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A great novel ending does more than tie up the plot. It leaves readers feeling something. Discover how to use promises, payoffs and emotional storytelling to make your ending more powerful and memorable, with examples from Harry Bingham’s Fiona Griffiths crime novels.

Promises and Payoffs: More Than a Plot Twist

Our Build Your Book Month had an interesting event on promises and payoffs: how to insert things in the first four-fifths of your book that can pay off beautifully in the very final bit.

Often, that’ll be a major plot reveal, but it can be subtler than that. A joke can find its punchline, a character can deliver something you sort of guessed was there.

There’s quite a lot to say there, but maybe I’ll leave that for another day. Because another thing that endings do is explain to the reader what the moral / emotional consequence of all this is.

How to Guide Readers’ Emotions at the End of a Novel

Should the reader end up happy? Or sad? Or excited and triumphant? Or in some bitter-sweet place? Or in tune with birdsong and the present moment?

That sounds dumb. Haven’t we just told the story? Are readers daft?

But our spoken words alone don’t convey meaning – we use tone and body language and eye contact to present a complete picture. It’s the same with books. Yes, the final plot outturn gives readers a good idea of how to feel, but the writer needs to do more than just deliver events. You need to say, in effect, “Here’s how you need to experience what you’ve just read.”

All that sounds a little hypothetical, so here’s an example.

Using Character and Emotion to Make a Plot Resolution Matter

In Love Story, with Murders, the second of my Fiona books, the tangible outcomes of the ending are as follows:

• Fiona solves one crime (Aussie bad guy who killed a young woman.)
• She also solves another (arms-dealing by a Welsh engineering firm)
• In the process, she also finds the pair of contract killers who almost killed her. She knocks the Scottish one senseless and leaves him for the police to find. She also (sort of accidentally) kills the Norwegian one.
• The arms-dealers are not prosecuted, because they use political connections to get their arms-dealing legitimised.

That’s quite a lot of outcome, and some of those outcomes are ambiguous. (eg: arms-dealers are caught, but not caught.)

The emotional framing around those outcomes was absolutely key to how the reader understood them.

How to Create an Emotionally Satisfying Ending

Here’s how I did it:

Fiona solves one crime (Aussie killer)

The Welsh police don’t have enough evidence for a conviction, but the Australian cops do. Fiona passes this information on to the parent of the dead woman – and asks to go up to see the girl’s bedroom, which had been kept completely unchanged:

“But the room is not the same. The duvet has changed. The poster is no longer on the wall. The wardrobe is empty.

My look must express my surprise.

‘Oh, after you came last time, you and Mrs Watkins, John and I realised it was time to move on. We shouldn’t still hold on to it all. We’ve kept everything precious. The photographs, of course, we could never throw those away.’

For a moment, she’s on the brink of more tears. But it’s been five years. Five heading towards six. And even tears must have an end.”

That little bit of text says that policing is about giving people that sense of release. That even without a domestic conviction and trial, life is now moving on again. It’s hardly triumph, Jack Reacher style, but it is the (quiet) emotional movement that this couple needed. There’s still grief, but there’s the emergence of life again too.

Writing a Powerful Ending

Accidentally kills a Norwegian killer

Fiona and her scary friend Lev try to capture a Norwegian bad guy, who has a laptop full of electronic secrets that Fiona wants. But the bad guy, Olaf, burns his house down rather than reveal those secrets. In the chase, he gets a bullet in the ankle from Lev, but nevertheless runs away as best he can across a northern Norwegian landscape, in spring.

Lev doesn’t shoot again, but …

“Lev has his sights fixed on Olaf’s back. He adjusts his posture by minute amounts. Either to keep pace with Olaf’s movements or to move his aim onto different targets. Head. Chest. Leg.

Olaf, as though feeling that invisible pressure, turns and looks at us. Motionless. A black figure against the white.

I don’t know what we look like to him. Don’t know what his thoughts are, as he sees his house ablaze, his possessions gone, his cover blown.

What do you think when you’re in that position? What do you think as you turn back to your direction of travel and see your future? A frozen lake. A facing slope of rock, snow and pines. On the run for ever, uphill and alone, shoulder wounded and ankle smashed. And a rifle bead tightening on your back.

I don’t know. I don’t know what he thinks.

I do know that when I was alone in the snow, I didn’t feel on my own. I felt myself part of the police family. Felt Buzz. Felt Mam and Dad and Ant and Kay.

I say to Lev, ‘Leave him.’”

This is mercy, certainly, but it’s more than that. It opens an action-type ending out into an existential one. What is it like to lose your home, to be on the run, to feel the sniper’s rifle ‘tightening on your back’?

