Notes on Beginnings, Middles, and Endings by Nancy Kress

Part 1:  Beginnings

Chapter 1:  “The Very Beginning, Your Opening Scene”

The Implicit Promise:  Framework for the Whole

Every story makes two promises to the reader, one emotional and one intellectual, since the function of stories is to make us both feel and think.

The emotional promise goes something like:  Read this and you’ll be entertained or thrilled or scared or titillated or saddened or nostalgic or uplifted—but always absorbed.

There are three versions of the intellectual promise;

• Read this and you’ll see this world from a different perspective.
• Read this and you’ll have confirmed what you already want to believe about this world.
• Read this and you’ll learn of a different, more interesting world than this.

Having read your opening, the reader knows what you’ve implicitly promised.  A satisfying middle is one that develops that promise with specificity and interest.  A satisfying ending is one that delivers on the promise, providing new insight or comfortable confirmation or vicarious happiness.  The ending feels satisfying only because the beginning set up the implicit promise in the first place.

In your first scene, you main goal is to keep your reader interested.  You do that through focusing on the four elements that make a first scene compelling:  character, conflict, specificity, and credibility.

Character:  Who Goes There?

The opening should give the reader a person to focus on.

Most successful openings give the reader a genuine character because most stories are about human beings.

Conflict:  Coming Soon to a Scene Near You

Conflict arises because something is not going as expected.

Conflict can be overt and dramatic (character vs character, character vs nature, or character vs society), or the conflict may be smaller in scale—family strife, romantic misunderstandings, personal economic loss or gain.  It may even exist only inside the skull of one character with none of the other characters aware it exists. 

Begin with an indication—subtle or overt—that something is not going as expected, or someone is experiencing disturbing emotions, or something is about to change.

Specificity:  That’s a New One on Me

Effective beginnings make use of specific details.  These may be details of speech, setting, characters’ thoughts—anything relevant.  Effective use of details, more than any other single factor, distinguishes publishable manuscripts from those that have a good story line but somehow “aren’t quite right.”

The right details give the writer three advantages:

• Details anchor your story in concrete reality.  Use specific details to show us, not tell us, something.
• Details set your opening apart from hundreds of others similar to it.  Use fresh, original, individual details without being bizarre.  This reveals that the writer has a fresh and meticulous eye.  They pique interest by not being more of the same old thing.
• Details convince the editor you know what you’re talking about.  When your details are accurate, the editor unconsciously awards you the prize of credibility.

Credibility:  Can this Prose Be Trusted?

Credible prose convinces the reader that the writer can handle the English language.  The sense of trust helps the reader suspend disbelief and enter into the world of the story.

The essence of credible prose is control.  Credible prose refeals that you are in control of your words, sentences, and paragraphs.  Specifically, you can control:

Diction

• Words are not misused. 
• Cliches are avoided.

Economy

• Only as many words as are needed to create the effect are used.
• Repetition can be used to great effect—if used to create a mood, an atmosphere, or a state of mind.
• Repetitive prose is well suited to obsession and to dwelling on old sins.
• “Be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams, the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.”  --Robert Southey, English poet

Sentence Construction

• Avoid awkward sentences.
• An awkward sentence is hard to read, is ambiguous, or orders its clausesin a way tht creates an impression different from what was intended.

Sentence Variety

• Credible prose varies sentence length.
• A short sentence following a series of long ones will have punch and drama.
• A long sentence following a series of short ones will require heightened attention from the reader; make sure the content is worth it.

Parts of Speech

• Credible prose is not overloaded with adjectives and adverbs.
• Excess modifiers are the mark of an amateur. 

Tone

• The focus should be on the story, not the writer.
• Resist the impulse to overwrite through clever asides, language to grandiose for the situation, through throwing in pointless foreign words or “in” slang, or through insistent punctuation.

Many writers don’t think about aspects of credible prose at all in the first draft. 

Nancy Kress concentrates on the story the first time through, revisions to the story the second time through, and prose quality in the third draft.

The Rest of Your First Scene

What do you want that first scene to accomplish in terms of your story?

