I'm freshly back from my globe-trotting adventures, happy to be with my kids again, and extremely jet-lagged. Enjoy this post from the treasure-chest of the Alley archives.
***
You enjoyed the book. You really did. The author’s voice was
strong; the opening scene hooked you; the characters beckoned you in; the plot
kept you turning pages.
Then you reached the ending.
Anti-climactic would sum it up. There was simply nothing… memorable about it. The author tied up the plot threads
neatly, sure, but it was done with a businesslike air that left you cold.
Story’s over; thanks for your company; now back to real life with you, and
better be quick about it – the kids are whining and you haven’t started dinner
yet.
Yeah, you might think about those characters once or twice
over the days ahead, but is this a story you’re going to rave about to your
friends?
Probably not.
The brutal truth is that a story is only as good as its
ending. Endings matter. They’re the final impression you leave with your
reader. The part of the story that lingers – or fails to do so – in a reader’s
mind. Dash off a forgettable ending, and chances are the reader will soon
forget the rest of the book as well.
In this
post I talked about creating twist endings –
those unexpected reveals that change the way we perceive a story as a whole.
This week I’d like to approach the topic from a different angle entirely.
Many great novels don’t end with a twist – and yet they
still give us pause, striking some note deep within that feels like truth,
taking us to a place where rows of type transmute into something bigger than
the fictional world; something that imprints itself on our spirit.
These are the stories that make us want to cling a few
minutes longer to the world of the author’s creation instead of leaving it
behind. The stories we can’t stop thinking about. The ones we can’t stop talking
about.
I believe these endings all have one thing in common.
Emotional resonance.
Stories offer something that life cannot always give.
Closure. A sense of completion, of finality. A sense that we’ve been on a
journey, and that the journey has had a purpose. The best endings contain a
largeness that expands beyond the lives of the characters we’ve walked beside.
Such endings illuminate not just the themes of the book, but something about
our own lives, our own experience.
Richness or significance, especially in
evoking an association or strong emotion
 |
| freedigitalphotos.net |
Or,
acoustically speaking:
Intensification and prolongation of sound,
especially of a musical tone, produced by sympathetic vibration.
To me, the idea of “sympathetic vibration” is key. When a
musician draws a bow across a cello, the strings vibrate, creating sound. But
energy also passes into the body of the instrument, causing the air and wood to
vibrate at the same frequency. The richness of tone that results is known as
resonance.
Us authors have the chance to play words like musicians. For
an ending to resonate emotionally, it needs to work in frequency with notes
played much earlier in the story.
The best endings contain something of the beginning. They
give us a sense of completion – of coming full circle.
Let’s look at four ways to do this.
- A
resonant phrase
At the beginning of The Kite Runner, the protagonist, Amir, enters a kite-fighting
tournament with his servant Hassan. They win – a victory that symbolizes to
Amir the chance to finally win his father’s approval. But the victory will not
be complete until they run down the felled kite of their final opponent.
Knowing how much it means to Amir, Hassan offers to run the kite for him.
“Hassan!” I called. “Come
back with it!”
He was already turning the
street corner, his rubber boots kicking up snow. He stopped, turned. He cupped
his hands around his mouth. “For you a thousand times over!” he said. Then he
smiled his Hassan smile and disappeared around the corner. The next time I saw
him smile unabashedly like that was twenty-six years later, in a faded Polaroid
photograph.
Amir follows his servant and witnesses something so shocking
it will forever after define him as a person. He has the chance to step in and
protect Hassan, but in cowardice he chooses instead to run away.
Many years later, grown and living in America, Amir begins
the walk toward redemption through his efforts to help Sohrab, Hassan’s
war-scarred son. In the book’s final scene, Amir and Sohrab are at a
kite-fighting tournament. Amir turns to the troubled boy.
“Do you want me to run that
kite for you?”
His Adam’s apple rose and
fell as he swallowed. The wind lifted his hair. I thought I saw him nod.
“For you, a thousand times
over,” I heard myself say.
Then I turned and ran.
A simple phrase that resonates with meaning, because we know
all it signifies to the protagonist. Regret and redemption, past and present:
all brought full circle in those few significant words.
