Do you spring clean? Do you preserve peaches in the summer or freeze apple pies in October? Did you move a tassel from one side of your graduation cap to another? Have you danced at your daughter’s wedding? Have you walked out of the oncologist’s office with a clean bill of health, cancer free? Do you write New Year’s resolutions?
If you have done any of those things then you’ve probably experienced the feeling of starting anew, moving from one season to another, beginning a new phase. It’s a good, clean slate feeling. You’re at the top of a ski trail, nothing but untouched powder on the run below. It’s exciting. It’s scary. You wouldn’t miss it for anything because, man, in this moment you’re completely alive.
Beginnings and endings are a lot alike. They’re a pivot, a leap, a weightless suspension that lasts a second but feels like it could go on forever. It’s a moment you’ll never forget yet is gone too soon.
So, when is the right moment in a protagonist’s experience to start his or her story? And when does that story truly end? If a story is about change, then the story begins with the protagonist’s apprehension that change is underway. By the same token the story has ended when that change has happened, both outside and in.
Authors often open with a dramatic event and end with a visual image. That’s fine but such choices don’t necessarily capture the feeling we have of arriving at defining moments in our lives.
Here’s a method for finding alternate opening and closing moments for your work in progress:
- In the early chronology of your story’s events, what’s the moment when your protagonist first knows that things are shifting…that something momentous is underway?
- What in particular causes your protagonist to realize that? What is different? What is different inside?
- In the late chronology of your story’s events, what’s the moment when your protagonist knows that he or she is beginning a new life?
- Also, what’s the first moment (at the story’s end) that signals the beginning of a new world? What in particular signals that?
- Have a look. Would those be good spots to begin and end?
Beginnings and endings are external, true enough. But they’re also personal. Go inside your protagonist to find where things truly start…and when they’re finally done.
About Donald Maass
Donald Maass (he/him) is president of the Donald Maass Literary Agency. He has written several highly acclaimed craft books for novelists including The Breakout Novelist, The Fire in Fiction, Writing the Breakout Novel and The Career Novelist.
One of my favorite exercises was writing the end of my book. It wasn’t my idea – I was barely a third of the way through the book when the leader of our writer’s group suggested writing the end when you are near the beginning.
I’d planned the ending and plotted how I was going to get there, but actually writing the ending was not something I’d considered. And what a revelation! Writing the ending crystalized what had only been vague plans.
I love this post as you remind us all that the endings are a very important part of the story . . . .and we shouldn’t necessarily leave them to the end.
Great approach. I believe in writing key moments in isolation. It works for endings, inner turning points in scenes and much more. Good to hear how it has worked for you.
Talk about crystalize … I especially like “what’s the first moment (at the story’s end) that signals the beginning of a new world? What in particular signals that?” I actually found this moment after days of tormenting myself on the page with a character. I felt this “gap” between the character and the ending action. I knew I needed a bridge but couldn’t identify it. When I spent some “free time” away with the character (away from the maddening page), I found it. Wish I had read your point 4 a year ago! Thanks, though. I want to copy these points and paste them to my desk.
I wish I had written this post a year ago! But all things in their time…
Do I spring clean? I must admit, at the moment I’m still an aspiring spring cleaner. And although I can identify the moment when everything starts to change and a moment when change has occurred in my manuscript, I realize it’s mostly revealed externally. So I suppose this spring I also aspire to delve inside my protagonist, to make those external events more personal, more meaningful.
Thanks for giving me the tools, Don. Much appreciated.
(snort) Aspiring spring cleaner? Love that. I’m an aspiring clutter bug. I’d save so much time if I didn’t tidy up so much.
Wow! This is providential. I just spent the last thirty minutes checking the first paragraphs of my favorite books. The things they have in common? I want to read more and for all the reasons you cite in this post.
Now I’m going to go check the last paragraphs.
Oh, what a great idea! What were the novels you checked?
I’ve been known to spring clean in the fall! Thanks for this post today!
LOL
Pulling weeds in the garden, rounding up dust-bunnies, sorting a decade’s worth of old clothes–anything seemed preferable to tackling a new opening for my WIP. Took a moment to read your post, Donald . . . and boy am I glad I did. Forget spring cleaning. I’m off to jump start my novel. Thanks!
I think I’m still wearing a decade’s worth of old clothes. There’s a suit in my closet that’s getting close to that milestone, and ties that definitely take us back to ancient historical eras.
I write the ending first. It gives me a false sense of completion, but I’ll take it.
Does writing the ending help you find the beginning?
Yes because the ending starts the full circle from the beginning. So if everybody lives happily ever after, how did they meet? I write from there.
There are times for many readers that a beginning which holds so much promise and required a lot of investment turns out less than expected. Turning that into a story of hope does not seem easy at first but already has a built in twist for the plot. Thanks for the idea that got me thinking.
Thinking is good.
I really needed this post, very timely. Lately, I realized that I am writing my first chapter as the second chapter, swopping it after days of head-scratching. Then trying to repair the shift. My husband told me it’s like I am trying to hide something healthy in the sandwich!
I’m all for hiding kale in brownies, or avocado in a Panini. Not so much filling chapter one with stuff that belongs in chapter two or later.
–In the late chronology of your story’s events, what’s the moment when your protagonist knows that he or she is beginning a new life?
–Also, what’s the first moment (at the story’s end) that signals the beginning of a new world? What in particular signals that?
I love the way these two points are expressed. When I thought about them in terms of my manuscript, I recognized that those points are there, and that my MC knows it, but I realized that I as a writer didn’t convey the depth of it.