What should be different at the end of the scene from the beginning of the scene?

Scenes in fiction are of two types:  DRAMATIC and EXPOSITORY.

Expository scenes essentially summarize action that isn’t new enough or important enough to need full dramatic treatment.

The first scene should not be a summary scene.  It should be dramatized.

Possibilities for changes in the first scene:

• A character discovers that a task he is starting is more complicated than he’d hoped.
• A character learns a disturbing piece of information.
• A character arrives someplace new.
• A character meets someone who will significantly alter his life; even in the first scene the new acquaintance has begun to change the character’s immediate goals or ideas.
• An event occurs—a murder, a spaceship landing, the arrival of a letter—that will lead to significant change.  The first scene details the event and hints at the kind of repercussions that will follow.

Once you know the answers to these questions, you can build on your strong opening to finish your first scene.

• What change will be introduced in your first scene?
• In whose life?
• How will that person feel about it?

Note:  The last sentence of a scene, just before the scene break, is the power position (just as the last word in a paragraph is a power position, and the last line of a chapter, and the last paragraph of a novel).  Make it count. 

The closing sentence of a first scene should evoke some emotion—not blatantly, but through a telling detail that means more than just itself.

This sentence also paves the way for the next scene. 

A Special Case:  The Prologue

A prologue is most effective when there’s a strong reason to set the it off by itself.  Sometimes the prologue takes place a long time before the main narrative.  Sometimes it takes place a long time after the main narrative.  Sometimes it is written from a different point of view, one which will never be used again.  Occasionally it consists of a real or fictional document—court summons or last will or newspaper article or personal letter—that prepares the readers for the drama to come.

Two-fold advantage of a prologue:

• It can avoid what might otherwise be a jolting transition between two scenes widely separated in time or space; the reader expects the story to start over again after a prologue.
• If it is interesting enough, the prologue can whet the appetite for the main story.

To be successful, the prologue must contain a strong promise of conflict to come.

Disadvantages of a prologue:

• You must write two opening scenes
• The prologue doubles the reader’s opportunity to decide she’s not interested.

Consider carefully whether you gain more than you risk with a prologue.

SUMMARY:  The Very Beginning

Writers compose stories in various ways.

• Some work best when they write like a runner racing through a haunted graveyard late at night:  full speed ahead, no looking back.

• Others polish each scene as they write it.
• Others write several variations of key scenes, such as the opening, to discover what they want to say.

At some point, it’s well worth spending considerable time rewriting and polishing that first scene.

Polishing the first scene or two early on will give you a firmer idea of who your characters are, what the conflict will be, and what tone the story will be.

• When you’ve firmly established your character, you’re less likely to weaken the story by making him do something out of character.
• When you’ve hinted at one source of conflict, you’ll know to develop that source.
• When your rewriting and attention to specific details have established a certain tone for the story—and they inevitably will—you can stay true to that tone, forsaking all others.

Chapter 2:  “The Later Beginning:  Your Second Scene”

There are three basic options for your second scene:

• Backfill
• Flashback
• Continuation of story time

Backfill:  The Swimming Pool Theory

Backfill is basically expository background, explaining who these people are and how they got into this mess in the first place.

It can be handled in two ways:

• Straight exposition in the author’s voice
• A sort of pseudoreminiscene in the voice of the point of view character

The Swimming Pool Theory says that structuring fiction is like kicking off from the side of a swimming pool.  The stronger and more forceful your initial kick, the longer you

can glide through the water.  The stronger and more forceful your opening scene, the less your reader will mind a “glide” through nondramatized backfill.

Flashbacks:  You Can Go Home Again.

For a flashback to succeed, it should meet three criteria:

• It should follow a strong opening scene, one that roots us firmly in your character’s present.  This means we have enough sense of her as an individual n of her present situation as dramatic potential.
• The second-scene flashback should bear some clear relation to the first scene we’ve just witnessed. Give the reader a flashback that deepens their knowledge of the previous scene rather than distracting them from it.
• Don’t let your reader’s get lost in time.  Indicate clearly how much earlier the flashback scene took place.  Use clear transitions.

