Tidy endings

I've been working on the last chapter and the epilogue today and am technically done. (More on the difference between that and actually done a little later.) I worked hard in the earlier drafts to lead up to a complete and satisfying and believable resolution, and I was pretty confident about it, but one of my readers is calling the question.

At issue now is the last effects of the events of the book on my character. He goes through some pretty dramatic events and the immediate conflict gets resolved for him, but having an epilogue at all kind of requires you to talk about all the stuff that doesn't get immediately resolved. Maybe it's the current conventional wisdom about psychology, but readers may expect certain kinds of lasting effects, but for whatever reason this reader wasn't buying what I was selling. Too tidy.

So what I've been doing is trying to rewrite so that it still leads to the same final tidyness but shows more messiness along the way to make it credible. As usual, I'm pretty sure that it's improved, but I'm not so sure it's good enough.

Two steps back

Worked on chapters 4, 5 and 6 today. Once I started reading through Chapter 6 yesterday, the problems in it seemed pretty severe and thinking them through sent me back to try again on scenes in previous chapters.

In particular, I've tried 2 different endings of Chapter 5 a couple times each. One ending is more dramatic but harder to pull off convincingly, so I keep chickening out and going for the weaker ending. (Essentially, I'm afraid to bring too much grief to my character too quickly. It seems like more than he can bear. And if he can't bear it, the pressure will build up before I can get him to the end of the story.) But then when I got into Chapter 6 I persuaded myself that I needed that more dramatic development to have happened, so I went back again and tried to make it work.

Chapter 6 has been my biggest pain the butt since I first started drafting it almost 18 months ago. It was first time that my writing schedule went off the rails and I ended up spending about twice as long on it, writing about 3 times as much as necessary. There's a lot of good material in it, and I've often thought that it would be good starter dough for a different story or book project. But so much of it doesn't fit with this book.

I think this is a function of it being in the voice of a secondary character. I have a few chapters, this one included, where I shift to another character's point of view. That requires getting in touch more with their motivation, which requires thinking about their backstory and so on. The hard part is figuring out how much of the character sketch work is needed in the draft in order to carry the story along convincingly. It's a tough balancing act when you switch to another character's POV like this.

That and other problems have me slowing way down as I come through the chapter again. This chapter probably more than any other needs actual rewriting--not just digging deeper and developing the potential in the episodes--but rethinking what the episodes are for in the story line and writing them over again.

So, I've got a lot more work to do on this than I wish I had. Friday now. I better plan on it taking all of next week. Similar to what I was thinking last week about Chapter 5, which I "finished" on Tuesday but found myself needing to go back and fuss with this morning.

Knowing the ending when you start

Interviewer: I think academics tend to assume writers write novels the way freshmen write term papers. You have a thesis . . .

Larry McMurtry: That’s right. And you explain your thesis. But that isn’t what happens. What happens is a process of discovery in which a writer is compelled as much by curiosity as to how things will turn out and who people are as anything else. I get curious about a group of characters and I start investigating them.

I wish it was that way for me. That’s the way I would like to write, but after many years of trying to just finish something, I mostly only had mere sketches of characters I was curious about. The breakthrough for this book came when I pictured the ending and I realized I could just keep writing toward that ending and that if I kept moving toward that ending I would logically have to create a plot along the way. For me, plot has always been the weakness I had to work on most consciously.

Now, this didn’t necessarily make a good ending a good plot, but since experience told me the biggest risks were not starting and not finishing, I decided not to worry about “good” and to focus on “finished.” That insight was what it took for me, with my particular mix of talents and deficiencies, to get a complete draft written.

Also, it didn’t necessarily mean that the ending and plot, however good they might be, would still go together very well. In fact, in the last two days as I was writing down the final scenes, half of my brain was celebrating—“I’m almost done!”—and the other half was admitting how unsatisfactory the ending was.

So the ending really served as a kind of placeholder that I’m now going to have to get rid of in favor of some other ending, still to be thought of. I love what the ending did for me. It served me well. But now I have to retire it.

More on Larry McMurtry tomorrow.