Beginning a novel is like the start of a romance with the spark and daydreams we enter, and a world newly created. Middles are like creating our own maps, the kind early explorers made who half believed they might fall off the page if they sailed too far, but they tried anyway. And then there are endings, and those can be tough. We fall in love with our characters, become seriously involved in all their business and sometimes find them more comforting than the realities where we actually exist. Why would we want to leave them? Why would we want to say good-bye?
Writing that last chapter, that last scene is like standing on the station platform and watching a dear friend’s face getting smaller, then blur, then vanish as the train pulls away. And that feeling of being left behind is lonely. Or the reverse, where we are the ones getting up from the café table and leaving our interior writing companion still sitting with a half cup of tea and bits of scone on a plate. It’s abandonment either way. Loss is loss and why wouldn’t we let the end languish, so the last chapter remains undone, an open door?
But that doesn’t really work. That’s neglect and pulls at us just as strongly. And we know we are letting ourselves down. We want an ending that measures up to everything that has gone before. Which can feel like a hefty ask. The place to start is back at the beginning. Read your own novel as if you have pulled it off a library shelf. Read it the way you read all the other novels you stack beside your bed. Let the story carry you and let the voices lead you through the action and emotional rhythms. Make notes if you must but try to be inside the book to feel its atmosphere and flavor. It is heading in a direction; it has a current. Follow it and believe in where that current points you when you get to the last page you have written. You will have a much better idea of how to complete the work. You can also, before or after using the previous strategy, ask the characters what they would like to do. Not one of them is going to say, “Leave me in limbo, please!” Go back to the café, the fishing pier, the factory floor, the horse coral and watch them, talk to them. Then ask them what more they would like to say. Let them be honest. Let them tell you what they know they are going to do and let them tell you they’re going to be ok.
Give them a send-off they deserve. They have given you a full adventure, and plenty of rich escape. After the last line is done, put on the kettle or walk along a stream and think of them in their world, continuing on by themselves. You have given them the skills and backstory to do it. Letting them go isn’t really saying good-bye. You can visit them in your own pages, and maybe, who knows, somewhere in the future, you may open a blank page and there they will be, waiting, thumb out for another ride on your pen.
Events
Tuesday Mornings are Back! Join me for ten weeks of writing and three hours each week that will lift you up and settle your nerves. March 15 – May 17, 2022. 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. EST. Each writer will have the opportunity to bring in a manuscript for peer review using the AWA Method. $500 maureen@maureenbjones.com
Thank You Book Moon & Odyssey Bookshop!
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