Any flashback will distance the reader from the action.  Even so, the flashback can be a good choice for a second scene if you gain more in depth and clarity than you lose in immediacy.

Continuing in Story Time:  Controlling the Conflict

Simply go on with the story, dramatizing whatever happens next to your point-of-view character.

Your second scene in story time will undoubtedly have some conflict in it.  Avoid the sense that every single scene in your story or novel is going to be a crisis.

When every scene is laden with intense conflict, the story becomes monotonous and (worse) unrealistic.

Choosing the Action for Your Second Scene

The second scene in story time must both carry the actioni forward and control the conflict level.  The best way to choose a scene to do that is to keep a single question firmly in mind:  What do these people want?

What does each of the characters want? 

Keeping this in mind can greatly simplify plotting your story, which just means deciding what will happen in the scenes of your story.

Once you know the answers, you can figure out how these particular individual s would go about getting it.  This in turn suggests scenes.

Who Are These People?  Introducing and Developing Your Characters

Different characters will have different kinds of conflicts and changes.

As your beginning scenes portray conflict, they also portray character.  A character creates or reacts to conflict in ways dictated by the kind of person he is.  How you show him acting creates further conflict or alleviates it.

Every paragraph in your story should accomplish two goals:

• Advance the story (plot)
• Develop your characters as real, individual, complex and memorable human beings.

Spend some time thinking about your characters.

• What makes them individual?
• Where did they grow up?
• What was their childhood like?
• What is their life like now?

These questions reveal who your people are when they are not in the story.  Imagining backgrounds for your characters helps bring them alive in your mind.  The next step is making them live on the page.

Characters reveal themselves in six ways;

Actions They Initiate

Actions are a good place to start showing us who these people are.

Reactions to Other Character’s Actions

One character says or does something.  Another character’s reactions to this event can effectively characterize them both.

Dialogue

At the beginning, a character’s dialogue probably is not going to reveal much about his deeper motives, fears, ambiguities, strengths and other fundamental qualities.  But it can—and should—reveal basics of class, education, and surface personality.

Thoughts

The thoughts of the point of view character can reveal an enormous amount about her—including things she may not know herself.

Gestures and Body Language

A wealth of body language can be used to individualize your character.

Appearance

It is effective to characterize through aspects of physical appearance that your character can control—how she dresses, whether her haircut is fashionable, which newspaper she carries, the state of her shoes.

The character also has some control over her living space, and so her surroundings can also be used to reveal her personality.

Putting It All Together:  Characters We Want to Read More About

Supplement dialogue with character’s thoughts, appearance, gestures, actions, and reactions.  The more of this you get into your beginning scenes, the better initial sense the reader will have of your characters.

A Cast of Thousands:  Introducing More Characters

Don’t throw too many characters at your reader in the first scene.  Hold the first scene to three named people, if you can. 

In later scenes, introduce characters only as they come onstage to do something meaningful.  Keep explanation to a bare minimum.  Let the character establish himself through some characteristic or significant action.

Avoid introducing each character with an expository capsule biography.  If it is vital we know something about a character the minute he enters, give us the information as briefly as possible.  Keep it short and save the rest of the facts until they are relevant to the story.

One effective way to prepare for the entrance of a character who’s not in the first scene is to have other characters talk or think about her before she arrives.  The same tactic can be used to prepare for less pivotal characters.

Various unnamed characters don’t need to be turned into individuals at all.  Drawing too much attention to their individual quirks and histories might actually work against the story by distracting focus from your major characters.

The Beginning and All the Rest

The first two scenes of your novel don’t exist in a vacuum.  Part of their function is to prepare the reader for the rest of the story.

They make the implicit promise to your readers.  By the time the reader has finished the first two scenes, she knows:

• What kind of story this is—domestic drama, political thriller, etc
• What general type of conflict you’re promising—marriage problems, alien invasion, etc.
• What tone the story takes toward its characters—ironic, detached, affectionate, heroic, melodramatic, gritty
• Whether the main character is someone the reader should like, identify with, or just observe

The major function of the beginning is to set up the implicit promise that you will develop in the middle and fulfill in the end.

