A Satisfying Ending (ConCarolinas 2013 Writing Panel Notes)

As Edmund notes when he introduces the panel, this was very fitting that this session was the last writing panel of the convention. Not only was it about endings, bur for me it was the end of my trip. Technically, I should have left sooner. I was a bit on the edge for this last hour; my buddy Alexander and I were poised to make a mad dash to the airport, since my flight was supposed to leave two hours later, he was giving me a lift, and the hotel was a good forty-five minutes away. Suspense!

Sort of.

My ending turned out to be anticlimactic because as it happened, my flight had been pushed back an hour and somehow I was never notified, and I didn't realize I could or should check online. (Not a satisfying ending, IMO, even if I was okay in the end. Just sayin'.) So I made it there just fine, with plenty of time to spare, and the only pain being my as-it-turned-out-unnecessary anxiety. (And I am never booking with that travel agency again. Sometimes, the points just aren't worth it.)

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A Satisfying Ending
Aaron Rosenberg, James R. Tuck, Carrie Ryan, James Maxey
Moderator: Edmund Schubert
ES: It’s about wrapping up. (which makes this panel appropriate for wrapping up a con). A great opening brings the readers in in, but a great ending brings them back. It’s also about keeping the promise that book made at the beginning. How do you make sure you are making your reader happy with your ending?

AR: The reader’s two reactions should be: Surprise and rightness. “I should have seen that coming … why didn’t I see that coming?” Plenty of authors go for surprise and not the rightness. Example: J.K. Rowling lives to surprise with her endings, but doesn’t focus on the rightness. So he has an idea of his ending even before he begins writing, to help steer his way.

Surprise without rightness: When Sherlock sees  a clue not mentioned before.

Rightness without surprise: When the reader can see the ending coming from a mile away … so why keep reading?

JT: Endings should be both surprising and inevitable, no matter how much it took you by surprise it should be the ending that works. So that by the wrap of the story the reader can close the book and feel satisfied.

CR: That’s where revisions come in: go through and make it work. Give the characters a challenge at beginning that they fail, and the ending is they succeed (unless this is a tragedy). What challenge can you give at the beginning? What changes can you throw at them to show that these changes have happened? In books, we should go bigger than real life. When there are certain stakes, then ending has to match those stakes.


ES: He has to write with an ending in mind. He can’t write without the ending in mind. He wrote his ending first, and wrote towards it. Has anyone else tried that?

AR: No, because it constrains everything written up til then. Knows the ending, but wants the ending to make sense, doesn’t want to restrict possibilities along the way. Doesn’t want to narrow down his options.

CR: You hit the point of panic (speaking as a pantser) – the point for the reader where there is no way the characters are going to get out of it. Sometimes you have to go back to the beginning to see what you’ve already seeded in. The answer is often already in the text. You’ve laid out the pattern for yourself even if you’re completely unaware of it.

AR: Pantsed his work No Small Bills, until he was asked to show an outline, and realized that even without plotting deliberately the ending fit surprisingly well (after much panic).


Audience question: With writing, they know how the ending is going to go, but they don’t want to finish it because they like the world they created so much. How do you get over leaving that universe behind?

AR: There are different kinds of writers. Some can take a year or two on their books. Some have to write several a year. You have an internal story editor. Trust them when they tell you you’re done.

JT: Gets to the end of the book because he’s out there and wants to make money.

CR: Sometimes the ending you know may not be the right ending. If you’re having trouble leaving, it may be the story’s way of telling you that it’s not the right way to go.

ES: He doesn’t like to talk a novel to death. Using David B. Coe’s soda pop analogy: every time you take the cap off, more fizz escapes. Write that first draft as quickly and badly as possible, then go back and fix it.

JT: Writing is something he’s enjoyed and wanted to do. But with his current project, he wasn’t enjoying it, so he stopped and changed things and now is back to writing.

CR: Sometimes there’s a fear of once it’s done, moving to the next step. Revising, querying, submitting is hard and scary. It’s no longer that safe feeling. You have to step out of your comfort zone, leave your story behind.


