Eric Kent Edstrom's Blog

Like us novelists, readers want validation.

We want others to confirm our genius.

Readers just want you to confirm that the story is over.

[image error]Photo: dima_sidelnikov

The validation readers need comes at the end of your story. It’s the scene or scenes following the climax, after the main plot closes.

You must provide a clear signal that the story is over. For good or ill, the adventure is done.

In Star Wars its the awards ceremony, where Luke, Han, and Chewbacca receive medals from the rebel alliance in recognition of their heroism.

In thousand upon thousands of other movies, its the scene where the main couple kiss and everyone looks on, smiling at each other. Every side character gets a few seconds on screen, smiling, clapping, dabbing a tear. This signals that yes, everyone and everything is accounted for. Even the dog we saw once in Act II comes in and barks happily.

This is where any remaining open loops need closing.

If you feel like your book is over but you don’t feel like you’ve nailed the ending, this may help you sort it out.

But there’s another big moment you should acknowledge when you finish your first draft.

And that is your accomplishment of finishing it. Regardless of what you think of your story, celebrate the achievement of this important milestone.

For just a few hours or days, sit in the glow of having done it.

If I’ve convinced you of nothing else, I hope you’ve at least entertained the idea that writing doesn’t have to be like pulling teeth, or tedious drudgery. If we are to spend so many hours doing it, it’s only sensible to do it in an enthusiastic state.

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Readers say they hate cliffhangers.

But readers reward cliffhangers . . . at the end of chapters.

[image error]photo: everett225

There are all sorts of cliffhangers, and you can use them throughout your book to create suspense, intriguing confusion, and surprise.

At the end of every scene and/or chapter, end with a Tease, Twist, or or Unresolved moment.

The Unresolved Moment is the typical cliffhanger.

Your hero is chased by rabid wolves to a cliff, where he nearly falls and is hanging by one hand while the wolves slobber over his head. Below, flaming snakes hiss and writhe, eager to bite, burn, and consume him alive. [End scene.]

The reader absolutely must start the next chapter.

Or the love interest gets down on one knee and produces a ring box. [End scene.]

The reader has to start the next chapter.

The Unresolved Moment makes the reader keep reading To find out what happens.

These sorts of chapter endings can feel heavy handed, so mix it up.

The Tease leaves a different sense of unresolvedness.

At the end of an argument scene, the hero’s teenage daughter answers her phone. Then drops it and says, “Oh my god. I got it.” [End scene.]

What did she get? We have to know.

Or maybe we know from context that she got the lead in the school play. But now we want to see immediately how this changes her next day at school. Do the Mean Girls give her stink eye? Does her Charming Crush who’s All Wrong for Her suddenly shower her with attention? Does her bestie get jealous? I MUST KNOW!

The Tease makes the reader keep reading to learn What does this mean?

The Twist is similar, but it sends the plot in a much more unexpected direction. Same scenario, but the daughter puts down the phone and stares in shock at her father. He says. “Did you get the part?” And she says, still dazed, “Not the one I tried out for. I got the lead.”

Or in a thriller, maybe we’re at the end of a legally dubious break-in by our maverick detective. She’s finally gotten into an office where she planned to copy the villains hard drive to a USB stick. But when she starts the download, she notices a photo on the desk. It’s not of the villain and his socialite wife. It’s of the villain and the detective’s mother! End scene.

The Twist makes the reader keep reading to find out What just happened?

What follows these end scenes?

If you’re mean like me, you keep the cliffhanger alive for a while by changing viewpoint characters and building to another cliffhanger. Then switch back to the first character and repeat the cycle.

But it’s fine to just jump right into the next chapter where the last one left off. Because as the reader compulsively leaps over a chapter break to start the next, they get the sensation of I Can’t Put This Book Down.

There are subtler forms of these cliffhangers. If your ending a somber scene, where your main character is reflecting on the disaster that has come from their choices, you might have an interior monologue of sorts that poses a thematic question, or conveys the characters internal conflict, ending at a point where the reader is curious about what choice will the character make next.

Or the last line could simply be, She shouldered through the crowd and fled, leaving her guitar behind, leaving the cheers of her fans behind, leaving everything behind.

