Dominic Leung’s Reviews > The Book You Need to Read to Write the Book You Want to Write > Status Update

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.