ES: Let’s talk about endings that didn’t work for you. Why?

AR: Roger Zelazny’s Amber. The end of 5th book in 2nd series, when all the plot threads get dealt with in the last 20 pages. Merlin makes up with evil siblings. WTF. Merlin sets a truce with his secondary enemy, too. He (AR) wonders if it was from the editor’s pressure.

JT: The end of the Hunger Games trilogy. There’s a betrayal of the character, who she was in book 1 and 2. Also, Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code – solid beginning, poor ending; Deception Point, 3 pages from ending, the author pulls in a submarine deus ex machine solution.

CR: Re: The Hunger Games - When your character is unconscious for a large part of the book, you should really revise. A book where the character wakes up having been unconscious and has  the climax explained to them, really doesn’t work. With another book read shortly after finishing Hunger Games: the last 15 pages were better written, provided more interest, and left a good taste in her mouth going forward. Afterwards, CR realized that the taste left in mouth is what you need to go for. The power of a solid ending. You can take a mediocre book and create and ending that turns readers into evangelists.

ES: So much of life doesn’t have satisfying endings, tidy endings, people want sense of closure. An author of a book he read violated the magic system after outlining exactly how it works and does not work, and that ruined the story for him.

CR: Even a controversial ending – one that leaves people who want something else, and hotly debate about ending, create passion in readers.


ES: Deus ex machina: why is it so incredibly irritating today?

JT: Since we write speculative fiction, we can write those endings, but we have to show that the world is set up as a way for that to work. It’s still very difficult to justify.

CR: But that setup negates the Deus ex. The deus ex machina is something from out of nowhere. The reason it’s so unsatisfying is because we as readers want to be involved. We want to solve the mystery, want to know te clues are there. Davinci code was so popular because reader goes through steps with the character and solve it with the main character.

ES: Readers like to be involved. They like to figure things out and feel smart. That level of engagement is satisfying.

JM (who joined the panel late): 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ends with “good thing we escaped that huge whirlpool / but I don’t know how we escaped”.

AR: But there are also different cultural expectations. Hong Kong movie watchers expect that they might not get a happy ending. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was French. Hollywood makes a lot of the endings happy, and that’s not always the point.

JM: The original Tarzan was not a happy ending but it was a good one, because Tarzan sacrifices his chance to be with Jane because he’s found someone that would make her life happier. Tarzan’s lie to Jane saves the book.

ES: A great story can overcome poor writing.

Audience comment: Our whole culture is based on the dream, the optimism, that things can turn out different and better. That’s why we want happy endings.


Audience question: What if the ending doesn’t match expectations?

ES: The power of expectations is human nature: if you set up expectations and don’t follow through, readers will be disappointed.

JM: Robocop ends when he shoots the bad guy and the credits roll before the guy hits the ground.

CR: This can be easy to overlook, but your reader has earned that ending. They’ve made it to the end of the book. They’ve earned seeing it end in a satisfying way, seeing how life has changed. Don’t go on and on, but have some time after (the denouement) for readers to enjoy.


Audience question: What is the promise, exactly?

AR: There’s a difference between the promise the writer makes and the promise the character makes. The character wants something, but the  author knows they’ll wind up in another direction. As long as the author’s promise is satisfied, the character gets the appropriate ending.

ES: The promise is that there will be growth in this character. The story is about growth of the character.

AR: The story is either plot-driven, where characters are inconsequential (eg. James Bond, where the story is what matters), or the story is about the character.

JM: In the movie Rocky, the character’s promise is broken when he doesn’t win the fight, but the real promise is that by agreeing to fight and taking his life seriously, he’s become a better person and turned his life around. The goal isn’t winning the fight; he’s the one that became stronger and fought fifteen rounds. He learned more from that experience than if he’d won the fight.

CR: There’s usually a difference between what the character thinks they want and what they need.