Doesn’t look like a cliffhanger, and it surely doesn’t have that same pace-driving feel. But if that’s the end of a chapter, the reader will feel a question. Maybe we know she’s fleeing because of bad news she received earlier, or because she’s performing a type of music she doesn’t respect. Knowing why she flees doesn’t answer where is she going? If we care about this character, that ending will force us to keep reading.

Or say your band of fantasy characters have found the secret entrance to a hidden valley. End the scene as they cross through, but don’t reveal what they discover until the beginning of the next chapter.

Or have them go through and show their reactions, but not what they see.

Or have them go through and show the wondrous vista and then have the sage wizard speak them an ominious single line of ancient history. “And so we come to the realm of Glinok-Tyl, not seen by mortal eyes these six hundred years.” The hero blinks at the awesome beauty. “It doesn’t look dangerous.” And the sage says, “That, my young friend, is why it is dangerous. Touch nothing, stay close.” [End scene.]

Chapter endings are fun, especially during your revision process. And you’ll often discover you wrote past the ending. Find that spot of suspense and cut there.

Have you written a chapter-ending line that will make readers click that Kindle button to the next page?

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I can’t watch gross-out tv shows or movies.

I don’t like close-ups of extreme emotional anguish either and most readers don’t either. But sometimes we have to write scenes of extreme events.

[image error]Photo: Wavebreakmedia

When we subject our reader to discomfort, we’re making a choice that might cause them to put the book down. This doesn’t mean we eschew difficult situations or topics in our novels. Quite the opposite.

If you’re writing horror, that’s what the audience wants.

But what if you’re not writing horror, or over-the-top brutality a la Quentin Tarantino?

There’s a technique that allows us to spare the reader the gory details so they can keep reading.

Zoom out or cut away.

And why would we want to do that? Well, we want them to keep reading, right? Just because an emotion or scene is “real” doesn’t mean anyone wants to suffer through it.

Imagine a scene in a PG movie, where the badguy has a kidnapped victim in his control. The ransom has been refused, and he’s going to make an example by shooting the victim in the head.

What does the filmmaker do? How does she convey the murder?

Not with a gruesome close up. Not even a quick blast and splatter.

The filmmaker might show a close up of the villains face, we hear the gunshot, and then the drop of a body. But we don’t see it.

OR the filmmaker zooms out to a wide shot of the warehouse and we see a flash in one window as the gun goes off.

OR the scene cuts to next morning as cops throw a sheet over the body on a gurney.

These choices spare the viewer the gross-out and the high-discomfort of such a moment to different degrees. Remember, I said it was PG. So, generally okay for older kids to see.

In a Tarantino film, we see a lot more viciousness and blood.

So this choice is about audience.

Let’s look at a different example. In Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, the audience is subjected to horrific WWII battle scenes, bodies blown to bits, shaky cam, confusion, explosions, gore, death, hopelessness.

And that’s just the opening ten minutes of the movie.

But later, when a pastor and army officer drive up a long farmland driveway to tell a mother that three of her four sons have been killed in action, Spielberg doesn’t show us her hearing the news.

He shows everything leading up to it.

He shows her collapsing in the doorway before the men have even gotten to the house. She knows what this visit means. We don’t hear her scream or sob. We’re behind her, we can’t even see her face in this moment.

The scene cuts away, respectfully, so she can mourn in privacy.

We’ve been spared the full barrage her agony. This sort of distancing is a kindness to the audience, and when handled deftly, adds enormous heft to the moment.

Watch it, imagine this in prose.  

We want our audience to be moved, feel joy and pain, experience the range of emotion a story provides. But we don’t want them putting the book down. We don’t want our audience so repulsed by the telling that they miss the story.

Contrast this to the death of Boromir in The Fellowship of the Ring. We see very arrow strike, we see Aragorn comforting him, hear Boromir’s final words. Not a dry eye in the theater when I saw it. So why did director Peter Jackson keep us so close? Why didn’t he cut away to spare us?

Boromir tried to steal the ring from Frodo just prior to this, an act he instantly regretted when he realized the effect the ring had on him.

So when the hobbits Merry and Pippin are best by orcs, we need to witness his valor and thereby earn his redemption. But note that Jackson keeps it fairly bloodless. He’s not trying to gross us out because that would draw our focus away from the emotion of the moment.