Thanks for making me see that. :)
Getting across that depth effectively is perhaps one of the trickiest and also most rewarding techniques a novelist can master. Go for it.
What you said to Lynn above hit a nerve. The bit about writing key moments in isolation. I so agree. I find the ending of a piece a moment of truth not only for my character but for me.
Love this! I would also add that I love when the end and beginning speak to each other in some way, either through mirroring or some sort of recurrence: The main character is back in the same setting but everything has changed, or the closing line resonates with the opening one, answers its question, etc. Thanks for another great post!
Annie-
Yes, those parallels are lovely when they happen–or when you make them happen–especially when they bring a story full circle.
Just what I needed!!! Thanks!
Welcome!
Like Vaughn, I’m an aspiring spring cleaner and a veteran clutter-bug. I put on the rubber gloves and started scrubbing the mildew from the middle bits of the story. Now I wonder if I need to clean house like a pro- work from the outside in.
Off to midden heap. ;)
Thanks for another remarkable post, Mr. Maas.
Cleaning house is an art. Everyone does it differently. I’m of the little bit every day school. It’s a discipline, maybe, sort of like writing.
Great post. Too many times advice given to writers is nebulous and confusing (show, don’t tell comes to mind). I liked the concreteness of this as it gives you specific questions to ask, and focuses on only two aspects of the story: beginning and end.
The writing advice I like the least are lists of “don’t’s”. Nice, but what should you *do*?
This is such a timely post for me!
Your last sentence really hit home for me: “Go inside your protagonist to find where things truly start…and when they’re finally done.”
When they’re finally done… I KNOW what that feels like, that moment.
I’ve always struggled with writing endings. I get there, but it can take a few tries sometimes. These questions will help take some of the struggle out of building my endings. Thanks for a great post!
Awesome post. Revelatory. With my current novel i didn’t write the beginning until after i’d drafted the whole manuscript. Knowing how hard it is to nail the beginning, and feeling that i’d have found my voice by then.
but your suggestion of when things feel like they change for the worse at the beginning and (possibly) for the better at the end – is amazingly true and helpful
thanks Donald.
At your service.
Great advice delivered in a wonderfully clean, straightforward way. It’s excellent timing, too: going back and forth with the end I know is “the moment when my protagonist knows that she is beginning a new life” and the few pages longer when I get the closure I need, too. Thanks for the advice I needed to hear.
Maybe next month I should tackle, “how to know when you’ve reached the middle”?
So…it is the moment she sees her father killed by horse thieves or the moment she realizes his killer has just ridden through the castle gates?
That’s still a tough one, Don. :)
Cheers,
Colleen
Colleen! Nice to see you here. (Check out Tuesday’s discussion of self-publishing.)
In your case, I’m definitely in favor of the moment she sees her father’s killer ride through the castle gates. That so makes me want to read more.
This post was great. Really got me thinking. “How to know when you’ve reached the middle” would be a godsend!
Ahhh! You posted this today just for me, didn’t you? No, no. Don’t disillusion me.
I have been fighting and fighting with where to begin my story, resisting the place where it needs to begin because it feels too early. And yet, it is precisely where the character realizes that her world is shifting in monumental ways.
So thanks for giving my muse just the kick, er, permission she needed!
Robin-
You’re more than welcome, it makes my day to hear I may have helped one of my very favorite bloggers here on WU.
BTW, congrats on your RITA nomination for Grave Mercy. It was great to see that.
Love this advice. Maybe because I get to feel a little self satisfied as I read it. I hacked off the first 75 pages of my second novel, to make the story begin at a big, life changing moment for main character.
I like that you’ve taken it further… that the “big moment” doesn’t need to be an event, but might be subtle, internal shift/epiphany. Thanks for this post. Much to mull as I navigate the swampy middle of WIP.
Mari- Ah, the swampy middle. Did you get the latest WU Newsletter the other day? Try out my “21st Century Tip”. It might open the sky over the muck. I hope so.
Thanks for the post!
I wrote my ending first. It helped having that final destination to keep driving toward. It is the least edited portion of my manuscript.
Beginning with a need to change presented some timing issues, but I know it’s where I needed to start. I made the first two chapters front story. The editing police can call my mother if they wish.
It’s interesting to see how many commenters here write their endings first, or early in the process. Maybe the beginning should be the last thing written? Huh. Gonna think on that.
Though I always think I know how a story begins, I’ve rewritten my first pages at the end of my drafting process for my last two stories. Why does this happen? Maybe it’s that what we mean to say isn’t always what we end up saying, and so the beginning has to be refined to complement the story’s true center–to pull back that first arrow that much more or redirect its arc.
The true ending leads to the true beginning. A storyteller’s way of looking at a story.
A while back I realized that my WIP is, in part, about my character very gradually realizing, as she grows through her childhood, how screwed up her family is. (Her mother is the miller’s daughter from “Rumpelstiltskin,” in a fairy tale continuation that involves an empire conquering the kingdom for its gold. My character is adopted into the emperor’s family as a hostage, sort of like Cleopatra’s daughter, but younger.) She didn’t just “always know.” This confirms that some of those early scenes where she starts to see it should be at the beginning, not backstory! Thank you!
Thanks for the hint “Authors often open with a dramatic event…”
I used to have a casual dinner among friends as beginning for my sci-fi novel but changed that, because I thought it might not be big enough. Although it introduces my protagonist perfectly (especially his humour). Instead I wrote a gruesome and gory intro to get the reader off his/her feet immediately.
But it always felt like making false promises to the reader, as my focus is on the personal relationships not the horror.
Thank you so much for setting my head straight again!