Putting a Button on It

When a story you love ends, it's a tragedy. You've been through the wringer with those characters. After the danger and excitement of the climax, you're looking for a satisfying wrap up to the action something that lives up to the execution of the promise the story premise made in the very beginning. Something that cements the lessons the main character learned throughout the slings and arrows of the story.

But hey, no pressure, right?

Endings are hard. There's your hero after the climax, bruised, bloodied, often broken hearted. That may be figurative. It may be literal or metaphorical, but on some level, your MC has suffered a death at the climax. That is the point in the story wherein it becomes crystal clear that this character is no longer who he or she was when the story started. And there's no going back. The MC has to return to the ordinary world after the adventure and they have to do that bearing some useful gift. The cure for whatever plague was decimating the town. The head of the dragon eating all the sheep. A Holy Grail of some kind - even if that grail is simply a relationship worth hanging onto - the gift conveyed there is the formation of the new family, whatever form that family takes.

This is what we, as readers, want to see in a resolution, then - the MC applying what he or she has learned. If you're writing genre, that's a happy thing. The gift is a benefit to the community. If you're writing literary, the gift affects no one by the MC and may carry a bit of a curse with it. Think Cassandra in the Trojan War. Gifted with the ability to see the future, cursed so that no one would believe her. If you're writing tragedy, the denouement is the fall out associated with the MC failing to learn his or her lessons through the course of the story.

I suspect that most of our readers have been trained by TV and movies to expect short denouement. But since books aren't constrained by producers watching the dollar signs with every frame of film captured, maybe it really is incumbent upon authors to luxuriate in our endings a little bit - to give readers time and space to transition out of the world of the adventure and back into their normal world. Certainly different stories will bear different treatments. If you spend very little time in your hero's everyday world at the beginning of your story, you can probably invest little time in the resolution. If you spend pages on the heroine's normal world at the beginning of your story, immersing readers in the details, you will need a denouement of similar detail at the end to contrast the differences between the two. Set up and resolution are the frame on the action of your story. You don't want a lopsided frame, right?

So really. How long should your story resolution go? Exactly as long as it needs to be to bring your characters full circle. Unless you're a terrible human being and you mean to strand your characters mid-circle. Then your denouement needs to be even weightier in order to measure the consequences of characters who failed to complete their journey(s) or who died in mid-arc. (We're looking at you on that one, GRRM.)

Do I make it sound facile? It isn't. Just go have a look at how well I follow my own advice. O_o

Links for Tips on Writing a Denouement

I'm cheating this week because I'm working hard on my CD. So here are some links on writing a Denouement.

Links:

ONE. From Writer's Digest.

TWO. From Ellen Brocks Novel Bootcamp Lectures.

THREE. From Yeahwrite.

ENJOY!

The Stuff Before THE END

"And they all lived happily ever after."

Too short? Too abrupt? Missing your favorite character already? Fortunately, that line is not the denouement. The ball after the dragon's been slain and the prince rescued, when our happy couple announces their engagement, the families rejoice, a few jokes are exchanged, and the fairies fall into the cake. That broader scene is the denouement.

How long is too long? Too short? Just right? Well, Goldilocks, my off-the-cuff advice would be a chapter of commensurate length as all the other chapters.



Three things you want to include in the denouement:

1. Expose any lingering plot secrets/hold-backs
2. Welfare-check your primary and beloved characters
3. Hint at the future of your protag (even if you're writing a standalone)
• If you've killed your protag, then a glimpse of the future for their cause.

The difference between a denouement and an epilogue is usually the time gap and final reveals. The denouement stays in the timeline of the story and reveals specific plot secrets. The epilogue fast-forwards months/years and has no obligation to the plot, just the characters.

Has anyone encountered a denouement that went on too long? Let me know in the comments what made you feel, "oh, just get this over with already!"

Writing the Denouement - What's the Right Amount of Wrap-up?

So... this is *MY* big news this week. How about you all?

Tee hee hee!

Yeah, okay, I'm still in a daze, totally gobsmacked, and running about in this kind of gleeful haze where I whisper to myself, "My fantasy romance, THE PAGES OF THE MIND, finaled in Paranormal Romance in RWA's RITA®  awards!!!"

To unpack that a little, for those not familiar, RWA is Romance Writers of America and the RITA® Award is our premiere award for published books in the romance genre. (There's also the Golden Heart, for unpublished works.) Because romance is an enormous umbrella with many subgenres, there are thirteen categories. "Paranormal Romance" is basically all science fiction or fantasy style stories with romance in the story arc. Yeah, it's a polyglot of a subgenre, but there you are. With entries capped at 2,000, and every entry read and ranked by five judges, it's a tremendous effort. It's basically the Academy Awards for romance authors. The winners will be announced at the very glam awards ceremony at the Annual Conference, which will be in Orlando this year, July 22-29.

Okay! Moving on...

Our topic this week is on story structure, specifically asking the SFF Seven about the Denouement: How long do you spend wrapping up a novel?

I'm very interested in the answer to this question because it's something I've been working on. I get "ended too abruptly" as a comment more than any other (I'm pretty sure - I haven't annotated or anything), and across all the genres I write. On the occasion that someone I'm friendly with makes the comment and I'm able to dig a bit, they'll always say, "Oh, it's a good thing - I just wanted MORE!"

Wanting more IS a good thing, but ending too soon isn't so much.

The way ideal story structure works is like this. We all learned this in grade school. I don't know who else among the SFF 7 uses this, but it's a standard basis to work from.

Really, it's not so even, and it will look more or less like this for the Hero's Journey, which is how a lot of SFF stories go:

Thanks to Digital Worlds for this excellent graphic!

When you break this out into percentages, it looks like this:
Act I, Beginning: first 25%
Act II: middle 50%
Act II Climax:: at 75%
Act III Climax: at 90%
Denouement: 10%

"Denouement," for those who've forgotten high school English class, is a French word that means "untying." Basically that final percentage is for unraveling all those knots that got snarled and tightened along the way.

BUT - and this is the interesting part to me - if you measure the actual space of story after the final climax in most stories, it's not 10% of the total. Many authors end within pages of the ultimate climax. One exception to this is urban fantasy author Jennifer Estep. She has a good chunk after the story's climax, which she regards as a kind of "bookend" to the opening scene. She also uses that to set up the next book in the series.

Me? I do chart my own books and ... yeah, the percentages say I end abruptly. I never hit anywhere near 10%. It's more like 2-3%. But I'm trying to change this! I'm making an effort to add more onto the ending, untying some of those knots, to see if it makes a difference.

In fact, one book I deliberately made the effort to do that with is THE PAGES OF THE MIND, which had 8% of denouement after the Act III climax. Did I mention that finaled for a RITA???

Tee hee hee.

Anyway!!!

I'm interested in both reader and writer experiences with this. How much ending do you like? Who are some authors who handle this really well?