Put these ideas in your creative toolbox, and the next time a scene of extremely uncomfortable emotion or repulsiveness comes up, you can choose to zoom out or cut away. Show the shadow of the stabbing taking place, rather than the stabbing itself. Or cut to the POV of someone else disturbed by the sound of screams. Or cut to the next day when the body is found. All valid choices.

Or . . .  show it all in excruciating detail. Whatever is appropriate for your audience.

I’m surprised by how many writers I meet who misunderstand the 10,000 hour rule.

[image error]Photo: Khakimullin

Popularized by Maclom Gladwell in his quadrillion selling “Outliers,” the idea is that a person needs 10,000 hours of intentional practice to master a complex skill like playing an instrument.

My respose: who cares?

Gladwell’s premise seems to have been inspired by a paper by Anders Ericcson in the Harvard Business Review.

The upshot of the paper:”Consistently and overwhelmingly, the evidence showed that experts are always made, not born. These conclusions are based on rigorous research that looked at exceptional performance using scientific methods that are verifiable and reproducible.”

That’s great news.

It tells us that skill is not reliant on talent. Talent is fundamentally having an interest in something. If you are attracted to it, you’ll have a keener interest in the subtleties, and therefore a better knack for mimicking good work.

This is why I only compliment people on their skill, never their talent. Skill is the product of work, dedication, and persistence.

But this doesn’t mean we must wait to share our work until we’ve put in our 10,000 hours.

This leads to a much more important book for creatives: Show Your Work by Austin Kleon.

We live in an age where it is possible to go right around all the old, traditional gatekeepers that stood between us and our audience. And you can attract an audience by sharing your progress. Share your journey and let people watch you grow as an artist.

I encourage you to buy Show Your Work in paperback, not ebook. It’s a little, square book, with illustrations and very short chapters. The sort of thing you can pick up and dip into to discover inspiration. I’ve read it many times and I recommend it to everyone.

Forget talent. Practice for skill, and publish your practice. A fulfilling creative life isn’t about the chore, but about the journey.

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The best advice I ever heard about writing endings was this:

“If you can’t write your ending, read your beginning.”

[image error]photo: deagreez1

Do yourself a favor and refresh your memory on the first couple chapters, especially the opening pages of your novel, and ask:

Where is this taking place? Does your character need to return here for the story to feel complete?

What was your main character thinking? Are those thoughts different now? Revelant, irrelevant?

What was your main character’s problem? Is it resolved? Has your MC gained a new understanding and acceptance?

Did an external event throw your character’s world out of kilter? Is a “new normal” established, and has the passing of the old normal been acknowledged.

Not every question will be relevant, but a couple of them should be. You don’t need to think too hard about these, just ask them and answer them quickly. Let your creative mind ponder them.

The direct answer isn’t what you need to write. They just give you the loose end of a thought thread you can follow to your ending.

Readers don’t keep track of plots as a whole. But just as you have a creative mind, they have a simulated world in their subconcious mind. It knows when an ending is lacking, even if they can’t say what. It’s just a feeling.

Often that sense of incompleteness is because one of the above questions wasn’t answered clearly enough. Those questions are posed in the beginning of the story, so go find them and answer them.

You might be surprised, once again, to discover your accidental genius was already planting the seeds you now need to reap.

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I used to be too nice to my main characters.

I’d put them in danger, I’d subject them to fights they couldn’t win, I’d imprison them, and once I had aliens install a brain implant through my character’s nose.

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But these sorts of discomforts and pains are first level pains. Readers can be intrigued by these problems, but they’re so used to reading them, they don’t feel especially moved by them.

You could write more graphic detail, the kind of thing people need to read with thier hands over their eyes. And I suppose there are genres where that’s what readers are looking for.

But what we want readers to feel mostly is a desperate yearning for the main character to overcome, escape, and perhaps get revenge. In romance we want the couple to come together forever.

And it’s the doubt, discomfort, pain that makes that payoff . . .  well, pay off.

Enter the Dark Night of the Soul, the nadir of the character’s arc, the low point of all low points, rock bottom, the last hope of victory is extinguished.

