Endings Part II:structure & turning points - by Rowena House

Last month I shared some notes I’d made for a writer friend who'd asked me about story endings. Here’s the link to that blog about the “what” of endings: what’s going to happen, and what that implies for the rest of the story.

https://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2019/08/endings-part-i-where-to-start-by-rowena.html

This post is about another side of endings, the “how” part. It covers some of the tips I’ve picked up over the years from editing and writing courses, and also from a range of advice guides and writing blogs. I hope it might be useful for anyone struggling with their ending or wondering how to plot one.

Of all the structural guides I’ve studied, the most helpful terminology I’ve come across is in The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne. In it, he provides a helpful label for each of the three acts of classic “Aristotelian” storytelling.
  

Coyne calls Act 1 the Set Up, Act 2 the Progressive Build and Act 3 the Pay Off. 

These labels signpost the content for each act; they also flag up the all-important turning points which spin the story into the next act and, finally, The End.

For example, the main turning point of the Set Up is an Inciting Incident: the event or call to adventure which gets the central plot going.

The Progressive Build ends at a Worst Point for the protagonist, the turning point which precipitates the story into the final act. A midpoint epiphany is another great practical turning point for Act 2. I’ve blogged about epiphanies here. https://rowenahouse.com/2018/02/02/eureka-nailing-epiphanies-big-five-part-2/
 

The Pay Off brings to a head both the plot and main character arc. As the pace and tension accelerate, there are (typically) two major turning points in Act 3: a Crisis and a Climax. The story is then wrapped up with a final beat, usually called the Resolution. Each of these three scenes gives shape, direction and energy to a climatic ending.

For writers who follow this schema, the Crisis is the deepest dilemma the protagonist faces; the toughest choice s/he must make throughout the story. 

One tip I’ particularly like is to make this Crisis decision as horribly, gut-wrenchingly dramatic as possible by forcing the protagonist to choose between two highly prized, but mutually exclusive alternatives (AKA “irreconcilable goods”). Imagine a parent on a dangerous cliff path: their son is being dragged towards a 100-foot drop in one direction, their daughter is being kidnapped by a madman in the other. Which way do they turn? Deciding between two such irreconcilable goods is much more difficult and character-defining than a choice between the lesser of two evils, or between right and wrong. 

If the story is focused on character, then this Crisis decision can be the defining moment of the whole thing: the “obligatory scene” as some creative writing teachers and editors term it. It is the point in the story where the protagonist decides to transform from the person they were to the person they need to become in order to fulfil their role in the story, or (by failing to change) to become a tragic figure.

To give the reader the maximum insight into this pivotal moment, the Crisis decision needs to be fully developed and emotionally powerful, and can take quite a few pages. 

The Climax is the action initiated by the protagonist as a result of their crisis decision. Classically, it’s the scene where they confront their biggest force of antagonism: the top villain if there is one, or their worst nightmare if that’s what’s been holding them back. 

The Climax is the final turning pointing for the plot; in it, the actions of the protagonist reflect a deliberate choice to change or transform in order to achieve their story goal. The outcome of this climactic conflict is profoundly meaningful for the protagonist; it is also irreversible. 

For more plot-orientated stories, the Climax is widely considered to be the “obligatory” scene and can be the longest one in the book. Climaxes don’t have to be explosive or action-packed. In The Goose Road it’s a slow-burn, escalating scene stretching over three chapters. In the film, Ordinary People, Robert McKee in Story notes that the Climax is the wife packing a suitcase and walking out on her family: a brief, simple action but with enormous meaning within that story world.

The Resolution is a final chapter or scene which cements this character transformation in the reader’s mind. The action shows how the change-through-conflict of the story, which led to the Climax, has altered the protagonist’s underlying behaviour and attitudes for good (and/or how that change impacts on their community). 

Plot-wise, the Resolution might wrap up a subplot or dramatize a reconciliation. The way the protagonist achieves this scene’s goal manifests their new persona.

Over the years, I’ve read quite a few variants on this theme of crisis-climax-resolution. In Into the Woods, John Yorke talks about “mastery” being the final beat within his five-act structure. In stories with deliberately “open” endings, the Climax and Resolution might be implied, rather than shown.

For Christopher Vogler, the “return with the elixir” is the last, and potentially extended stage of the hero’s quest, as detailed in The Writer’s Journey. 

With this style of ending, the protagonist brings back to their troubled home community some sort of boon (a life lesson learnt or an actual physical elixir). In the archetypal quest ending, this boon helps the protagonist to win one final battle.

