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Reading chapter 9 - Beginnings and endings - Tension and pace

Creating, sustaining and developing that curiosity in the reader is the way a writer maintains tension in a narrative.

Reading chapter 9 - Beginnings and endings - Tension and pace

The chapters of our novels won't all end on cliffhangers, but ideally the end of a chapter tips the reader froward: she should be aware there are things he doesn't yet know that he wants or needs to know. As readers we are hard-wired to want to satisfy our curiosity and resolve the story - as long as it has become sufficiently important to us.

Finished chapter 9 - Beginnings and endings - A sense of an ending

A good ending is a fitting culmination of all that has gone before, usually gesturing back in some way to earlier events, and sometimes pointedly recalling the opening of the story. This structural patterning addes to the novel's sense of resolution: a cycle has been completed.

Finished chapter 9 - Beginnings and endings - A sense of an ending

If it's more preferable to your original idea, then you should change direction as necessary in order to accommodate it. Better to change an ending than to restrict the creative process.

Finished chapter 9 - Beginnings and endings - A sense of an ending

But it can also someimtes be profoundly unhelpful to press onward to our planned destination with such single-minded determination that we close our minds to alternative possibilities. Perhaps in the process of writing you've learnt new things about your characters, or a ne widea thrown up which better suits what you want to say.

Finished chapter 9 - Beginnings and endings - A sense of an ending

So generally speaking, it's helpful to have a strong sense of where you're going.

Finished chapter 9 - Beginnings and endings - A sense of an ending

It's often the case that developing writers don't know how their current story is going to end. Some writers work on a story quite happily without knowing where it's going and this doesn't prevent them arriving at a good conclusion. But having no sense of how your story is going to end is going to increase your channces of running into trouble.

Finished chapter 9 - Beginnings and endings - A sense of an ending

An overwritten ending is slightly hrader to reach consensus on, but try cutting progressively back from the end and seeing how the conclusion reads with each new cut. Wherever the cut improves the story, you know those extra words have to go. Do you want your ending to deposit the reader safely back to land or drop them at the mouth of hte harbour?

Finished chapter 9 - Beginnings and endings - A sense of an ending

Uusally there is a common habit in developing writers: they don't trust their readers to understand what whey've been shown, so they they tell them well. But that would actually dissipate the impact of what they've already written.

Finished chapter 9 - Beginnings and endings - A sense of an ending

On one hand you want to leave enough room for the reader to participate imaginatively in the ending; on the other, you don't want to leave them baffled or confused by giving them too little to work with. If you have underwritten an ending, readers will usually be quick to tell you.

Finished chapter 9 - Beginnings and endings - A sense of an ending

What we're looking for in an ending is something that falls between no ending at all and an unnecessarily protracted and insistent ending. As with every aspect of writing, arriving at a satisfactory conclusion is the result of a balancing act.

Finished chapter 9 - Beginnings and endings - Exposition and starting in medias res

However you choose to start your story, your opening is an opportunity to recruit your reader. Although it was suggested that you shouldn't spend too long on your opening at an early stage, but eventually you way want to give it particularly close attention. And when you 've found the right front door for your purposes, you'll know.

Finished chapter 9 - Beginnings and endings - Exposition and starting in medias res

With a character in motion in the middle of an episode, he pulls us along in his wake. The narrative feels reassuringly purposeful - we're going somethere, or something's about to happen.

Finished chapter 9 - Beginnings and endings - Exposition and starting in medias res

Another way of starting a story is to begin in medias res - in the midst of things. Of course, all stories have an implied or explicit 'before' and 'after', but there's a particular sense in certain narratives of our having entered in the middle of an episode. conversation or thought-process.

Finished chapter 9 - Beginnings and endings - Exposition and starting in medias res

One common way of starting a story is with some exposition - this is the set-up, the way things are , the ' once upon a time there was...' . This can be done in straightforward fashion. Starting your stroy at a point where change is occurring can be helpful.