JM: In his first novel in the DragonAge series, Bitterwood, the story seems like a typical fantasy, and then at the end the reader finds that humans have genetically modified lizards to make them dragons, who then evolved, but you don’t get that until the last few pages of the book. (ES: This is a brilliant twist out of nowhere, and there are ruins described and artifacts from the past of our civilization left throughout the book as clues.) The magic turns out to be nanotech. It was called “SF in fantasy drag.” But the publisher marketed it as fantasy. JM told people it was SF. He wasn’t trying to make a secret out of it, but that’s not how it was sold. He stopped writing that series because he felt it was a bigger and bigger lie to continue to write pretending it was fantasy.

AR: There’s fooling readers to demonstrate how clever you are, and fooling readers to make them think about something. The cheat in the first example impresses for half a second, and then it disappoints.

CR: Part of the reason a cheat is disappointing is that we’ve all read something like that. It’s fun being able to do the first to surprise readers, but you still don’t want to do it poorly.

The Unfair Folk (ConCarolinas 2013 Writing Panel Notes)

I'm sure you don't need to hear about  my crazy month of parties, traveling, and computer issues. (Though I narrowly avoided sending my laptop off for needless repairs when I realized that the fix had partly to do with all the accumulated cat hair. Which we will not speak of right now. Seriously.) And above all, woven through that were more revisions. Revisions that lead to hour-long conversations about the nature of my main character's magic, the flaw with middle books in some fantasy trilogies, and the plausibility of stairs on ships. Among other insanities. So I'll spare you the details, except to say that barring final feedback from my critique partner, I'm ready to get back to querying. Yay!

But I will say this: the process of doing an intense revision with a critique partner who knows how to kick butt has been *awesome*. I learned a lot in the process. I paid attention to whether or not my main character was driving the story. I remembered to factor in the advice about making sure that at least three of the senses are engaged to enhance description. And I kept an eye on the flow. What I'm saying is, I feel really good about this.

Meanwhile, please enjoy more notes (at last, as usual, sighhhhh). I feel no shame. But guilt? Um ... OH HEY LOOK AT THE PRETTY NOTES ABOUT FAERIES!


The Un-Fair Folk
Emily Leverett, Misty Massey Kalayna Price, Janine K Spendlove
Moderator: James Maxey
JM: How did we get from Oberon to Tinkerbell?

EL: It’s changed with time. In the medieval version of Orpheus’ tale, his wife gets kidnapped by faeries; Orpheus is a king who dresses as a minstrel and faeries are evil, creepy. Then a few hundred years later, we get Shakespeare with Oberon and Titania who aren’t very nice either and mess things up. Then in the Victorian era, it’s twee faerie things; then they became cute and fluffy much later on with Disney and the like.

Regardless, if you want to meet fairies: fall asleep by a river under a tree at noon.

MM: For a very long time, people believed that the faeries are really there. Some people still do. For so long we’ve believed they’re real, so in story we’ve needed to make them more friendy, less harmful. It was an attempt to make them less terrifying as the modern world came in slowly and our understanding grew.

EL: The rise of childhood as an actual thing may have contributed. Maybe the creation of children’s stories led to the sanitization of previously-darker tales.

KP: There’s lots of research on Victorian era faeries; she (KP) has researched faeries elsewhere. Often there are different names for the fae. There’s the story of humans being caught in the endless dance, and a darker story with vampire mythology that as they dance, the beautiful women slowly cut them apart and drain all their blood. There are lots of dark creatures in the older mythologies, but they by the time you get to Victorian folklore, some were bad luck but became good luck. Oral tradition has so many variations.

EL: Stories got attached to morals, and become moral tales.

JM: Neil Gaiman reclaimed faeries-as-evil: presents them as beautiful, interesting creatures in a variety of shapes and form, with an element of the uncanny and terrifying underneath, if you cross a line. Say the wrong thing, turn the wrong direction, eat the wrong food, and you’ll pay the price.

Disney and J.M. Barrie aren’t to blame. Faeries represented the ignorance of what is making nature tick. Suddenly we didn’t have to attribute strange noises in the ground, in the air, to supernatural forces. With a scientific world view , faeries stopped having the sinister aspects.