While some writers follow Vogler’s road map in its entirety (or Yorke’s Five Acts or Coyne’s Story Grid etc.), I prefer to cherry-pick, keeping an eye out for recommended structural beats as I plot or going back over a first draft to identify missing elements.

After a draft of The Goose Road was rejected by Andersen Press, for example, fellow Bath Spa MAer Chris Vick (whose new book Girl. Boy. Sea looks fantastic, by the way) pointed out that Angelique’s journey contained many elements of a quest. In light of his insight, I re-read The Writer’s Journey and found a host of structural beats I could add, which in turn helped me to deepen Angelique’s character arc during a full development edit for Walker.

There are, hopefully, an almost infinite number of ways to end a story. Structurally, however, the advice I’ve read and heard supports one underlying tenet: at the end, change must be demonstrated by a “character-in-action” (to borrow a phrase from Emma Darwin’s brilliant This Itch of Writing blog.) 

The protagonist must do something to show the reader they’ve become a different person due to the events of the story. In the end, they’ve got to walk the walk.

PS In case anyone’s free on the evening of Oct 2, Tracey Matthais, Matt Killeen, Liz McWhirter and I are talking about our protagonists’ “Interesting Times” at Waterstones, Uxbridge. See our social media feeds for details. I’m @HouseRowena on Twitter

  

Endings Part I: where to start? By Rowena House

My favourite writing guru, Robert McKee, explains in Story the great benefit to the writer of knowing our endings: once we have one, we can reverse the process of cause and effect to build a better story.

Whether you retrofit that better story after finishing a first draft or plot it from the outset is a personal choice, or maybe a function of our psychology. Me, I plot because I can’t help it, but I try not to over-plot as that hampers writing with passion and honesty.

But sooner or later we all have to look at the story from a reader’s point of view. And that, I think, is when we really need to decide on an outline for the ending at least.

Not convinced? Then how about this: the ending contains the “obligatory scene”, the one the entire story has been building towards (more in Part II next month about which scene this is, the Crisis decision or Climax action).

If the obligatory scene doesn’t resolve the problem set up in Act 1, the overall plot (and major character arc) will almost certainly need a wholesale rethink to tie the two together and create a unified whole.

The problem (as every writer, editor and guru worth their salt points out) is that original endings are getting harder to write; there are just so many stories about these days, readers have seen it all before.

The solution? To expend a great deal of imaginative time and effort devising the most satisfying ending possible within our story worlds.

That way, fingers crossed, readers (and editors) will ask for more.

Okay, fine, said a writer friend with whom I was having this conversation last week. But what does all that mean in practice? These two ABBA blogs are my attempt to answer his question as far as I can.

Plotting endings

Scouring the literature, I’d say there’s a broad consensus about four main endings for archetypal plots in any genre, i.e. those with one or more lead character with a defined story goal.

These four are: positive, negative, ambiguous/open and ironic endings.

For more on each, do have a look at James Scott Bell’s The Last Fifty Pages: the Art & Craft of Unforgettable Endings. I got it for a bargain £3.oo on Kindle. In Write your Novel from the Middle, Bell describes an alternative, holistic plotting method which unifies the ending with the start and middle, rounding out his advice in Plot & Structure. I thoroughly recommend all three books. Meanwhile…

A positive ending is one where the protagonist achieves their goal and is happy about it. This is a staple for romances, enlivened by the obstacles strewn in the way of the couple’s happily-ever-after.

For other genres, positive endings tend to be enriched by sacrifices made along the way, with their attendant psychological wounds, and/or crucial life lessons learned.

I think positive endings are very useful for children’s, teen and Young Adult fiction, since (in my worldview) hope for the future ought to be their birth-right. We can give our characters hell along the way, but…

A negative ending is one where the protagonist does NOT get what they want and is sad/angry/devastated about it. Or dead - and not in a nice, self-sacrificing way, either. Shakespeare was big on negative ending; see Hamlet, Macbeth etc. It’s the come-uppance, tragic pay off; a punishment for making an anti-social or immoral life choice. So probably not a great ending for Picture Books through to lower MG!

Ambiguous endings (did they or didn’t they damn well get what they wanted?) or, more kindly, open endings tend to be found at the more literary end of the spectrum, also in short stories.

Open endings leave it up to the reader to imagine life after the story, and wonder about the ramifications for the characters of its events. Personally, I love a good open ending, but I know they bug some readers, a minority of whom might well write you a rude Amazon review.

For young people’s fiction, I guess it’s a matter of degree: the more sophisticated the story (and the older the reader) the more nuance and uncertainty they can handle. But for me nuance is best handled through...

Irony

Irony is, imho, the richest hunting ground for original material for endings. I can’t comment on fiction for readers younger than 11 as I’ve not been in contact with those markets for years, but I reckon irony can work in any story aimed at 11 to 101 years-old readers.

