Argh! Marmosets!

Before I get into the article proper, a quick request. In the comments section, can you post suggestions for opening lines and/or closing lines for a story? They can be as serious, silly or otherwise random as you like. Before my next storytelling post in two weeks time, I'll get Hagelrat to pick one opening line and one closing line from all those posted and I shall make use of them in some fashion during the article. Thank-you.

The other day I read a very good article about the importance of endings (I can’t remember where). However, the main point of it seemed to be: endings are important, so you better make them good.

But it didn’t really go into how you make them good.

This is somewhat akin to a manager instructing to his football team (or soccer team if you believe football is played with your hands) to just go out there and win!

Great as a concept, but how do you execute that?

Football, stripped down to its bare essentials (and ignoring goalkeepers for the purposes of this analogy), consists of only four actions:

• Passing
• Running
• Shooting
• Tackling

You can pass a ball, make a run, take a shot, perform a tackle, but you cannot just ‘win’. The result of a football match is the net effect of all those passes, runs, shots and tackles. Winning comes from executing those things well and having a bit of luck on your side.

Writing’s much the same. I’d even argue that there are strong parallels between the needless rolling around on the floor a footballer does when fouled and the existential angst some writers suffer, but that’s somewhat outside the scope of this article.

A good ending to a story is the result of an effective sequence of scenes built from the following key components:

• Theme
• Mood
• Plot
• Character

All of which are really just facets of the same thing, but let’s not get too abstract purple monkey dishwasher.

Let’s take them one at a time (and apologies if this repeats some of the points I've made in previous posts).

Theme

A good ending in this context is one that successfully illustrates the theme. If this is ‘good triumphs over evil’, then good better triumph over evil at the end. If it’s ‘victory comes at a cost’, then having your hero defeat the villain only to lose a few pennies in loose change down the drain during the climax does not exactly prove your point.

Those examples are cases of the main plot being used to illustrate the theme and when the main plot’s done, the story’s finished. A portmanteau approach might have several short stories, each of which illustrate a different facet of ‘responsibility’. It’s harder to round off the book/film/play with a satisfying conclusion in this case, because each story has its own beginning, middle and end, and unless you bring them all together for a big fight scene atop Mount Rushmore (which, to be fair, is always a good idea), then you might have several endings strung out through the story, with the one that incidentally comes last being no more or less significant than the others.

It might be useful to think of theme in terms of a court case. You’re a lawyer attempting to prosecute some filthy scumbag who’s been catapulting kittens into a volcano for kicks. You present to the jury the evidence: the DNA from the crime scene; the eye witness testimonies; his past history of using small animals as projectiles – an argument (story) designed to prove your assertion (theme) that this man is guilty. And, because you’re putting on a show, you save the conclusive video of kitty cats nose-diving into lava for last.

Mood

Aristotle said that endings must be both inevitable and surprising. This isn’t a contradiction in terms. Simplistically put, you always know that James Bond is going to save the day, the surprises come from exactly how he does it.

But how do you know if you’re watching a James Bond film or a Se7en?

The way you describe action, the choices the characters make, all of these play into the tone and mood of a story. A bleak, noir setting sets the viewer up for a downbeat ending. The feeling an audience takes from the telling should follow through to the end.

If Austin Powers’ next film filled the first and second acts with characteristic buffoonery and then ended with Dr Evil brutally torturing our hero to death and Basil Exposition descending into a suicidal depression, the audience wouldn’t be impressed.

The original theatrical cut of Bladerunner ends with Deckard and Rachel driving through the countryside en route to happily ever after. This ending feels tonally awkward given what’s gone before. Yes, most people like happy endings, but Bladerunner conjures up a world that appears void of happy endings, so delivering one smacks of contrivance, rather than a natural consequence of what has gone before.

Plot

Bladerunner, the director’s cut, ends with Deckard and Rachel going on the run. Whether they live happily ever after is left as an open question. A strand of plot is left unresolved. Why does that work?

Two reasons:

1. The central theme of the story – what it means to be human - has been fully explored.
2. The central plot of the story – Deckard dealing with the replicants – has ended.

Showing what happens to the two leads next won’t further either of those two points and will actively diminish the true climax – “… time to die” – by rambling on with superfluous detail.

The other way plot can come unstuck is in the details. Plot is the nuts and bolts of a story. It’s the logistics of getting from A to B to C. If the hero confronts the villain and they engage in a bout of fisticuffs to determine the winner, any tension or drama in this conflict vanishes if the reader is going, ‘but the bad guy’s got a gun! Why didn’t he just shoot the hero before he got within six feet of him!’

Robust internal logic, adherence to the laws of cause and effect, these are the things that ensures the climax of your plot holds together.

Character

… is intrinsically tied to plot. Plot is about things happening. Things happen because of people. What people do informs character.

Take the example of Bladerunner’s Deckard deciding to give up hunting down Rutger Hauer and co. halfway through the film, moving from L.A. to Chipping Sodbury in Gloucestershire, England, and spending the remainder of the running time working as a waiter in a cosy country tea shop. This doesn’t only shit mightily all over both the central theme and central plot, it also runs counter to our expectations of how Deckard should behave.

Characters in books are not like characters in real life. People in real life need no explanation for acting out of character. That nice Mrs Miggins, whose neighbours all describe as being quite pleasant, can become a mass murderer in the hours it takes for the police to dig up all the bodies under her patio. We may never know why she did it. James Bond however, can’t suddenly become a coward and run away from the bad guys without the audience wanting a bloody good explanation.

And of course, because characters drive plot and plot illustrates theme, Billy’s coming of age tale needs to end up with Billy showing the maturity he did not possess in the opening act.

...

Oh, there’s one other thing that determines whether or not an ending’s good:

• The reader

And unfortunately, that’s something you have no control over. You can expertly illustrate your theme, pick the perfect mood and have your plot and characters march inexorably toward the only resolution that ties everything together, but that doesn’t stop your reader wilfully twisting what you’ve written into something else – something that leads them to expect an ending different to the one you came up with.

Perhaps they’re fixated on happy endings. However much you telegraph the fact that everyone’s going to die, they may still cry foul when everybody does.

Perhaps they identify so closely with the protagonist, they object to decision she makes, not because it doesn’t make sense in the story, but simply because they wouldn’t make that choice themselves.

Perhaps they disagree with your theme – “good triumphs over evil? Ha! Don’t make me laugh”.

Perhaps they have an irrational loathing of marmosets and your hero’s sidekick just happens to be a marmoset.

Or perhaps your theme, mood, plot and character were all rubbish, but the rose-tinted glasses your reader wore when reading your story, magicked those elements into something that worked for them.

Always remember: the qualitative experience of a story is ultimately subjective.

So how do you write a good ending?

Well, you don’t.

Instead, you practice and hone your skills at crafting the elements of a story. You may even become the authorial equivalent of Brazil at the 1970 World Cup in terms of technique, but when it comes right down to it, you can’t write a good ending, you can only read one.