writing the heart of your story (22 page)

“What a beautiful day,” he said, stroking my hair. “A new year. Full of promise.”

He looked down at my belly and smiled at the life growing inside me. I felt strangely sad and joyous at the same time. And although I felt heavy with my pregnancy, heavy with anticipation and, admittedly, a little fear and worry over what the future held, something lifted off my heart. Some burden, a reprieve of sorts.

For years I had carried around my own poisonous guilt—for my failings as a dutiful daughter, my inability to make my mother happy, my lack as a wife. Even guilt over my miscarriages, as if I had done something wrong, so that I didn’t deserve to have children. And now, after having found my father, Nathan Sitteroff, these self-recriminations were dissolving. I felt light, as if flying.

I looked at Jeremy, the only man I had ever loved, oh so loved, and my heart soared like a helium-filled balloon escaping into the sky. I thought of the man in the restaurant—the man who had spent the better part of his life looking for answers. Looking for truth.

I’m free, he said.

I mouthed the words along with him.

That’s how my book ends. The book begins with the conundrum of the man in the restaurant saying he is free, a man who is symbolic of Lisa and this journey of her life that has finally brought her to a place where she, too, feels free. The line about the only man she’s ever loved “oh so loved” is an exact quote from the end of chapter one. Themes of freedom and a search for truth are at the heart of this story, so I wanted to be sure to bring them center stage at the very end.

When you can pull bits like this from your opening scene that are thematic to your story, they bring the novel around full circle and give the reader a sense of completion. As T. S. Eliot said: “In my end is my beginning.” Strive to incorporate that thought as you create your ending.

One thing to note: my protagonist Lisa started off with one visible goal—to uncover the mystery surrounding her father’s death, but in the end, she arrived at a completely unexpected place. The answer to her plot MDQ (“Will I save my brother by uncovering the truth of my father’s death?”) was no. But the answer to her spiritual MDQ (“Will this journey somehow bring peace and healing to my life, despite the risk?”) was a resounding yes. You may decide your character won’t reach her goal at all, though if she doesn’t, there must be something invaluable she learns through the effort and makes the journey (and the ending of your novel) inevitable but not predictable.

Think about
. . . pulling out those favorite novels on your shelves or skim through your e-reader to the last scene written of the novel you’ve just read. See how well the author accomplished all the things mentioned above. And take some notes as to what they did that was really well done.

If you’re planning out an ending to your book, or feel maybe the one you have might not be quite right, think about your themes, motifs, and the heart of the story. Write a list of five possible scenarios for your ending that puts your character in a place and state of mind to be able to process what she’s learned. Show how she now looks at the world, herself, her family, her life. What has become important to her now, at this moment, that wasn’t before? What does she see as a powerful truth that she never saw before? Now that she’s arrived at her visible goal, she’s learned something significant, and if you can get that visually across, you’re likely to have a powerful (but not necessarily explosive) ending to your book that will stick with your readers for a very long time.

If your novel is done, think about a motif or line from the first chapter that speaks to your theme (or put one in) and see how you can work it into your ending. Distill your ending down to just a few paragraphs and have your protagonist reflect on how she’s now looking at the world with new sight, after what she’s gone through. Take out every unnecessary word, any distracting description, that is not locking in on that moment.

Chapter 29: The Universality Is in the Details

“There’s a universality in the story and it speaks to everyone.”

~actress Jacqueline Russell

I want to wrap up this book on the topic of universality since we want our novel’s theme to have universal appeal—meaning a whole bunch of people all over the world should be able to relate to it at perhaps any time in history. But while we're thinking in broad, all-encompassing ideas, I want to make a distinction here.

Don’t make the mistake in thinking that in order to appeal to a wide audience with a universal appeal we have to write in very general terms and details. You may think that the more unspecific you can get with your locale, setting, time period, problems presented, the more universal the novel will be. You may think if your character can have a general problem—say a bad temper or he’s a Scrooge—a lot of people will identify with him . . . so you decide to not be too specific and take the risk of making your novel’s world so small that no one will relate.

General Is Not Universal

Some authors have their characters in some unnamed place and time, engaging in activity and dialog in a way that philosophizes and narrates but is hard to picture. They think if they set their book in a certain time that in a decade or two it will read dated and won’t endure as a classic.

What we learn by examining powerful novels that have stood the test of time is that they are exactly the opposite. They zoom in on a tiny moment in time in a very specific place. Sometimes that moment may just cover a few weeks and that place only one house on a block in a small town in the middle of nowhere. How about
To Kill a Mockingbird
? Of course, some books have a much wider landscape and could be epic novels, like those of James Michener. He actually felt brash enough to start one of his novels with the creation of the planet as the start of his story (can you name that novel?). But if you've read any of his books, you will know he’s the king of detail.

