P2P: Give Your Ending Room To Breathe

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The ending of your short story or novel is what will stick with your reader the longest. Nailing the ending is how you evoke the catharsis feeling of a great story and there are some concrete ways to get there.

A good ending needs two things:

• inevitability (the feeling that this is what everything leads up to)
• offers closure (the satisfaction feeling)

And a great ending needs one more:

• unexpected (the 'what? I didn't see that coming!')

Inevitability is the momentum you've built up over the course of the story into your climax and ending. It's the feeling in the reader that this is the only way things could have worked out. This means the 'easy' solutions to conflict are dealt with in some logical way. If the problem can be resolved with a frank conversation between the right people, you don't have a solid conflict.

Stay in tune with your protag's motivations: also known as staying 'in character.' The protag and antag of your story have their own histories, their own wants and desires. They need to constantly strive for those desires or the reader can't root for them. If Jimmy wants juice but keeps asking for water and then complaining about it, your reader has no sympathy for him. Replace 'juice' with anything your character wants: love, recognition, power, a puppy, revenge- as long as he strives for his goal throughout the story, you'll build the momentum necessary for an inevitable ending.

Reflect the beginning of your story in the end. Either mimic or oppose the situation you started with to evoke either coming full circle or growing beyond one's starting place. Your protag's motivations can help you identify which of the two would feel better. If your protag wants something back the way it was, a circular ending will feel conclusive. If she wants something to change (and gets it) an opposite ending will reflect that.

The protag's direct actions need to result in the ending. Have you ever read a book where at the very moment of crisis something comes out of the blue to save the heros? This is a technique called Deus Ex Machina- a latin phrase for 'god in the machine.' It means, essentially, that the protag hasn't caused his own ending which means all of that momentum you've built up means nothing. Of a cascade of coincidences solves the major conflict of the story, your reader will be cheated of their feeling of satisfaction. The protag needs to kill the king himself, needs to rescue the little girl, needs to master his power through his own force of will. Arbitrary coincidence can't do it for him.

Bring conflict to its full conclusion. The easiest way to cheat your reader of a satisfying ending, is to skip over consequences. Getting characters in trouble is the fun part, but if there are never any consequences to those actions, what do any of them matter? If your protag kills someone and it doesn't effect him in any way, if his sidekicks don't seem to care, what weight does that action hold? None at all. If the climax of your story involves a deadly battle with a werewolf and he barely survives but then you skip right over how he gets help and lives so you can show happily ever after, you've cut your reader out of half of the emotional arc. Gunshots leave holes, death leaves trauma, marriages are extended relationships- not one-time events. Make sure all of your protag's actions have consequences, good or bad, that you're not skipping over.

If you have everything above, a reader can come away from your story satisfied, having enjoyed the experience. But they may have been able to guess your ending, which leaves some people less-than-thrilled. It's still a good book, but they're not going to rave to their friends about it.

To be truly great, an ending must be unexpected. One way to twist the ending is to defy traditions: genre, age, gender, sexuality, caste, and more. The fantasy genre tends to bring the protag and most of their sidekicks through the plot alive. Kill them all off. Romance sub-plots end where the guy eventually wins over the girl. What if she's asexual or lesbian? The hero's usually the one saving the princess. What if the princess saved herself to rescue the hero? Twists on the inevitable ending your plot drives you toward will surprise your readers. If you plant three or four subtle clues throughout the book, your more astute readers will be very pleased they figured it out.


Throw in your voice below. What other ways have you seen endings twist for that 'wow!' feeling?

P2P: My War Against Had and Was

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Arguably one of the easiest ways to tighten up prose and bring a punch to your settings or action is to strike out most mentions of 'had' and 'was.' These words crop up to indicate complex past tense states that are, on the whole, unnecessary for clear prose.


Past Perfect Tense

• He had faltered up the steps.
• She had sang until her throat became hoarse.
• They all had left a mess of the balcony.

The past perfect tense indicates a time period before a time in the past. It frequently crops up in past-tense fiction when referencing something that has already occurred. Since the story is written in past, the past perfect tense offers a double past indicator.

In almost every instance, had is unnecessary for the understanding of the sentence, slows down the scene, and takes the punch out of the verb that follows it. Also in almost every instance, all you have to do is remove it.

• He faltered up the steps.
• She sang until her throat became hoarse.
• They all left a mess of the balcony.

Tighter, stronger. The reader doesn't need a double past indicator to understand when something is happening before something else. Context within the story provides that information as does simply placing the earlier event earlier in the draft of the story where it would have happened.


Future-In-the-Past

• They were going to visit his Aunt.
• He was planning on skipping stones on the lake.
• She was going to cut vegetables for the stew.

Was/were is a little trickier as it's used for two different past tenses. The future-in-the-past tense indicates a plan for the future from a point of view in the past. There is an implied 'but something happened' in a future-in-the-past tense. 'She was going to cut vegetables for the stew, but traffic made her late.'

This tense format is useful in fiction, especially for close points of view. But 'was' tends to be a habit of unplanned prose as it's the context of the scene or a previous scene that tells the reader what the characters plan on doing. The writer shouldn't need to specify directly, it takes all the showing out of your story and places the sentence firmly in the telling category. 

The fix is not simple, unfortunately. If you've spent chapter one establishing that Boy's mother wants him to run the basket of apples to his Aunt in the woods, it's unnecessary to open chapter two with 'They were going to visit his Aunt.' But usually a rejigging of the paragraph is needed if the information isn't already obvious to the reader. 