If you read Kelly McCaughrain’s excellent ABBA post last week, you’ll have seen her favourite character arc (inspired by KM Weiland) which - to simplify for the sake of brevity - pits a protagonist’s desire against their subconscious or unknown need, culminating in the discovery of a truth which demonstrates that what they needed was, all along, more important than what they wanted. That’s a tried and trusted form of irony with lots of positive overtones. Here’s the link for more details:

https://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2019/08/quick-character-quiz-kelly-mccaughrain.html

Irony is also the backbone of Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moorish warrior who learns he had what he wanted all along, a loyal wife in Desdemona, but only after he’s killed her in his unwarranted jealous rage.

There is deep irony in the title of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (spoiler alert), home of Jane Seymour who will supplant Anne Boleyn in King Henry VIII’s affections in the following book, leading to Anne’s execution. After 650 pages about Cromwell helping Henry to get what he wants (Anne), Wolf Hall are the last two words of this epic novel.

Other classic examples of irony include a protagonist who:

·       gets what they want, only to find it wasn’t worth the getting (a variant on the positive ending);

·       doesn’t get what they want, but is glad about it due their transformation wrought by the story’s events (riffing on the negative ending);

·       realises they’ve thrown away the very thing/person that could have made them happy (see Othello above); a variant of which is,

·       realising they’ve rejected the person who could have been their friend/ally/true love in favour of someone who isn’t.

·       Being destroyed by the person/thing they’ve set out to destroy is perhaps best left to YA horror and adult fiction.

·       Discovering a deeply-held belief is in fact a lie is probably one for mature readers as well.

·       Discovering an ally is an enemy and vice versa is a well-recognised ironic twist for just about any genre, if perhaps a tad clichéd.

Natch, there are more, but I won’t try to list them all.

For upbeat endings, negative ironic twists can also be used to set up the ending, e.g. after coming face-to-face with a cruel irony at the close of Act 2, the shock of finding out the truth precipitates the final Crisis decision and Climax in Act 3.

All of which might sound rather formulaic, but if irony worked for Shakespeare and Hilary Mantel…

For me, discovering a story’s ending - imagining it, reimagining it, sleeping on it, plotting it or weaving back and forth from it during an edit (thinking all the while about how it will resonate with a reader, and how it might resonate more) - is one of the hardest parts of the storyteller’s craft, but - ultimately - the most satisfying.

Next month I’ll look at another side of the process: the structure of endings and how that links with character arcs, including the interwoven roles of the Crisis decision, Climax action and the Resolution.

See you then, I hope!

@HouseRowena on Twitter

Rowena House Author on Facebook

Website: rowenahouse.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Man Booker, BBC2 & Robert McKee: guiding lights for self-editors – by Rowena House

Last week, as I was explaining to a local writing group a selection of approaches to self-editing, I basically talked myself into a corner and reaffirmed (at least to myself) a truth about revision.

That is, after the big developmental overview, when you nail down that elusive concept of the “heart” or soul of the story, and decide, for example, whether you’ve got too many subplots or characters, the natural focus for re-writing is the scene.

Not voice, not sentences, not even structure as such. The scene.

From their expressions, I’m not sure I convinced my students, perhaps because the example I used of an ideal scene was old and rather lame, and taken from Robert McKee’s Story, which is brilliant in my opinion, but rather too rooted in black-and-white films to be self-evidently relevant to today’s novelist.

Then, later than week, cuddled up with our cat on the sofa, watching the BBC 2 drama, Effie Gray,  “Bingo!”

From now on, whenever I need to define an ideal scene it will be the climax to that story, with Derek Jacobi as a lawyer confronting the odious John Ruskin (played superbly by Greg Wise), preparing to bring his entire world crashing down with one word.

Before looking at that one word, and how the scene builds up to it, here’s some context from George Saunders, winner of this year’s Man Booker prize. He has been interviews all over the place, but these quotes come from this article in The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/04/what-writers-really-do-when-they-write

In it he says, “We often discuss art this way: the artist had something he “wanted to express”, and then he just, you know … expressed it. We buy into some version of the intentional fallacy: the notion that art is about having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same. The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully ... An artist works outside the realm of strict logic. Simply knowing one’s intention and then executing it does not make good art.”

His self-editing method is a binary process, which he describes as a meter in his forehead flicking from positive to negative as he imagines how each passage he’s written will be received by a first-time reader, and then editing his work “so as to move the needle into the [positive] zone.”