I’m a big fan of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s books. Something he said in an interview really stuck with me decades ago and influenced my novel writing all the way through. Remembering what he said about detail inspired me to write this chapter, so I’m going to put a little excerpt of this interview with him from the Paris Review 1981 (which I happily found doing a Google search).

INTERVIEWER: There also seems to be a journalistic quality to [your] technique or tone. You describe seemingly fantastic events in such minute detail that it gives them their own reality. Is this something you have picked up from journalism?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: That’s a journalistic trick which you can also apply to literature. For example, if you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
is full of that sort of thing. That’s exactly the technique my grandmother used. I remember particularly the story about the character who is surrounded by yellow butterflies. When I was very small there was an electrician who came to the house. I became very curious because he carried a belt with which he used to suspend himself from the electrical posts. My grandmother used to say that every time this man came around, he would leave the house full of butterflies.

But when I was writing this, I discovered that if I didn’t say the butterflies were yellow, people would not believe it. When I was writing the episode of Remedios the Beauty going to heaven, it took me a long time to make it credible. One day I went out to the garden and saw a woman who used to come to the house to do the wash and she was putting out the sheets to dry and there was a lot of wind. She was arguing with the wind not to blow the sheets away. I discovered that if I used the sheets for Remedios the Beauty, she would ascend. That’s how I did it, to make it credible. The problem for every writer is credibility. Anybody can write anything so long as it’s believed.

Even One Little Adjective Can Do the Trick

This point about fine detail making a passage believable is such a great message for writers. Instead of shying away from being very specific in our scenes in order to achieve a universal appeal, think about making your small details very specific, the way a journalist would do if reporting an event they witness. You are like a reporter detailing events for your readers, so if you use detail like this, it adds believability. And believability is the key to universality.

Think about
. . . thinking like a journalist as you write or rework a scene. Everywhere you have general descriptions of things, come up with very specific details. Don't overload with details. Note that Marquez only needed to add the word yellow to make the appearance of butterflies seem real. A few specific details can be powerful, and they add clear imagery in your readers' heads, which is what you want.

Chapter 30: The Secret to a Stress-Free Novel Journey

“It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.”

~Ursula K. Le Guin

I saved this last bit for the end of the book, for either you’ve made it this far and are willing to listen to my spiel, or else you’ve given up and, in that case, you won’t have to read this. But I’m going to stand on my soapbox and talk a little about the need to do some advance preparatory work.

I already mentioned this at the start of the book—and you’ve seen by all the topics we’ve covered—how there truly is a lot of thinking and figuring out that must be done before you dive into writing that novel. I know some of you will disagree with me, and as I said before, you have every right to do so. Write your own way. No one is holding a gun to your head. But I am hoping you will at least hear me out and give my advice a try.

At the risk of sounding repetitive (because I am being repetitive), you have a choice. You are not stuck in “pantser land.” You really can learn how to plan out your novel before you start writing—and I truly believe if you do, you will find it a much more joyful experience. So here it is.

I’m going to paint a little analogy for you here about taking a trip—for writing your novel is a journey of sorts. And we have all probably had smooth-running trips as well as disastrous ones we’d rather forget (and wished we hadn’t gone on).

A Trip with Some Objectives in Mind

If you’re like me, you like to have a sense of security in knowing the trip will be a good one, and that means planning in advance. Let’s say you live in the US and you’ve never gone to Europe. You have three weeks, and you want to see about ten cities and visit two dozen major landmarks. So you go online, get brochures and maps, read reviews—do some research. Then you start working out an itinerary. Maybe you don’t want to be so specific that you leave no room for spontaneity along the way. But you don’t want to just hop on a plane to Frankfurt and wing it without even having booked your first night in a hotel.

Of course, if you’re out there looking for any kind of adventure and part of the thrill is seeing where you end up and wanting to be surprised (or mugged), that’s a different kind of trip and doesn’t apply here. I’m talking about a trip where you actually have some objectives in mind, some specific sights you really want to see and experience, and you don’t want to waste a lot of time (or money) traveling needlessly on planes and trains in a haphazard fashion. You know that if you plan carefully, you’ll pack in a lot of sights and go from one city to the next in an orderly manner.

Don’t End up Sleeping on a Bench in a Subway

By now you should know where I’m going with this. If you don’t want to hear the lecture, skip to the last page. But I hope you’ll hear me out (you can make faces at me since I can’t see you). Writers who dive into a project as huge and challenging as writing a novel without planning much ahead of time are taking many risks. They may go off on a journey that wastes their time and resources (emotional ones primarily) and doesn’t bring them a lot of joy. They may experience a large amount of stress by not having things planned ahead, similar to having to sleep sitting on a bench in some subway because all the hotels in town are booked for a large event that they were unaware of because they didn’t do their research.