I’ve noticed three reasons why writer wimp out:

Writers are fond of their characters and are too soft on themWriters fear putting characters into a hopeless situation because they don’t know how to get the characters out of itWriters fear that taking away hope will force a fundamental change on the world they don’t want to write

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The psychology of the story is the psychology of the author, and there are caves we don’t want to enter.

But that’s where the path leads, invariably. The reader needs you to go in there and take them with.

If your main character dies, you’ve written a tragedy. That’s fine, and if you’ve signaled to the reader that this is what’s happening, they will accept it. If you’re writting a romance, you will alienate readers, who want a Happily Ever After.

Or maybe your main character dies and is ressurected, literally or figuratively. It’s hard to literally kill your main character without a deus ex machina resurrection. So we kill them metaphorically by taking their power, killing (or appearing to kill) their loved ones, and showing the villain’s victory.

In Writing the Blockbuster Novel Albert Zuckerman notes that the hero must fall into the power of the villain. He’s been captured, gun taken, hands bound, surrounded by guards.

All these tropes are designed to create the enormous emotional contrast when the hero gets free and vanquishes the villain.

Indiana Jones fails to keep the Ark of the Covenant out of the Nazi’s hands. He and his girlfriend Marion are captured, tied up, and forced to witness the relic being opened.

Whip snapping, gun shooting, and fist fighting got him this far, but it’s his knowledge as an archeologist and his respect for historical relics (“It belongs in a museum!” he tells Belloq about the Aztec idol at the beginning) and his experience that all treasures have traps, that saves him. “Don’t look at it!” he tells Marion.

It requires sacrifice. For Indy to survive he has to turn away from the mystery.

And there’s a bit of a hint for how to get your character out of that dark moment. Look to the qualities of their character, not their physical skills, to get help them out of the darkest moment.

For Luke Skywalker to survive against Darth Vader in Empire Strikes Back, he can’t fight, his hand has been chopped off and his lightsaber lost. He doesn’t have enough command of the Force to beat Vader. But he has now way out except to join the Dark Side.

But he does have a choice, one that only a noble-hearted hero could make: to sacrifice himself by jumping to a probable death. (BTW, Han Solo is frozen in carbonite, giving the audience a worse-than-death horror to endure for THREE YEARS until the sequel came out. I remember, I was there!)

John McClane in Die Hard has to surrender to save his wife. Yes, he has taped a gun to his back, and he does use it once he’s Surrendered to Infiltrate the Fortress of the Villain, but this is total keeping with his New York cop street smarts.

In The Dark Knight, Batman chooses to take the fall for Harvey Dent’s “murder.” All his gadgets and fighting skills can’t fix the real problem: that the “White Knight” that was to clean Gotham up had gone bad and had to be killed. To preserve Dent’s reputation, Batman chooses to be seen as the villain.“Because he’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we’ll hunt him. Because he can take it. Because he’s not our hero. He’s a silent guardian, a watchful protector. A dark knight.”

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Remember, you can scroll back in your manuscript and plant a few seeds that will blossom at just the right moment.

Your hero has helpers. These characters make up his team.

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I didn’t realize this when I wrote my first novel. I just threw names out and characters started having conversations and then plot happened.

But ten chapters in, I had these hangers-on, these useless louts who took up my brain power but didn’t do anything except run in fear when bigfoot burst from the forest.

It was too much to keep track of, and each had little mini plots going that were boring.

The solution was easy, if a bit tedious to execute. I had to merge some of them into a single character, and others I simply removed.

If someone had told me about teams, my creative mind might have known to fill out the roster more efficiently.

Your main character’s team will also help you, the writer.

If you’ve watched any TV cop show, you’ll quickly recognize that the hero has all sorts of experts they can call on to do stuff for them. Think of the specialists in Oceans 11. You’ve got the master of disguises guy, the technology nerd, the suave con-man, the stealthy ninja.

Or how about The Fellowship of the Ring. Frodo is aided by a wise wizard, a burly strong dwarf, a noble ranger, a deadshot elf archer, and his loyal friend Samwise.