Cutting vegetables, for instance: Sally slumped against the window of her bus seat. She couldn't drum up a smile for the little boy waving at her in the car next door. Traffic snarled in every direction and she checked her watch for the third time. Seven oh six. Mother came home to unchopped vegetables. 

Past Progressive and Gerunds

• She was skipping with us.
• He was throwing the ball.
• They were cutting, taping, and gluing their craft projects.

 Past progressive tense indicates a thing that started in the past and continued for a while (either specified or vague). Again, there's an implied clause that something occurs to interrupt  the event that was happening. 'She was skipping with us until she fell down the hole.' 'He was throwing the ball until he hit a window.'

In conjunction with 'was' the following verb is forced into a gerund format, a verb that acts like a noun. They're easy to spot with 'ing' at the end of them. All verbs in the sentence that follow a 'was' or 'were' need to adopt this gerund status to maintain the correct subject/verb agreement.

But a verb that's forced into a noun isn't a strong verb at all. The easiest way to change this is simply remove 'was' and convert the gerund back into a verb in the simple past tense.

• She skipped with us.
• He threw the ball.
• They cut, taped, and glued their craft projects. 

Notice that the sentences still work if the event in question is interrupted. 'She skipped with us until she fell down the hole.'


More Past Tenses

If you want to look into even more varieties of past tense, I recommend this post from Daily Writing Tips. They give good examples and decent explanations of each tense (though no cool visual timelines).

As always, editing guidelines are 1) subjective and 2) not set in stone. Great writers break rules all the time, but you should always know what the rule is for so you can break it deliberately.

P2P: Twitter

Original photo by USFW

For those uninitiated, Twitter is a short-form, global, public conversation with a million participants all talking at once. A planetary hive-mind of ideas and experience that happens in real-time. It's text messaging for the web with your texts limited to 140 characters.

The hivemind is filtered by the symbol #, also known as a hashtag (or octothorp if you're a writing nerd) and with it you can both broadcast to a specific group (#novel) or narrow your focus to a limited audience (#SoCal). It's also a tool to indicate an emotion or opinion, usually at the end of your text (#tmi #IDontWana #EndRant). Hashtags cannot contain any punctuation, but they're indifferent to capitalization. 

So. As an author you'll find twitter is a great place to both find an audience and connect with a lot of other authors, readers, agents, publishers, and other industry pros. The best way to introduce yourself and meet like-minded people is to hunt down a twitter chat that is in your genre. Attend and participate, you'll find friendly people and more contests than you can shake a stick at.

I use twitter to connect with and follow some of my favorite authors. I announce new blog posts there, seek out people to interview for my newsletter, and let everyone know when I have a new book available. I'll pop in during the day to see how other people are doing, I frequently haunt the #amwriting tag to give encouragement or answer easy questions people run into during their drafting process.

Here's a list of sites that have already done a great job collecting all kinds of writing related hashtags. 

205 hashtags for authors

40 hashtags for writers

the best twitter hashtags for writers and readers

100 twitter hashtags every writer should know

And a list of twitter chats:

twitter chat database

twitter chat schedule

20 twitter chats for the library crowd

tweetchats by day of the week

Finally, a website I use to figure out popular hashtags that are related to the ones I already know about:

hashtagify

Find me on twitter under @tamiveldura and let's talk! I'm frequently involved with #wschat and #genrechat.

P2P: Edit Yourself Backwards

Editing your own work is hard for several reasons. You know what's going on, so the picture in your head is complete. When you're reading your own work you don't really know what a brand new reader is seeing with your words. How complete is their picture? You also know the intent of the dialogue, and our brains- being awesome- fill in minor missing words without our eyes ever noticing. Sometimes, when we're really involved in a project, faults of logic can even slip past, causing huge pileups of edits later on.

So if editing yourself is so hard, is there anything you can do?


Edit Yourself Backwards
Have you ever tried reading a sentence backwards? Start at the end of your manuscript and work your way right to left. You'll notice right away that things go a lot slower like this. Making sense of a backward sentence takes a bit of doing- a lot like learning a new language where the nouns and adjectives are swapped. This enforced slower pace will make awkward sentences jump out right away. Missing words and strange tenses will become very obvious.

Edit Yourself Upside Down
This won't work on a tablet or your desktop computer, but print out a few text pages and try it. Flip your work upside down. Like the backwards technique, upside down forces your brain to work harder to translate into right-side-up words. You'll have the sentences in a logical order this way, so pacing, voice, and characters are easier to see.

Edit Yourself In The Mirror
Not going to lie, this one might be more trouble than it's worth. But for those avid readers who swallow doorstoppers in a day, it may come to this. Grab your laptop, get comfortable on the bathroom counter (or in front of a floor-length mirror if you want to be slightly more normal) and read your story in the reflection. With every letter flipped around b's and d's will get confused very quickly. Be methodical. Read word for word. Misspellings, missed punctuation, and all sorts of small weirdnesses will pop out at you, but it will take a long time.

Edit Yourself Out Loud
Every reader has a mental voice or two that carries them along through a text. Many readers, once they get into the story, start seeing it like a movie or hearing it, rather than reading the page. Hide in the farthest corner of the house in a quiet room to yourself, and read your story out loud. With you mouth, not your mental voice. Give the words weight and emphasis. Feel them. Pacing with scream at you this way, but so will awkward sentences and funny homonyms.
Even with all of the above, you won't catch everything. It's the nature of the beast. You will, at some point, need a beta reader or editor (request a quote!) to go over your work and critique or proofread before publication. That's ok! An outside look at things can give you some perspective. Still, in order to produce the cleanest copy you can, try combining all four of the above techniques at once. That'll slow your inner reader down.