Your beginning must also function as an interesting reading experience in itself, full of character and situation and pleasing language.  It must claim the reader’s attention in its own right.

Chapter 3:  “Help for Beginnings:  Early Revision”

If you are unsatisfied with your beginning, set aside some time.  Write several short openings to the same story, writing very rapidly, keeping each to between three and five paragraphs.  Don’t judge these openings.  Keep producing variations by deliberately altering either narrative mode or point of entrance into the story.  Inevitably, one of the variations will click in your mind and you’ll feel that sense of rightness that is one of the major pleasures of writing fiction.

Varying Narrative Mode:  Cinderella Redux

All fiction is created out of five different ways of presenting information called “narrative modes:”

• Dialogue
• Description
• Action
• Thoughts
• Exposition

A complete story will use all five modes, but often the opening scene is characterized by the predominance of one mode.

Literary Relocation:  Starting Over in a Different Place

Write a beginning that opens either earlier or later than the original.  Usually a story will be improved by starting later in the action rather than earlier.  Whichever scene you decide to open with, your material will be richer for the ideas sparked by experimenting with alternatives.

A Final Word on Revision:  The Temptation to Polish Forever

Once you have one or two good scenes, it can seem so much easier to polish them—sharpening details, switching sentence order, adding grace notes—than to write the next scene. 

Resist this temptation.

Grit your teeth and move on.

Part 3:  Endings

Chapter 7:  “Satisfying Endings:  Delivering on the Promise”

The reader can just feel the forces gathering

• Characters are on the verge of being pushed into action,
• or disasters are on the edge of occurring,
• or secrets are about to be disclosed,
• or a deadline is almost here,
• or a situation has become so intolerable that it’s obvious somebody is about to bring it toppling down around everyone else’s ears. 

Something has to give.

At its beginning, a story makes the kind of implicit promise discussed throughout the book.  In the middle, the development of both characters and conflict extends that promise by arranging forces in opposition to each other.  We see various problems and tensions come closer and closer to collision. 

Then comes the ending.  It must use those same characters, conflicts, problems, and tensions to show us the collision (the climax).

How do you find an ending that delivers?

• First think carefully about what your story has promised the reader, both emotionally and intellectually. 
• Vicarious terror? 
• Vicarious love? 
• Justice? 
• The answer to a problem? 
• An insight into contemporary life?
• The feeling that life isn’t so bad after all? 
• A view of a workable alternate society? 
• A warm and cozy feeling?
• Second, think carefully about the forces you’ve set in conflict throughout the middle. 
• What are they?
•  Can you list them? 
• Which ending would bring them into plausible, satisfying collision, leaving some victorious and others vanquished? 
• Which ones have you made promises about from the beginning?

The ending dramatizes the triumph of some of the forces developed in the middle, which in turn were set in motion by the characters and conflict introduced in the beginning.

That is what your ending must accomplish.  How you accomplish it is by controlling the two parts common to most story endings:  the climax and the denouement.

Climaxes That Do

The climax can be defined as whatever big event the forces in your story have been building toward. 

If a character is going to change, this is the experience that finally demonstrates that change (although earlier experiences may also play a part).

If a problem is going to get solves, this is where the protagonist solves it.  (The villain makes his last big fight, the lovers are united, the family tension finally explodes, the quest reaches its goal, the decisive confrontation occurs). 

This is the payoff.

To succeed, a climax must do four things:

• The climax must satisfy the view of life implied in your story.
• The climax must deliver emotion.  The readers should feel whatever your characters feel.  If your characters don’t feel anything in particular, this is not the climax.
• The climax must deliver an appropriate level of emotion.  The level of drama in the climax must match the level of drama throughout the story.  Too much drama will short circuit a restrained, quiet story.  Too little drama will seem flat in a story already festooned with murder, betrayal, war, sex, car chases, or other strong action.
• The climax must feel logical to your plot and your story.  The climactic scene must grow naturally out of the actions that preceded it, which in turn must have grown naturally out of the personalities of the characters.  Make sure your climax is not only plausible for your characters, but pretty close to inevitable.