Remember the A-Team? It was an awesomely silly 1980s action show about a band of Vietnam vets, discharged from the military for “a crime they didn’t commit,” and who now take on heist-style missions. (The 2010 movie remake lived up to the stupidity of the original.)

✅ Hannibal: Master of disguise, and mastermind (the leader of the group)

✅ Murdock: Pilot and jack of all trade (mentally unstable)

✅ B.A.: Strong man who can drive or build anything (afraid of flying) Mr. T!

✅ Face: Charming con-man who can source any vehicle on short notice (disgustingly good looking)

They only take on jobs that pay, but also that are just.

I loved this show when I was a kid. Especially the midpoint montage where they inevitably got cornered in a barn and had to build a monster tank from a delapitaded tractor and 50 gallon barrels.

CSI in all its variations feature teams in support of the main detective. Forensics can discover anything, if the plots needs them to.

Arrow, the comic adaptation TV show, has a team surrounding the Oliver Queen. I love how Felicity Smoak can do anything with technology to help Oliver stop criminals.

Smoak: “I just picked up the bad guy’s phone signal in the Glades!”

Arrow: “Track it!”

Smoak: “To do that I’d have to install a virus on his phone that pings the doohickey with the interflooser wangfidget.”

Arrow: “You have five minutes.”

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So if you’re mired down with a bunch of characters who seem to have no point in existing, it might be time to ask your creative mind to sort them into buckets of abilities.

What can this character do that my hero can’t do?

Some archetypes in popular teams:

The Tank: strong man who can beat up guys and absorb huge amounts of abuse

The Brain: super smart, explains the science/history of what’s happening, builds the “tech machine” that solves a problem.

The Charmer: master of persuasion, can elicit info from anyone, ease tensions

The Thief: sneaky and silent, can unlock doors and pick pockets

The Sage: sees the big picture, knows the ancient history, might be weaker than others, but makes up for it through experience. Often the mentor to the hero.

The list goes on, and you should pay attention anytime you watch a show or movie to see how a character fits into this sort of role.

Oh, BTW, badguys have teams too: minions. Watch Die Hard again, and take note.

We somes make promises to readers without realizing it. This happens all the time when we introduce an intriguing mystery or enigmatic character. Some won’t remember them, and won’t notice if you never show the resolution or purpose of these elements.

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But others will, especially if you have re-readers.

If you’re writing a series, you can carry these over from book to book, answering some, introducing new ones. But the trick is to keep track of them and bring them to a close in some manner or other.

I have an Excel spreadsheet called “open loops” for my Starside Saga series. I have a short name for all the open plots in the left hand column.

Here are some examples:

Vol. Minn and her merculyn armyRaginalt KeelStartle

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These are characters I’ve mentioned and who were last seen “doing something” of import or interest. By the end of the series, I need to close these.

I occasionally go through and add a column to update the current-state of that loop.

Sounds like a lot of thinking and inventing, doesn’t it?

But that’s not how it works for me.

By regularly reviewing and updating this list, I reawaken those characters and plots in my mind. I sometimes go back and read some passages to refresh my memory. And then I continue on my merry way, trusting my creative mind to take advantage of those open loops to solve other plots.

Leaving a few stray loops open can give the readers a sense that the world you’ve created will continue after the story ends. But they better not be important ones!

One of the biggest open loops in a series that I remember is the question of Who Killed Asmodean? in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series.

I read the Brandon Sanderson books that ended the series (very excellent work, BTW), but I had to look up the answer to the Asmodean question on the internet. The question was answered in the books, but not explicitly, and that was a let down. It was a small thing in the scope of the story, but the manner of his death was so dramatic and suprising (and his murderer’s identity withheld), that it was an enormous question and source of theories for years, and years, and years. So it was a huge question in readers’ minds.

If you’re dealing with one book, you can do most of this during revision. As you read through your first draft, you’ll see the plots and characters and objects that seem important.

If you wrote about a snake that got loose from somebody’s aquarium, we’d better discover what happend to it.

But if you get to the end of the novel and the snake hasn’t reappeared and it’s disappearance wasn’t important at all, you can:

1) take out all mention of it

2) close the loop by having someone mention finding the snake

3) use memory of the loose snake to spark a new idea in your hero’s mind

4) have the snake’s disappearance end almost immediately by finding it in the same scene.