Because science has become so rational, Arthur Conan Doyle believed that two girls had taken pictures with faeries. Even today in Iceland, you have to have people familiar with the fae to survey the land and confirm it’s okay to build a road. They even build little churches for the faeries to come and be converted.

JM: So why does the belief persist?

EL: Because it makes the world more interesting. It’s a boring world without faith or belief. Some of it is desperation. One of the darker sides of faerie beliefs was the concept of changelings. They had instances of that in renaissance and medieval history. Probably it was a child with Down Syndrome. It’s okay to kill a changeling, not a child. Bad things, ugly things happen, and it was a way to cope. Even today we want a way to cope.

KP: Faeries were also used to explain things like SIDS.

MM: Ancient beliefs are very hard to let go of. It’s easier sometimes to still say, “it could be faeries and not science” – we can’t always see the science. And part of us will always go, “What if I’m wrong about not believing in this?” Often it was used as an excuse – the faeries did it.

JM: These were myths from the past that people believed. Future people might think that we actually believed in Santa because we have a lot of Santa stuff  around. And what would they think if they read our fiction?

EM/KP: [Amusing, too-fast-to-log discussion about Santa being raised by elves]

JM: What’s difference between elf, faerie, brownie?

KP: From a writer’s standpoint, anything

MM: Brownies are tiny; fae, human sized, elves are not necessarily fae

EL: Elves were popularized by Tolkien. Lots of his stuff about elves comes from Norse Myth.

KP: And lots of fiction based on elves has modeled them after Tolkien.

JM: From a purely fantasy perspective: One of the common aspects of faerie myths is that they were the original inhabitants of land that went into hiding when mankind took over. How much of this is scientific memory of more advanced cultures coming in and taking over from the tribes, the aboriginal inhabitants? We’re now advanced enough to recognize they’re people, but what if we once saw aboriginals in body paint and thought they were supernatural beings? Made them into myths? It’s a way to explain it. The same thing is true with the tree folk. Did we impose powers and abilities on them?

JM: Ancient ruins: There’s still something haunting about lost worlds, something out of place, the separation of time but being in the same space. Often true of the faerie world: time shifts.

EL: The Ruin (poem) about a roman bath, a former civilization – the poem talks as if those people had magic, and what is lost is a true loss.

Audience question: How much of the beliefs about the Fae came from the old myths of Baccus, Odin, etc?

KP: very good chance, especially since myths were revived in the renaissance. Most of these stories came from the oral tradition, which is hard to track.

EL: The environment affects the mythology – e.g. Japan has lots of water ghosts, not desert ghosts

JM: This panel is about elves and faeries in lit – what reading would you recommend?

JS:  Loved C.S. Lewis’ dryads, naiads, etc. in the Chronicles of Narnia. Gateway in childhood.

KP: Katharine Mary Briggs wriote several good books on specific stories and an encyclopedia on this subject – presents different types of fae; also recommends reading Child’s ballads – stuff he collected. Also: for classic tales – Thomas Knightley’s study of romance in the Victorian era

MM: Very impressed by the YA: Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr. Her faeries are terrifying critters. (also gorgeous cover art). Also, Lady Cottingly’s pressed fairy book. (a parody)

JM: Gaiman’s Sandman dips into faerie realms, astonishing stuff; also, the movie Pan’s Labrynth (horrificly violent, about the brutality of war).

EL: Hellboy 2 plays with faeries, too. Faerie magic appears very  differently in medieval and renaissance lit. Seconds gaiman. (esp the midsummer night’s dream story). LKH’s faeries are fun (though very non traditional). Medieval Arthurian legends deal with magic, and so does Chaucer – lots of medieval romance (quest narratives). Beowulf: Grendel, Cain, and Fae. Also, critical book: The Faeries at the Bottom of the Garden.

Aud: With the Victorian stuff, Andrew Lang’s colour fairie books?

MM: Current fairie books are drawing from older literature, but making it their own, too.

JS: Yes, whatever works for the story.