There’s no rage here. No sense of justice. No wham-bam action even. (There was some just a couple of pages previously.) It’s a quiet, sad, wondering ending.

Olaf continues to stumble away, gets onto thin ice, and perishes:

“[There’s] a bluishness in the ice. A difference in the way it carries the snow.

Olaf is moving with acute care now.

With fear, I think you would say. With fear.

I see him jolt. His boot has gone through the ice. He recovers but proceeds.

And I don’t want him to. All of a sudden, I don’t want this anymore. I want him to retrace his steps. We’ll share a smoke, shake hands, forget about all this. …

He goes on. Stumbles once more and recovers. Then another stumble – and he’s gone. The grey icefield suddenly darkens as water blackens it. Olaf’s head and hat are visible above the ice. His arms. He’s trying to roll his weight out of the water back onto the ice. But each time he tries it, the ice shelf crumbles beneath him. He’s too far now for us to see his movements in any detail. He’s a fly struggling against glass.

It doesn’t take long. We’re too distant to witness the final choreography in any detail. We just see that, one moment, there is a head above the water and the next moment only a level silence. Black, silver, white. And moving water. A glimpse of moving water.”

That’s a death, but it’s described from a distance, almost like a nature painting. It’s very quiet. The mood is one of existential wonder at existence and the possibility of non-existence. A few moments later, Lev and Fiona start smoking a joint, and Lev asks:

‘You are all right?’

‘Yes.’

Lev laughs at that. Takes the joint from me and draws hard on it. ‘Stupid question this one. Everybody always ask it, including me. Are you all right? Everybody says yes. Always this: yes. And –’ he waves his hand at the lake of ice. ‘Is still a person. Boof!’…

We lie on our backs in the snow, passing the joint to and fro, laughing for no reason at all, except that we are alive and we might not have been, and the light is golden and it might not have been.

Why Emotional Payoffs Matter More Than Plot Outcomes

It’s interesting reading this back.

There’s been quite a lot of violence in the ending. The Scottish killer is beaten up. The Norwegian one killed. A house burned. Some police raids and the rest.

But the predominant mood is one of quiet, and somehow an alertness to that sense of being alive – what that means, when in the presence of death. And it is, I suppose, a happy ending, for all that the police-style outcome wasn’t quite what Fiona wanted. But a bereaved couple get to live again and for Fiona herself, ‘the light is golden and it might not have been.’

So guide the reader. Promises and payoffs aren’t just about plot outcomes, they’re about emotional ones too, and the emotional ones are the bits that matter the most.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Body Language

Find a 250-300 word chunk from your ending in which you locate a particular emotional tone and guide the reader as to how to respond to the events they’ve just witnessed.

This could be dialogue between characters. It could be some reflection from the narrator. It could even be a bit of descriptive writing. That sort of text is going to be amongst the most important in your novel, so it’s key to get this right.

As ever, give us title, genre, and any context we need to make sense of the passage.

When you are ready, post in the Townhouse forum.

Til soon.

Harry

Author and editor Mary Hargreaves shares her top tips on how to use humour to enhance your writing.

Have you ever had one of those moments? You’re at the dinner table with friends, you land a joke at the perfect time, and everyone loses their minds laughing. You have? Well, my friend, that’s because you’re hilarious. You’re a veritable comedic genius. Channelling that conversational humour into good comedic writing, however, requires a slightly different approach. Let’s look at five tips for using comedy in your writing.

1. Identify what makes your characters funny

Exploit your characters’ unique traits for comedic value. Perhaps they have a sharp inner monologue borne of a tumultuous upbringing, or are oblivious to their own glaring faults. Maybe they take everything too literally, or assume everyone’s trying to trick them.

For demonstration purposes, I’m going to use one of the best one-liners from one of the best characters in literary history: Mrs Bennet from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Mrs Bennet is an anxious, interfering woman with absolutely no social tact or self-awareness, and this makes her dialogue joyous to read. She’s not making jokes; she’s being entirely herself, unaware of just how funny she is.

‘Well, my comfort is, I am sure Jane will die of a broken heart, and then he will be sorry for what he has done.’

2. Use contrast and surprise for impact

We often find things funny when they subvert the path we thought we were being led down. It’s how a lot of stand-up comedy works, and we can use it in our writing in many different ways. Perhaps characters under-react to huge events, or overreact to small ones. Maybe a character ends up in a situation that’s deeply out of their comfort zone. In our Mrs Bennet example, the contrast comes from the comfort she takes from the thought of Jane’s hypothetical death, particularly as she claims to put her daughters’ happiness above all else. Even though we know her character well by this point, we’re still surprised into laughter by the absurdity of her priorities.