He describes this process as repetitive, obsessive and iterative: “watch the needle, adjust the prose, watch the needle, adjust the prose … through (sometimes) hundreds of drafts. Like a cruise ship slowly turning, the story will start to alter course via those thousands of incremental adjustments … Falsehoods get squeezed out of it, lazy assertions stand up, naked and blushing, and rush out of the room.”

Beautiful prose, isn’t it? I’m really glad he won this year’s Man Booker prize, and I look forward very much to reading Lincoln in the Bardo over Christmas.

However…

What if you don’t have time to steer your ocean liner through a thousand incremental adjustments? What if you have a full-time job and/or a family to raise, and no milk in the fridge and a deadline to meet, and… and… and..?

In other words, what if writing isn’t your whole life?

For me, in the trackless oceans of imagination, structural advice books are star charts, and the solid possibilities of a well-crafted scene as essential as a life-raft.

So, back to Effie Gray … via Robert McKee.

If I had to keep just one book from my library of writing advice guides, McKee’s Story would be it. Despite his focus on film, the understanding he’s given me about storytelling is unequalled.

In a nutshell, what he says about scenes is this: every scene should build, beat by beat, to a Story Event, by which he means a meaningful change from positive to negative or vice versa in a fundamental human value (or a Story Value as he terms it).

Examples of changes in a Story Value include: cowardice to bravery, hope to despair, fear of commitment to commitment, happiness to sadness etc.

For McKee, such switches should be achieved by pitting a protagonist with a clear objective against an equal or more powerful force of antagonism with a diametrically opposed goal. Via progressively escalating confrontations, the scene should culminate in an unexpected pivot point that alters this Story Value for a central character.

All of which the climax scene in Effie Gray, written by Emma Thompson, does to perfection.

SPOILER ALERT: Do watch the film first if you want to experience the deliciousness of the denouement in full. It is available on iPlayer for the next few weeks. I’ve skipped over some elements of the plot for the sake of brevity, which does a disservice to the richness and complexity of the sub-text, but anyhow, here goes.

 

Events	Structural beats
Effie Gray’s lawyer gets out of a carriage and opens his legal document case. Earlier scenes have established Effie’s desire to escape from her unconsummated marriage with abusive & sexually-repressed John Ruskin.	The protagonist’s objective is established: to deliver a legal letter. In this scene, the lawyer is both Effie’s proxy and also a representative of Victorian social values & the law.
Inside the house, the interfering parents of self-satisfied grandee John Ruskin excessively admire a new portrait of him by an eminent pre-Raphaelite painter.	The antagonists’ objective are established: the Ruskin family seek to enhance John’s social standing via the portrait.
Servant George enters with news of an unexpected caller for John.	The inciting incident. An external force interrupts the domestic status quo.
Effie’s highly respectable male lawyer, kept waiting on the doorstep, announces he has a citation to court for John.  John’s parents stand between John and the lawyer.	The lawyer communicates his scene objective. The parents, by blocking the doorway, form a physical barrier between the lawyer & his objective.
John & his mother question the purpose of the citation; when the lawyer says it is a petition for divorce from Effie, the father snatches the letter.	A force of antagonism strikes directly back at the lawyer.
The lawyer insists the letter must, by law, be delivered to “the defendant”. The father reluctantly relinquishes the letter to the lawyer, who gives it to John. While taking it, John remains composed, and questions Effie’s grounds for divorce.	The protagonist’s proxy defeats the father’s desire to protect John by calling up the power of the law, i.e. society’s power over the family.  Effie wins round one, although John’s disdainful pride & self-confidence remain apparently intact.
When the lawyer refuses to answer John’s questions, citing the delicacy of the matter, John presses him for an immediate explanation, culminating in his demand for an answer. In response to this demand, the lawyer states that her grounds for divorce is John’s impotency.	This beat of questions and rebuttals builds to the pivot point of both the scene and the entire story. The word “impotency”, delivered in Derek Jacobi’s magnificent voice, challenges John’s manhood. Effie is calling down on him not only the full weight of the law, but also Victorian society’s expectations of a man and his sole duty to his wife. With one word, she has countered all of John’s malicious threats to ruin her reputation through false allegations of wantonness.
The horror of the impending scandal slowly dawns on the mother, but more quickly on the faces of John and his father. As their expressions turn from shock to comprehension to shame, the father shuts the door in the lawyer’s face.	John’s cold, imperious pride (his Story Value throughout the film) is quenched. Henceforth, he will be humiliated, while Effie’s Story Value switches from enslavement within their marriage to the freedom to live as she wishes and to love another. Well done, Effie! And well done to the film makers. A fantastic scene.

@HouseRowena

 

PS Publication date for The Goose Road  is now April 5th next year - after a brief shimmy to March!