Finished chapter 8 - Beginnings and endings - A good enough beginning

You could usefully ask yourself: how late in the sequence of events can I begin the story?

Finished chapter 8 - Beginnings and endings - A good enough beginning

Any of this is likely to be just so much dead material, suggesting that the writer is writing herself into the story, warming up in front of the reader. By all means warm up, but be sure to cut these passages later so the reader begins reading at the point where the real story begins.

Finished chapter 8 - Beginnings and endings - A good enough beginning

The crucial thing in your own writing is to check that your opening does actually have a function - that it's doing a necessary job. A description of weather that has no real bearing on the narrative, an account of a place which is not substantially important to the story, the introduction of a character who plays no significant part -

Finished chapter 8 - Beginnings and endings - A good enough beginning

Openings have a variety of functions: they can (in any combination) introduce character, suggest a theme or subject, set the plot rolling, indicate time and place, or intrigue us with the promise of what is to come; they can also, particularly in the case of first-person narratives, establish an interesting or inviting narrative voice.

Finished chapter 8 - Beginnings and endings - A good enough beginning

Consider finishing your story first, then revisit its opening several times. In doing so you may find that the opening is basically sound but needs minor tweaks in the light of the experience you have gained writing the whole story; or this opening is now superfluous and that you can cut it altogether.

Finished chapter 8 - Beginnings and endings - A good enough beginning

Understand that you are needlessly sabotaging your chances of getting a story written if you fixate, at too early a stage in the writing of it, on creating the perfect opening. You may torment yourself by comparing your own beginnings with the openings of works that had been edited over and over.

Finished chapter 8 - Narrative viewpoint - Other-world narrative voices

Such a balancing act is fraught with diffculty and is a high-risk enterprise for a writer, but when done successfully may result in genuinely new and exciting work.

Finished chapter 8 - Narrative viewpoint - Other-world narrative voices

Careful in his choice of unfamiliar language, introducting new words gradually and in a context which allows the reader to understand their meaning, he tries to map out a path which simultaneously remains true to his intentions and keeps the reader fully on board.

Finished chapter 8 - Narrative viewpoint - Other-world narrative voices

As with so many aspects of writing, the author using otherworld speech is constantly negotitating, trading one thing for another.

Finished chapter 8 - Narrative viewpoint - Other-world narrative voices

The challenge the writers face(and offer) involves pushing the alien to a point just within the reader's capacity to accommodate it. This is where Kingsnorth's 'instinct' comes in - the writer has to judge how far he can go before the unknown reader feels insufficiently rewarded for the extra effort he is putting in and wants to give up.

Finished chapter 8 - Narrative viewpoint - Other-world narrative voices

The phrase 'at once alien and familiar' usefully describes the function of all these dialects, whatever time and place the writer imagines. Burgess, Hoban and Kingsnorth use language to insist on the otherness of the world their characters inhabit, while immersing the reader in that world to a point where its language and values become familiar.

Finished chapter 8 - Narrative viewpoint - Second-person address

The narrator of a predominantly third-person narrative can also use the first-person/second-person dynamic to establish intimate terms with the reader. Direct address draws us into an artificial world, immersing the reader. But by addressing the reader, reminding us that what we are reading is a work of fiction, may be a desirable effect as well.

Reading Chapter 8 - Narrative viewpoint - Second-person address

In some of the novels, there's a difference between the hypothetical reader of the narrative and the actual reader of the novel; but you'll also see how this approach draws us, the actual readers, into the story. We can imagine ourselves as taking part in the narrative itself, entering its space at the inviation or insistence of the narrator.
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Finished chapter 8 - Narrative viewpoint - First-person plural narration

This narration is extremely rare and very difficult to manage, it is ostensibly told by a group of people. The rarity with which we encounter it suggests its limited usefulness; however, both these examples demonstrate that it can be sucessfully deployed by skilled writers in the right context.