Chapter Ten
Plot the End
The fact that you survived the middle, whether you limped your way through it or leapt over the obstacles and the unknowns, is cause for celebration. Go ahead—beat your chest and proclaim to the world that you plotted your way through the murky, meddlesome, and messy middle. Now we must continue onward, to the final leg of the journey.
As unbelievable as it might seem, you are in the homestretch, the final quarter of your story.
The False Summit
As your character reached the crisis, she thought her problems were over—that is, until she caught a glimpse of the even higher mountain still quite a distance away. She then realized she was only at the false summit. So how do you and she make it to that next peak, the true summit? Step by step, just like you made it to the crisis.
Often in life, we make pacts with whatever power we believe controls our destiny, so long as we are able to go on, survive another day, or make it past this horrible event that has triggered such a life-changing wake-up call. Yet once life settles down and the fear has vanished, somehow we forget our promises. Your protagonist likely does the same thing. Now, just past the false summit, we need to address this universal character reaction.
For your story, this pact-making happens in the scenes at the very end of the middle, when the intensity of the story wanes for a bit to give the reader and the protagonist time to rest and make plans.
In your first draft, focus chiefly on getting your story down on paper. In subsequent rewrites you can be more creative.
The True Summit
Your protagonist has been confronted with an uncomfortable, potentially life-threatening or ego-demoralizing situation and finally sees himself for who he actually is—flaws and all. In the middle of your story, through all the opposition he encounters, as well as through his downfall, he also gains strength, logic, clues, and skills he only becomes aware of after the crisis. Having survived, he is also more confident. In the last quarter of the story, he has to make a decision. Is he going to rationalize his way out of change, shoving his promises to a dark corner of her mind? Or does he accept the challenge to move from his comfort zone and risk the unknown to live his life differently from this point forward? You decide—or let your protagonist decide. Whatever the answer, it is up to you, the writer, to create scenes in this final quarter of your story that will allow the protagonist to make choices, whereby “showing” the reader which direction he is moving.
You get to decide if your protagonist will beat the odds and succeed in changing permanently. The only way to show that is by creating scenes that give the protagonist the opportunity to make choices. You have one-quarter of the total number of scenes (or one-quarter of the total number of pages of your entire book) in which to do this.
The Light Switches On
Think of the middle as the tunnel of darkness, fraught with antagonists of all sorts. The crisis is the dark night of the soul, in which the protagonist hits rock bottom and becomes conscious of who she really is, or of what she has been avoiding or denying. Because of what happens at the crisis, a light snaps on, and thus begins the process of transformation.
In the End, the protagonist still has foes to confront and overcome, but now she is empowered with a new understanding of herself and/or her circumstances. For the first time, her true goal comes into focus.
In the end, the Plot Planner line flies nearly straight upward to the climax, the crowning glory of the entire piece. The end is half as long as the middle, which means the conflicts and obstacles must rise quickly, one after another. Here, at the end, the tension is at its greatest as the protagonist struggles to take full ownership of her newly discovered consciousness. In the quick buildup to the climax, the protagonist more keenly recognizes that her actions or speech do not align with her new understanding of herself and the world around her.
As she nears her goal, the obstacles constitute increasing levels of difficulty. The end unfolds, one scene into the next, in a deliberate and calculated way. It must not be predictable, but it must be inevitable. In the end you must deliver the promise you made in the beginning.
This is not the place to stop for a flashback or backstory or explanation. This is the place to quickly build momentum. So long as you have not raised the stakes too high or too soon, you can now escalate the action as you reach the climax.
Plot the End
To create the end portion of your Plot Planner, retrieve the numbers you generated in chapter three and the Plot Planner you have already begun.
After the protagonist has integrated what’s necessary, rid him of what no longer serves him, including limited beliefs about himself and life around him. If he has established a plan, no matter how sketchy or vague, he’s ready to move forward. The end begins when he takes the first step toward his final goal.
On the Plot Planner, decide where you believe the end of your story should be placed. Expose only the part of the paper you will be working on for now. Continue the line you have started, making it sweep steadily upward from the drop-off point. Bring it to the highest peak thus far and then drop the line down about half a foot.
The mini-breather you created, which allowed both your reader and your protagonist to recover from the crisis and reflect, is over. Now it is time to start cranking up the tension and the conflicts again. Start plotting your scenes. The end is near. The stakes are high.
Once you know how the character is going to play out the final confrontation, you have all you need to know.