The Right Ending:  A Litmus Test

A successful ending must be tied not only to the author’s implicit promise and the forces dramatized in the middle, but also to the protagonist’s nature. 

A test for your ending is this question:  If my protagonist were a radically different person, would this story still end the same way?  The answer should be NO.  If it is YES—if the events of your book would be unaltered no matter whom they happened to—your ending will not feel convincing.

The ending must grow out of the character’s deepest self.

A Final Word on the Climactic Scene

The climax must be in proportion to the length of your story.

In novels, the climax usually occupies at least a chapter; it may take up several chapters. 

Consider your story as a jewelry setting, and your climax the diamond.  The diamond may not be as large as the gold around it, but it should be large enough to not seem insignificant by comparison.

The Denouement:  “Marryin’ and Buryin’”

Everything after the climax is called the denouement, whose function is to wrap up the story.  The denouement shows us two things:

• The consequences of the plot
• The fate of any characters not accounted for in the climax

If your story leaves questions unanswered or characters dangling, you might consider adding a denouement to satisfy reader curiosity.

A successful denouement has three characteristics:

• Closure
• Brevity
• Dramatization

Closure means you give your readers enough information about the fate of the characters for them to feel that the book really is over.  Show just enough of your characters’ futures that the reader doesn’t feel that he’s been left hanging.

Readers don’t want to decide for themselves what happened.  They want you to decide, based on the dual grounds that you’re the writer and they just read four hundred pages of your prose anticipating this very information that you are now withholding. 

Brevity is important to a denouement because if it goes on too long, it will leach all emotion from the climax.  End while your reader is still affected by your big scene.  Anything else will feel anticlimactic.

The more subtle and low-key the climax in action and tone, the briefer the denouement should be. 

Dramatization ensures that your denouement feels like part of the story, not a chunk of exposition tacked on after the story’s over.  Try to show what happens to your characters by showing them in action.  Whatever action you choose to dramatize, your denouement should be fairly mild.  Otherwise it may compete with the climax.

To Epilogue or Not to Epilogue

Novelists generally set the denouement apart in an epilogue only if it differs significantly from the main narrative in time or place, or if it’s going to be in a radically different style.

If the events in your novel require wrapping up in a different place, time, or narrative style, consider calling the wrap-up an epilogue.  This alerts the reader that something different is coming up, softening the sense of discontinuity from the main narrative. 

The label “epilogue” can also shift reader expectations about tone, from the immediacy of the climax to a longer, more contemplative view of what the climax might mean. 

The Special Case of the Series Book

Every book in a series bears a special burden    .  In addition to standing on its own as a satisfying reading experience, it must also leave the door open for the next book.  This means things can’t be too thoroughly wrapped up. 

There are three kinds of series books, and what you write about depends on which kind you’re creating.

·        Sue Grafton’s “alphabet mysteries” feature the same protagonist in every book. 

o       This means Kinsey Millhone must finish every book alive, still willing to be a detective, and enough unchanged that readers who enjoyed her in one book won’t find her with a different personality in the next book. 

o       If you write this kind of series, you need to make sure your protagonist ends up in roughly the same professional and emotional place she started. 

o       You’ll have to emphasize plot over character development.

·        The second series type allows more freedom because the books don’t feature the same character but only the same setting, or the same family, or maybe just the same universe. 

o       The protagonist in one book doesn’t necessarily appear in the next.

o       Only the conceptual framework—a chain of descendants or a future controlled by the predictive genius of “Psychohistory”—remains the same.

o       Characters can change, die, or exit the story.

o       When the author finishes one story within the framework, he shifts focus to another protagonist.

·        The third kind of series also permits characters to change, but without shifting focus from the initial protagonists.  These don’t allow readers to expect that the protagonist will return to essentially unchanged circumstances in the next installment.

o       Both circumstances and protagonist evolve.

You need to know which kind of series you are writing:

·        If it’s the first type, you simply invent a new problem for your permanent protagonist.

·        If it’s the second type, leave something in the plot situation unresolved, to be taken up in later book(s) by different characters.

