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set the story down to think about them. What kind of experience
do they seem to promise the reader? Characters he can identify
with? A glimpse into a different world? Thrills and excitement?
An intellectual puzzle to solve? Insights into human nature? Peo-
ple he will love to hate? Try to formulate a sentence or two that
accurately describe what your story promises.
If you are fortunate enough to have enlisted Sensitive
Reader, ask him to do the same thing: Stop after the first few
pages and jot down how he expected the rest of the story to go.
The goal here is not to see if he can predict your exact ending,
but to get his thoughts on what sort of story he hoped to see
unfold from your beginning.
Help for Endings: The Last Hurrah 135
Pick up your story again and read the middle. Does it seem
to develop those forces promised at the beginning? Make a list
of all the forces your middle develops. If, for example, your be-
ginning promised a detective troubled by personal problems and
challenged by a difficult case, does the middle make clear what
those personal problems are? Does the case provide enough
complications and difficulties so that it really is challenging? Fi-
nally, do these various forces the detective's personal concerns,
the difficulties of the case, the goals of the other characters
move into opposition with each other so that your middle prom-
ises an interesting confrontation at the climax?
What does Sensitive Reader say when you ask him these ques-
tions?
Now reread your ending. Again, try to pretend you haven't
seen the story before. Does it fulfill the promise? Specifically,
do the forces come into satisfying clash at the climax? Does the
denouement, if there is one, account for everything that needs
to be accounted for? Are the expectations raised in the beginning
of the story satisfied by the time the reader reaches the end?
If the answer to all these questions is "yes," you've fulfilled
the implicit promise. But if it's "no," you need to determine
where the story went awry. If the ending delivers something dif-
ferent than was promised in the beginning, one or the other will
need to be rewritten. Your major task here is to determine which
one. It's possible that major replotting will be involved.
Suppose, for instance, that you started writing about Sam,
Martha and Jane from Jane's point of view. Your beginning en-
courages us to identify with Jane, the mother. You do that by
allowing us free access to all Jane's thoughts, by painting her as
a caring mother concerned for her daughter, by showing Sam's
neglect of his family as the reason Martha runs away. But then,
halfway through your story, you realize that your plot is more
complex than that. No one person is to blame. Instead, Martha's
troubles come from a congruence of problems: Sam's preoccupa-
tion with work, Jane's envy of her daughter's youth, the friends
Martha has fallen in with, the American culture as a whole. In
fact, at the end of your book, Martha is going to die of an over-
dose.
136 BEGINNINGS, MIDDLES AND ENDS
Is this change of direction on your part actually a problem?
Yes, it is. In the beginning you offered us the promise that
we were going to see a story of straightforward mother love,
which might or might not be enough to rescue an erring daugh-
ter. We the readers have settled in for a satisfying, vicarious dose
of good-woman-doing-her-best. But the promise you've fulfilled
is different: an unflinching look at the American family. Jane
isn't someone we want to identify with after all; we're not going
to feel good; this is all harder than you promised. Readers will
feel cheated. Many won't finish your book. Editors may not even
buy it, not because it's gritty and downbeat, but because you
promised us simple and upbeat.
So what do you do? You can adjust the beginning, rewriting
so that we see from the beginning that Jane, even though she's
the point-of-view character, has problems of her own severe
enough that we might do better to observe her than to identify
with her. You can introduce enough distance between reader
and character so that identification isn't automatic. Or, alterna-
tively, you can let us know that even though we're meant to iden-
tify with Jane because we like her, she has doubts about herself
that we ought to pay attention to. In short, you can promise that
this story is not going to be easy, and if we're after straightfor-
ward adventure or heartwarming happy endings, we'd better go
elsewhere.
On the other hand, you could change your ending. Maybe
Jane confronts her own jealousy of Martha, realizes that she's
almost made a terrible mistake, and gets to Martha in time to
save her. This would justify our original positive feelings for Jane
and would deliver the affirmative ending promised by your be-
ginning.
I've deliberately chosen a subtle example here to show how
carefully you must consider the implicit promise. Other disjunc-
tions between beginning, middle and end are easier to see. If
you've promised to scare us and nothing scary happens, that's a
broken promise. If you've been building toward a major gun
battle and it never happens, that's a broken promise. If you've
set up a baffling murder and shown your detective investigating
suspects for three hundred pages, and it turns out the real mur-
Help for Endings: The Last Hurrah 137
derer is someone who wasn't even a character in the story, that's
a broken promise. If you've shown us a virtuous character and
it turns out she was the murderer but your story contained abso-
lutely no clues to that effect anywhere, that's a broken promise.
If you fail to have the forces of your middle collide at the climax,
that's a broken promise.
Once you know what your beginning promised, what forces
your middle developed, and what your ending delivered, you can
make sure that all three match.
STEP THREE: SCENE ANALYSIS
Now switch metaphorical hats, from reader to editor. We're
about to look at the way stories are written: in scenes. Here's a
technique some writers find useful.
Make a list of every scene in your short story by location or
major event. For a novel, try listing the scenes in each chapter or
section as you revise it. A partial list might look like this:
Scene Place Event Point of view
1 home Jane & Sam fight Jane
2 home Jane talks to Martha Jane
3 city Martha catches Greyhound Martha
4 street Sam hit by bus Sam
5 home Jane on phone with her mom Jane
When you've finished, look at your list of scenes. Are there any
you can cut? Are there any you can combine? A scene should
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