- A
resonant action
Early in Dale Cramer’s novel Bad Ground, the character of Snake shares a childhood memory of
sitting at his mother’s feet while she plays with a hank of his hair, circling
her fingertip round and round a single spot on his scalp. It’s a caress that
holds significance because she uses it only with him.
At the end of the novel, the same character is so badly
burned he has no hair. His mother has been paralyzed for years, incapable of
communication or movement beyond the occasional raised finger. Snake, fully
grown now, sits on the floor at his mother’s feet and places her hand on his
bald head. Slowly, very slowly, the paralysed woman begins to trace circles on
her son’s bald head with her finger, just as she used to do to when he was
young.
I’ll admit it – the scene brought tears to my eyes. Without
the earlier emotional set-up, a simple action like this would not have
resonated so deeply with me as a reader.
- A
resonant image
At the beginning of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, a snowstorm forces Dr David Henry to deliver his own
twins. The little boy is born normal; the girl has Down Syndrome. In a split
second decision that will change all of their lives forever, the father asks
the nurse to take away the disabled child and put her in an institution,
telling his wife that the baby died in childbirth.
At the end of the book, the existence of the lost sister,
Phoebe – now a young woman – is finally uncovered. Paul, the twin who remained,
takes Phoebe to visit their father’s grave.
Everything slowed, until the
whole world was caught in this single hovering moment. Paul stood very still,
waiting to see what would happen next.
For a few seconds, nothing at
all.
Then Phoebe turned, slowly,
and smoothed her wrinkled skirt.
A simple gesture, yet it set
the world back in motion.
Paul noted how short and
clipped her fingernails were, how delicate her wrist looked against the granite
headstone. His sister’s hands were small, just like their mother’s. He walked
across the grass and touched her shoulder, to take her home.
It’s a simple image that brings closure. More than two
decades after the baby girl was sent away from home and family, in secret, we
are left with the image of the young man finally taking his twin sister home.
The symbolism resonates with us because we’ve walked the journey of what came
before.
- A
resonant emotional arc
In The Secret Life of Bees, fourteen-year-old Lily craves one thing: the love of her dead mother.
Her journey takes her to the home of three beekeeping sisters, where she finds
acceptance. In the final scene of the novel, after a confrontation with her
abusive father, Lily says:
I
watched till he was gone from sight, then turned and looked at August and
Rosaleen and the Daughters on the porch. This is the moment I remember clearest
of all – how I stood in the driveway looking back at them. I remember the sight
of them standing there waiting. All these women, all this love, waiting.
Then, in the last lines of the novel, the author draws the
connection with Lily’s emotional journey to create a final note of resonance.
This is the autumn of
wonders, yet every day, every single day, I go back to that burned afternoon in
August when T. Ray left. I go back to that one moment when I stood in the
driveway with small rocks and clumps of dirt around my feet and looked back at
the porch. And there they were. All these mothers. I have more mothers than any
eight girls off the street. They are the moons shining over me.
In those last lines, we see the significance of the story.
It’s always been about Lily’s search for a mother. And there they are. They’ve
been there all along. It’s a profound realisation.
***
In each of these examples, the author has taken the time to
lay the emotional groundwork early on. Then, when these motifs are revisited at
the end, they hold an instant and powerful significance to the reader. This
brings a fullness and richness to the final scenes – a resonance – that cannot
be achieved any other way.
Let’s talk. Which endings have resonated with you
emotionally? Can you tell us why? Do share!
Karen Schravemade lives in Australia. When she's not chasing after three small children, she spends her spare minutes daydreaming about the intricate lives of characters who don't actually exist. Find her on her website and Twitter.
TWEETABLES
A story is only as good as its ending. 4 keys to achieving emotional resonance in your final scenes:
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The best endings contain something of the beginning. They give us a sense of completion – of coming full circle.
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For an ending to resonate emotionally, it needs to work in frequency with notes played much earlier in the story.
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Scene Ideas:
When you are trying to hash out characters, you might realize that you need another scene to give the reader insight into something specific...Or, if your plot jumps in an unnatural way, say, your heroine falls in love with the hero just after she learns something awful about him, you'll realize a scene might need to squeeze in to enhance your story.
My problem is, if I have gotten to one part in the story that I am pumped about where it's going, I may not be in the mood to go back and write THAT new scene at that moment. So, I make a note (like below) and save that scene for later, but giving myself enough of a note so I remember what I wanted to write.