And there’s a dozen more ways to handle it. But leave it unresolved and your readers will feel that something isn’t quite tidy about the ending of your novel.

As a visual artist, I’m at a disadvantage. I have zero natural talent.

But that’s not stopping me from learning to draw. My ultimate goal is to be able to draw concept art of my characters. So I’ve been drawing heads (from every angle) for days. They are invariably bad, but they are improving.

So what does this have to do with writing?

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The smaller the sketch, the less detail I can put in without it turning into a muddy mess.

This is true in writing. If you are introducing a walk-on character, you can’t spend four paragraphs describer him. If your character dives into a restroom to hide during a gunfight, you can’t break the pacing to give us paragraphs of description about toilet stalls.

But you don’t want to miss the opportunity of establishing these elements firmly in your reader’s mind.

A guy called Foster came in with the report. He handed it to her.

“This it?” she asked, leafing through it.

“Yeah. Not much there. A few burglaries, a noise complaint.”

She didn’t even notice when Foster left. It seemed impossible her suspect had left so few tracks in his record. Nobody went from robbing a double wide to killing fourteen people.

That’s fine, we don’t need any context to know what’s happening. But the reader is forced to fill in the details of the world with the Generic TV Cop Show setting. It works, many super successful writers do it, but that doesn’t mean we settle for generic.

A guy called Foster came in with the report. He scratched a fat earlobe and extended the file across her disaster area of a desk. He raised an eyebrow, scanning the debris of yesterday’s lunch. “Want me to call FEMA?”

She grunted a laugh. Her desk wasn’t that bad. “Want me to call your cardiologist?”

She flipped open the file. He muttered something about his cholesterol. “This is it?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Foster said. “A few burglaries, a noise complaint.”

It seemed impossible her suspect had left so few tracks in his record. Nobody went from robbing double-wides in Pine Place to killing fourteen people in a Stanel Heights mansion.

Yes, it’s a bit longer. We see that she has a messy desk. But we now see that Foster might be a bit unhealthy. We see they have a relationship based on teasing. The pace is just slightly slower.

If the description of Foster went on more than this, the reader would start to think Foster is a more important character than he is. Or they might wonder why our detective is losing focus on the task at hand to notice so many details about him.

Just as in a small sketch of a face, we can’t pack in every wrinkle, every freckle, or the smallest creases above the eye. Give us the shape and a detail or two that captures the essence.

The more sentences you use to describe something, the more important the reader assumes it to be, and the slower the pace becomes.

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I am often impressed by my own accidental genius.

Wait. What?

[image error]photo: Milkos

Accidental genius is one of the great joys of writing fiction. And you have already encountered it.

When something I “just made up” during the flow of writing back in chapter 3 suddenly becomes pivotal to the story in chapter 15, I grin like a maniac and type like a fiend.

“It’s happening!” I cry. “It’s really happening!”

The best part about these things is that they appear to be oh so carefully plotted out. “Readers are going to think I’m brilliant!”

And a thousand writers will lie right to your face and say they thought and thought and thought and weighed detail after detail and assembled their novel like a Swiss watch. And yes, they did put that in on purpose and it relates to the theme of “urgency” as it applies to the human condition in the twenty-first century blah blah blah blah.

They did no such thing.

I love when my subconcious mind—the creative mind I mention in nearly every post—delivers its genius up to me like a gift. I still give myself credit, because if I didn’t sit down and write every day and remind myself to relax, it never would have happened.

In his book Creating Short Fiction science fiction grandmaster Damon Knight teaches that we must learn to “collaborate with Fred.” Fred is the name he gives to the creative mind. He instructs writers to give Fred a story problem at bedtime, sleep on it, and chances are you’ll see it in a new light.

We don’t have to “puzz and puzz until our puzzler gets sore” (Grinch reference!) We simply need to let the same genius who stuck in that chapter 3 detail to realize you’re waiting for him or her to tie a couple plot points up.

All the accidental genius needs from you is to keep writing.

“Write. Don’t think. Relax.” —Ray Bradbury

Writing tips, tricks, and inspo straight to your inbox. Bi-weekly except for November when I send a daily email to keep you on track for NaNoWriMo.