The Climax
Each scene in the steady trek to the end builds in significance and relevance through rising tension and conflict until your protagonist reaches the true summit, the climax of the entire story. This is where she is confronted by the biggest hurdle, the greatest challenge, and the toughest test. Will she react and revert back to her old, habitual ways, flaws and all? Or will she embrace her newly discovered power and show the world that she is a changed person all the way to her core? Will she get what she wants? Now that she has what she thinks she wants, is she satisfied? What has she learned?
The climax serves as the protagonist’s light at the end of the tunnel (and, as the joke goes, it’s not a train). He moves toward the light: one step forward, toward the ultimate transformation, and then two steps back as he struggles and is beaten backwards. Often in the middle, the protagonist moves in much the same way, taking one or more steps forward before being pushed back. At the end, after all he has learned, he still is pushed back, but now, rather than bulldozing his way forward with blinders on and little care for who he tramples, he assesses the situation from all sides, always on the lookout for the next unexpected step he believes will take him to his goal. In the middle, he was driven by success. In the end, he is driven by the desire to finish what he started. The protagonist has been empowered by the knowledge gained at the crisis. He has learned the rules of the game. He is wiser and more powerful. Therefore, the obstacles must be made more difficult scene by scene. Setbacks should continue to plague him, and the challenges should intensify.
The climax spotlights the character in full transformation demonstrating necessary new skills, personality traits, gifts, or actions to achieve her goal. She acts in scene in a transformed way—in a way she could not have acted in any other part of the story, because she first needed to experience everything she does in the book to get to the final stage.
The protagonist demonstrates the transformation she underwent in the story by doing something in the climax she was unable to do at the beginning of the story.
This final scene does not have to be an all-out war, full of explosions and death. It does have to contain meaning to the overall story.
When you know how the story ends, you then know every moment that must be dramatized to create a convincing and meaningful climax. Work backward from the climax, and dig for motivation behind every action, the purpose of every scene, and the significance of every detail to bring the story to that moment. Every word leads the reader to the inevitable, but still surprising, conclusion. All scenes must be thematically or structurally justified in the light of the climax.
If a scene does not contribute to the climax, see if you can strengthen its cause and its effect. If not, then ask yourself if it can be cut without disturbing the impact of the ending. Once you have shed the dead weight of unnecessary scenes, arrange all your remaining scenes and details as “whispers” to prepare the reader for the climax. The reader may hope against hope for a certain outcome, but when he gets there, it should be obvious that there was absolutely no other possible ending than the one you have written.
The Resolution
Once the protagonist shows the mastery of what is needed in the climax, the line drops for the Resolution. The Resolution is usually a brief tying up of most of the loose ends. If the story resonates with thematic significance (see chapter thirteen), the reader is left to ponder the deeper meaning.
It is best not to have the Resolution go on for too long, and there is no need to resolve all the plotlines. The energy of the story has dropped, and as much as the reader does not want the story to end, it is up to you to end it. Prolong the resolution and your story becomes like the last guest to leave the party, a little woozy and worn-out.
The Whole Story
Now that you have the entire Plot Planner drawn out and organized, take a bit of time to view the story as a whole. Writing for discovery without first planning a plot may benefit creativity, but without a clear idea of where your story is taking you, this method can quickly lead you astray. Now that you have scene ideas plotted out on your Plot Planner, they may change, move, and grow as you write and continue plotting. Even so, with a plot plan in place, you can write from the beginning and plot to the end in a way that supports both your logic and your imagination rather than wandering down dead-ends and dark alleyways for months.
As I said earlier in this chapter, the end sets up the crowning glory of the entire story—the climax. This scene shows the character fully united with her new self-knowledge, her new understanding of the world, and her new sense of responsibility through her actions and her words. Now that you know what the action is at the climax, evaluate how it ties to the beginning and the middle. Then deliberately plot from the end by deconstructing who the character becomes due to the conflicts and learning that take place in the middle.
At the climax of Folly, a mystery novel by the award-winning Laurie R. King, the protagonist, in an effort to protect not only herself but her granddaughter, stands up to a man with a gun who has been terrorizing her. That this character begins the novel fragile and paranoid, and ready to commit suicide on a remote island, adds depth and meaning to the final confrontation. In the middle, she tosses her antidepressant pills and pushes herself physically, all the while having hallucinations and hearing whispers. At the crisis, she suffers a full-blown panic attack. Each of these earlier major plot points serves to bring more meaning, excitement, and emotional investment to the final confrontation at the climax, which involves so much more than simply stopping the bad guy. The climax is where the protagonist shows herself to be healed.
