice his own safety and well-being. He has very good reasons not to stay and fight. He’s probably going to lose.

  The great Frank Capra film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, is a perfect example. Jefferson Smith (played by James Stewart) is appointed to the United States Senate on a fluke, to be a simpleton puppet of a state machine. He just doesn’t know it.

  When he finds out that his dream of setting aside land for a boys’ camp conflicts with the plans of the machine, he discovers what a stooge he’s been.

  When Smith makes an attempt to buck the machine, it kicks into high gear to destroy him by getting him booted from the Senate on a trumped-up fraud charge.

  There is no way he’s going to be able to beat this.

  But with the help of a savvy politico (played by Jean Arthur), Smith is convinced to give it one more try. He has to sacrifice his fear to do this. He has to put himself into harm’s way.

  Two Types of Sacrifice

  Here is a simple comparison of the sacrifices in each of the two principle endings. Notice what kind of courage is required for each:

  Final Choice

  Lead sacrifices his goal:

  Moral courage

  Final Battle

  Lead sacrifices his safety:

  Physical courage

  TWIST ENDINGS

  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!

  TYING UP LOOSE INFORMATION

  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.

  LAST-PAGE RESONANCE

  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.

  Language

  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.