The Beginning of the End

In one of my earlier posts I spoke about knowing your ending before you get started. You need a destination so that you know where your story is going. Find your conclusion and work toward that.

As I’m editing my novel Opening Day, getting it ready to pitch at Thrillerfest, this July in New York (You can find out more about Thrillerfest by clicking here) I’m also forming the end to the current novel’s sequel. In the optimistic belief that the first book will soon be sold, I want to be ready with a follow up.

The whole exercise has me thinking a lot about endings and what reader’s or a movie audience expects from them. Hollywood likes the big ending. Think of the satire about Hollywood endings as portrayed in The Player – Bruce Willis coming to the rescue at the last minute – “Traffic was a bitch.” There’s a certain hopefulness in happy endings that resonates with our longing for everything to tie up nicely; the good guy wins and gets the girl, the bad buy ends up buying the farm.

The truth though, is we all know that real life isn’t usually like that. Most of the time it’s a sort of compromise – you get older and you stop thinking about the dreams that have passed you by and focus on new ones. And the sad odds are that those reformed aspirations are going to drop by the wayside as well. Sooner or later most of us just run out of time.

I’m not trying to be maudlin. It’s just that it’s a fact that with some six billion souls on the planet, not all the endings are going to be Julie Andrews and the von Trapps skipping out over the mountains to freedom. Sometimes the bad guys win.

If you know your audience doesn’t want to hear about that, what do you do? What are the popular stories where the bad guys come out on top? Or where, at the least, the good guy doesn’t get what he desperately wants?

Casablanca did a pretty good job of telling a story where the hero sacrificed his greatest love for the greater good; I’d like to find anyone who says that that ending is a let down. And there are movies, like The Usual Suspects or Reservoir Dogs where there are no good guys, just a bunch of really bad guys and they duke it out amongst themselves until it’s last man standing.

But what about stories that end like most lives; just running along until the clock winds down and the final curtain falls. How is that story compelling?

Well, in most cases, it’s not, but there is a way to tell a story about an average life that people want to hear. It doesn’t have to necessarily be a happy ending but there is one requirement for a really good story: The character has to change. Dara Marks said it best in her book Inside Story – The character has to do something in the last act that he would have been incapable of in the first, otherwise all his problems add up to his just having had a really bad day. That’s the key. There has to be change, transformation. Something has to happen to the character internally for us to care. Think about the Humphrey Bogart who sends Ilsa away with Victor, is that the same Humphrey Bogart so casually tossed Yvonne away?

In the Cider House Rules, John Irving writes a story that’s a lot like life. Most of his really good novels are. Cider House is funny and sad and bittersweet and in the end it’s about finding your true place and doing the best with what you have. It’s a peculiarly American trait to root for the underdog; we love the Rudy’s and the Vince Papale’s of the world. But it’s good to hear the stories of the ones who try but never quite get there too.

What is the ending that I’m writing now? I’m not really sure. But as much as I want my novel to be a great foundation for a film, I want it to be true to the voice that these characters have developed. Maybe they’re not all going to win. They have to change but the change must be believable for the reader to really buy it. I don’t have the answer yet, but I’m working on it. I’ll keep you posted as things develop, and trust that it will all work out in the end.

— Ric Hess, May 13, 03:27 PM

Comment