·        If you’re writing the third type of series, prepare for the next book by leaving your characters some unsettled personal issues—what psychiatrists call “unfinished business.”

o       If your characters are realistic human beings, there will always be unsettled issues, because as the characters age, they react to new circumstances with old psychological equipment.

In the first and second types of series, you don’t wait until the end of the book to set up the next book. 

If the plot situation will be left unresolved enough to spawn many stories with many characters, it has to be large-scaled and complex.

If the characters will be able to support additional stories about them, they too will have to be multi-layered and complex.  The place to create complexity is not at the end of the book but in the middle.  That’s where characterization is deepened, situations complicated.  That’s where you leave doors open for future volumes.

Checklist for Successful Endings

Check your proposed ending against the following list:

·        Does the climax grow logically out of the specific experiences that this character had in the middle of the story?

·        Has the character change (if there is one) been prepared for by the events of the middle of the story, or is it a come-to-suddenly-realize change?

·        Are all the various forces present at the climax also present in the middle of the story?

·        Is the fate of each secondary character in the climax or the denouement consistent with how these people were portrayed in the middle?

·        Does the ending deliver on the promise implicit in the middle of the story—that is, does it fulfill reader expectations you developed by the events, tone, and world view of the middle?

·        Is your climax in proportion to the middle of the story—neither too different from it in level of drama nor too short in terms of total page count?

If the answer to all of these questions is “yes,” you’ve got a viable ending—and a good middle.

Chapter 8:  “The Very End:  Last Scene, Last Paragraph, Last Sentence”

Resolution Versus Resonance

Short stories divide into two broad, overlapping categories:

• The traditional plotted story
• The contemporary literary short story

The traditional plotted story is easy to recognize.

• The plot complications are resolved for better or worse
• The fates of all major characters are made clear
• When the story’s over, there are no loose ends

The contemporary literary short story

• May not seem to resolve anything or account for what happens to the characters
• Nonresolution of situation and plot is actually deliberate.
• These stories aim at examining a situation but not resolving it because the situation is ambiguous, interesting in and of itself without resolution, or impossible to resolve.
• The story resonates—it sets off in the reader a complex intellectual and emotional reaction to the skillful rendering of a meaningful situation.
• “Literature is the question minus  the answer”  (Roland Barthes)
• The ending is dependent on symbol and nuance rather than resolution

Resonance is that which strikes chords of recognition and meaning in the reader:  I too have felt that, or I’ve always thought that but I never had words for it before. 

For this resonance to work, you need a sensitive reader—one capable of making subtle connections between the world of the story and the world he lives in.  Not all readers can or want to do that.

The Ending of a Traditional Plotted Story

At the end of the story, something must have changed in a meaningful way from the beginning. 

This change should be embodied in an action.  It’s not enough to just show that a character realizes something she didn’t know before; she must do something about it, or at least resolve to do something about it.

• When you choose an action to dramatize whatever has changed from the beginning of your story, consider one additional criterion. 
• The end of a story often delivers a dose of emotion—a rise in the emotional temperature of the narrative. 
• Whatever emotion your story as a whole seeks to convey, try to choose a final action that will evoke it to the reader.

The Ending of a Contemporary Literary Short Story

• The ending of  the contemporary literary short story may or may not be identical with the climax.
• The story usually makes its point through symbol rather than resolving anything through action.
• The symbols evolve throughout the story, frequently turning up as early as the first paragraph.

The Very, Very End:  The Last Paragraph

The last paragraph of a short story is the power position—and within that position, the last sentence is the most powerful of all. 

Often, the last sentence or paragraph evokes the theme of the entire story.  Effective final paragraphs use action, symbol, or a character’s thoughts to seamlessly comment on the story’s meaning while also bringing  the plot to a close.

The last sentences of novels, too, tend to imply the theme of the entire work.

Rewriting: Looking for a Few Good Sentences

Rewriting your ending is just as important as rewriting your beginning, and repays the effort just as strongly.

A good beginning gains your reader’s initial interest; a good ending makes your story linger in his memory after he closes the book.

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