Janet’s post yesterday dovetails in nicely with what has been on my mind lately: Finishing the darn book.
I don’t mean finishing reading it, but finishing writing and editing it. See, I’ve had this Regency-set historical I’ve been editing, and last night I officially finished editing it. Until my last reader reports in with her feedback.
Like Janet, I like the quick ending. I despise epilogues, especially if there are little bundles of joy around. Not that I don’t like kids (I have one, after all), it’s that I don’t romanticize parenthood. Overweight, exhausted women who resent their husbands for sleeping through the night? Not romantic. But I digress.
I do have problems with some authors rushing too quickly to the end. Janet mentions Judith Ivory in her post, and some of Ivory’s books seem like she just wants to get out of there.
Until recently, I wondered why she just didn’t take as much careful time to craft her story at the end as she had all the way through the book.
Until recently.
I was so excited to get towards the end of my book that I totally rushed through the ending, wrapping up all sorts of plotlines in a few quick sentences. I know I’ll have to go back and flesh things out a bit, but right now? I’m just happy to be done. My last reader is starting to read the ms. today, will have feedback over the weekend, so it’s not like I have a whole lot of time off from it. But it’s enough.
Not all of you are writers, but all of you do things in your lives that you start and finish. Do you find yourselves rushing to get to the end? Delaying it as long as you can because there’s just another task waiting beyond this one? Or are you that pinnacle of perfection, taking as much time and energy–but not too much–with the end as you did the previous 95%?
Meanwhile, wish me luck this weekend with the editing. I thought I was done.
Megan
www.meganframpton.com
I do tend to rush endings — the first time through, anyway. It’s like my brain hates to deal with the last 5 percent of anything… I have a tendency to wash all the dishes except two…that sort of thing. 😉
And when writing essays, or speaking — I’m the same. I can do a great introduction, but I’ve always detested the whole “end it by summing up what you just said” thing. They just heard what I said, or read it, so why should I sum it up? I have a real mental block there.
Of course, an alternative is to give a little inspirational ending — but I have a mental block there too. Whether doing so would feel too presumptuous, or just too cheesy, I’m not sure, but I’ve never been able to do the inspirational thing — or the summing up thing. So my essays and speeches tend to end, um, rather abruptly. 🙂
Cara
I’m with you, Cara–why should I sum up what I just wrote or said?
That said, I love finishing the dishes.
Rules for giving a scholarly talk:
Version 1: Tell them what you’re going to tell them, then tell them, and then tell them what you told them.
Version 2: The first third should be comprehensible to anyone; the second third to experts in the field; the last third only to the speaker. If the speaker is sufficiently eminent, he or she may skip directly to the last third.
Tried ’em both; but Version 1 works better. 🙂
Todd-who-has-now-told-you
And BTW, Megan, please feel free to come over and finish our dishes.
Todd-who-has-now-told-you-something-else
uh ho, every book I write (almost) has a baby in the epilogue! Poor Megan has to read all that idealized parenthood!
My biggest problem is always, What is the darn ending? I set up everything, and I know how it ends, but how to get it there? I don’t rush my endings because they only occur to me in excrutiatingly slow detail. Once I get there, though, I love to show the hero and heroine in a happy life together, which usually means a baby.
I’m usually suffering from some degree of burnout, or even deadline pressure, by the end of a book.
What I’ve found helps is to write the quick-and-dirty (though artistically unsatisfying) ending, let it sit for a week (if at all possible). Usually by then I know how I really want to unfold the ending.
As a writer, I tend to rush through endings, too. After all, I know what happens, plus I’m usually sick of the story by that point, and have to come back and clean up later. 🙂
As a reader, I don’t mind epilogues. I like to see where the characters I followed for 400ish pages end up. Don’t especially like the very treacly ones (where they’re wrapping up a series, and thus we have 17 couples and their 150 kids, all deliriously and boringly happy), and I like the end to fit the rest of the story. One epilogue that sticks in my head is Teresa Medeiros’ “Fairest of Them All”. The heroine was stunningly beautiful (she IS a romance novel heroine, after all!), but it has always caused her lots of trouble in her life, and it causes the hero trouble, too, when he gets involved in her life. In the epilogue, they have many gorgeous and high-spirited daughters running around the castle, and you can tell they’re going to cause the hero lots of grey hairs, but he loves it. Very cute. 🙂