Audience: What about Spencer’s Faerie Queene?

EL: Stay away from that. He’s awesome but the story is about flattering Queen Elizabeth 1 and it’s a Christian allegory.

Audience: Teen section of library – the Faerie Path series. Talks about faeries good and bad clashing.

MM: In some mythologies, the summer court and winter court do clash a lot.

KP: Also Seely versus unseely. Different types depending on where you go in the world and what decade you’re in. Oral traditions change faster.

Aud: More writers are using more original tradition – is that a backlash against Disney?

JS: No, but it is a realization growing up that not all faeries are Tinkerbell (not that she was very nice if you read the book) – more of a discovery of everything else that faeries could be. We're leaning more about faerie lore, people are rediscovering it, and we want to play in that world.

MM: Writers want to do something different, too. There's nothing really new out there, so we take what we have and reinterpret in our own way to *make* it new and fresh.

JM: Once you go back and start researching, you find that almost everything has a very dark origin.

KP: John Harntess’ Black Knight Chronicles – deals with Faeries in Book 2.

EL: Yes, some of it is a bit backlash, but also, in urban fantasy especially, things have generally gotten darker. The economy has crashed, 9/11, and other stuff. We were headed that way darker, artistically, as a way of dealing. Hartness' book is comic. We may be back on the swing towards more lighthearted soon, as times change once more.

Bringing Life to your Characters (ConCarolinas 2012 Writing Panel Notes)

Slow-clap time. Yup, more way-belated notes from ConCarolinas 2012. And yaaay, I'm going to ConCarolinas 2013! I honestly wasn't sure if I could ... but hey. Nothing like being in a car that was rear-ended and finally getting an insurance settlement for it, six months later. Yeah. Sigh. Okay, I got off easy. But I still haven't made it back to sword class ...

So. I've been busy revising-following-agent-requests-at-SIWC, beta-reading (for one must give in order to also receive), and suffering through the latest nasty plague going around. But I survived, just in time for the holidays. At the start of the month, well before I came down with that awful cold, I made new discoveries on how to ensure a smooth tiger butter. I'll be sharing those fun facts shortly. Promise. No, really, I mean it ...

But first, enjoy these notes.

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Bringing Life to Your Characters
Edmund Schubert, James Maxey, Faith Hunter, Terry W. Erwin II,  A.J. Hartley, Teresa Frohock, John G. Hartness
Moderator: David B. Coe
Bringing life to living characters who are alive, creating believable characters

DBC: What is your biggest challenge?
TF: Keeping the focus on the main character, the protagonist
JM: The character has to be constantly learning from their experiences. A lot of that goes into the foundation of any character you create. What was their childhood like? What shaped them as they grew into an adult? What shaped them? Healthy well-adjusted people are not his typical character. His typical character are broken, not necessarily great people.
JH: Information hoarding – not telling the reader what the main charaacters’ dirty little secrets are, except bit by bit (1 or 2 a book). Little pieces here and there, backstory in dribs and drabs.
FH: Outlines her books – the conflict thoroughly. Every *thing*. Just doesn’t know exactly how the characters are going to react to things.
AJ: Middlegrade/YA vs adult; When dealing with younger chars, they don’t have as much backstory, haven’t had time to accumulate baggage; the biggest thing was that there’s such little difference otherwise. RL Stein: “Most things that scare kids are the same that scare adults. People are afraid of the dark, the unknown, things with lots of legs, etc.” Shift in mindset was to stop worrying about it. Easier to just think of them as people he could write. With Macbeth, someone else’s character, he takes his experience in theatre, sees it in theatres and treats it accordingly. Even though these chars are familiar, in some ways they’re blank slates. Took them as his protagonists. Made his characters people.

