Writing Wednesday: Beginning with the Ending

I have found
myself doing this again this year. One of my favorite projects wasn't
working and I couldn't figure out how to fix it. I loved the first
few chapters, and then the story just had nowhere to go. I kept
writing it, and there was a resolution somewhere that I sorta liked,
but everything between the first few chapters and that ending was
going to have to go. But what was going to replace it? I spent a year
puzzling over this and finally came to the conclusion that the first
few chapters I really loved were actually the climax of the book.




Ah ha! That's why
they were wrong. That's why there was so much back-story that I
didn't know how to put in. That's why the timeline was so screwy, and
I kept going back to tell whole chapters in the past, then flashing
back forward to the present—for the entire book! I had told the
whole thing backwards.




Not that there is
anything wrong with a novel that chooses to tell a story out of
sequence. Some novels work very well this way, so long as the author
is aware of what she is doing, and is giving the right information to
the reader all along. These novels may feel like they begin with the
climax, but what they actually begin with is a teaser, and then the
real climax, told from beginning to end, is right where it should be,
near the end of the novel. Because if you don't do it that way, guess
what? Reader interst flags with everything that isn't the climax, and
plus they are confused about things in the climax they shouldn't be
confused about.




I have made this
mistake now in 3 books. The first was The Monster In Me, where the
climax of going back to her mother happens off-stage before page one,
and then it was a mess. The second book was The Rose Throne, where
the first chapter I wrote was actually (no spoilers!) the climax for
one of the main characters where the truth comes out. As long as I
kept writing drafts where that climax appeared early in the novel,
the book was a disaster. Now that it's in the right place, I think
it's a fabulous book. We'll see where this current manuscript goes
and if it is published or not. And no, not everything that a writer
writes gets published, and that's the way it should be.



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Published on January 09, 2013 12:51
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