DBC: What do you look for in a character?
ES: (What does he look for in character)? There are so many things that don’t work. What does work: What makes him want to spend time with a char is  one entertaining and surprising at the same time. Not theatrical, but interesting to be around. By getting to see all the different sides of them. Tries to make the protags dirty as possible while keeping them likable, antagonists who are doing horrible things for the best reasons possible.  Compressing compelling chars into a short story? It’s challenging. So much harder to write great short story. Short stories have to be laser-like in focus. One or two key details to tell the reader what he needs to know. Katniss in The Hunger Games – you get the sense she’s trying to take care of her sister and mother, but she loves her sister so she lets the awful cat stay. Efficient, effective opening In the first 5 pages, worth studying.

DBC: Are there elements to writing comedic vs. serious characters?
JH: What really helps define a character: choice of dialogue. Also background in theatre. Reading dialogue, being able to dial in your dialogue really does help. You set the tone for a char. Has to catch himself when writing the straight guy. Being serious is a challenge. Also steals from the classic tropes of comedy.

DBC (to JM): Did you have a different approach in your superhero books vs. your Dragon Forge books?
JM: Uses a lot of tropes in action. Protagonist has the burden of changing, but the comic relief are tropes. In his action novels he has the character type he’d call the badass. He doesn’t need all of them to have a lot of internal conflict. But can’t wirte a book with just these tpes of chars. Needs someone who’s weak. Someone who’s changes. Also, we want to know what a character’s intentions are. What they want to accomplish.

TF: You don’t always want to insert 21st century attitudes into historical characters.  As much as we’d like to think that we’d do better, she wants them to act and react realistically. She needs to be conscious of their thought processes. “Your story is your character’s emotional growth  Your plot is how you get him there. And all the things that happen to the character will enhance the story and promote that emotional growth.”

DBC: What about point of view?

TE: What’s the best way to tell the story to the reader? Which POV works best? E.g. 1st person – can be useful, can be tricky. The reader learns as the character learns. Still some mystery about that character.

FH: Beast and Jane – first person point of view. Must include all parts of them. The multiple personalities. Editor made sure 2 first person voices are different.  POV is whoever body they’re in. The most important POV is whichever body they’re in.

AJ: ACT OF WILL – First person. DARWEN ARKWRIGHT AND THE PEREGRINE PACT: Third person. In case of Will, when you tell a story in first person the story becomes about the character. Everything’s mediated by the character. Every sense, every impression. Middle grade third person, very limited to just Darwen, you see nothing the character isn’t present for. This is a standard for middle grade right now. Close enough to him that we’re never really outside of his conscious.

DBC: Audience question: Sherlock's not a sympathetic character, but that’s why Watson’s there. What have you done with your non-sympathetic characters?

DBC: Yes, the main character in the Winds of the Forelands wasn’t sympathetic, but his supporting cast was. Hard not just because he was mean, spoiled, and obnoxious, but because these other chars affected him and he grew.

FH: Jane Yellowrock isn’t likeable herself, but she has those around her to love, which makes her easier to like

ES: Even if we don’t like a character, we can respect him.

AJ: Will is not likeable, but he’s charming.

Audience Question: What about characters with Otherness?

JH: You can’t relate to the other, unless you find a way to write the other so they’re something you understand.

JM: Dragons and Vampires can explain themselves, if they can talk, but if your story is about the difficulty of communicating with an alien/other mind,that itself can be a major part of the story.

AJ: Even if it’s just people from a different period, you lose the reader.
DBC: The inscrutability brings terror. But if you want them to have emotions.

Audience Question: Can you write any good heroes anymore, outside of YA, just the good guy who’s a good guy?

AJ: Yes if he’s also crap at a lot of stuff.

TE: Make him relateable. Who tries to do the right thing but doesn’t always succeed. Just keep them human. Not perfect.

ES: Whatever you do, your char must have some flaws, things to overcome. An internal struggle as well as an external struggle.

JH: You can play a paladin, just make him a paladin with a dexterity of 4.

Audience chime-in: Put the character in situations where he can't uphold his moral code.

JH: Torture your characters – half the fun of being a writer (torturing your readers the other half)

DBC (on villains): The degree of which you can make sympathetic villains, and the blending of flawed and good for both characters, is also important. Not just evil for evil’s sake. Every character is the hero of their own story. Even the villains.