3. Control timing

Delivering the payoff at the right moment matters. This could be as simple as giving a humorous internal revelation its own line for emphasis, or building up crossed wires during a dialogue scene, so that by the time two characters realise they’re talking about different things, the impact is that much funnier. Austen’s genius line is timed to perfection: we have the set up, ‘My comfort is…’, which engenders an expectation of something reassuring, followed by a shocking idea, ‘Jane will die of a broken heart’, raising the melodrama, before the payoff of ‘and then he will be sorry’. Experiment with the order of the information you give your reader. Sometimes the funniest place for a punchline is where it’s least expected.

4. Don’t explain the joke

This seems like it goes without saying, but it’s surprisingly easy to assume that your reader might not have quite got something, and thus needs it explaining. As a rule, readers are much savvier than you might think, and it’s worth risking a joke sailing over the head of ten percent rather than irritating the ninety percent who did get it by driving it home unnecessarily.

I hope you’ll forgive me adding something to Mrs Bennet’s quote here, as an example of what not to do. Austen, of course, would never.

‘Well, my comfort is, I am sure Jane will die of a broken heart, and then he will be sorry for what he has done.’

Elizabeth stared at her. ‘Mother, that is hardly a comfort. You have just suggested that Jane’s death would be tolerable as long as Mr Bingley feels guilty for leaving her. That’s rather morbid, don’t you think?’

As you can see, we’ve killed the joke by doing the reader’s work for them.

5. Edit, edit, edit

People often think it was Stephen King who coined the phrase ‘Kill your darlings’, but it was actually Arthur Quiller-Couch, who instructed writers to murder their darlings in 1914. Whoever said it, it’s good advice. Look at what comes before and after a funny moment: is it setting up the joke unnecessarily? Is it taking the joke beyond its funniest peak, so that it loses its impact? And does the joke belong there? If it doesn’t fit the emotional tone of the scene or the personality of the character making it, give it the chop. After Mrs Bennet’s exaggerated claim, Austen has Elizabeth remaining silent. The joke lands; nothing further is needed. As tough a pill as it is to swallow, not all your comedic genius can (or should) make it to the final draft.

Using comedy in your writing might use different skills from making your pals laugh at the dinner table, but if you already have a nose for what’s funny, you’re halfway there. Bring out the natural humour of your characters, surprise your reader, pay attention to your timing, trust them to get the joke and chop ruthlessly. Remember: sometimes the funniest writing comes from what hasn’t been said.

Want professional advice on your manuscript? We offer a range of editorial services for all writing stages and work with top editors, like Mary, to deliver professional feedback that will help you improve your project.

There’s a type of good vs evil Hollywood film where the protagonist ends up struggling with the top bad guy on a wet rooftop, or similar. Inevitably, they both have guns but for some reason contrive to lose them, so they end up beating each other up with fists and conveniently-lying-around metal poles instead. Then it looks like the good guy is about to lose. (Oh, no! He’s hanging one handed from the balustrade, dangling over a 200 ft drop! Now he must surely die!) Then the good guy pulls out some good-guy trick, and it’s the bad guy who falls instead.

If there’s a deputy good-guy (often a woman), then the rules say that the deputy good-guy has to have some deputy-battle with a deputy bad-guy. That battle needs to be a bit less dramatic than the main battle, because we can’t take too much light away from the Big Good Guy.

All those rules are annoyingly predictable, but they’re also annoyingly essential. You can’t end an action movie without real action; that would just be disappointing. Likewise, that action can’t be tame compared with what’s just gone before. And a show-down with darkness needs to have jeopardy. Bruce Willis needs to have a one-to-one, jeopardy-rich battle with Alan Rickman. He can’t just come in with a troop of armed sharp-shooters and say, ‘You’re stuffed, mate.’

But that’s Hollywood. And Hollywood can only do exteriors. Its battles have to be played out on rooftops, because they can’t play out in the mind.

What about books?

And here – well, it’s complicated.

One, perfectly fine, model for books follows that Hollywood script exactly. Mounting jeopardy and action. The antagonist personified in one very clear figure. A big biff-wham-bam climax, that’s essentially one vs one. Goody wins.

That works. If that’s the model for your book, it’s fine.

But there are alternative models and they work too:

Multiple protagonists

My first book had three brothers racing to make a million pounds, as a way to win their dead father’s considerable fortune.

The brothers included a good guy, a bad guy who sought to reform, and a guy who stayed bad until the epilogue. There was also a good sister who snuck in at the very last minute to scoop the jackpot. There wasn’t really a clear antagonist here. There were moral stakes in play, of course, but never of the rooftop battle sort. The bad brother who lost his money was punished only by returning to do a philosophy degree in Oxford. Throwing him off a rooftop would have been vastly excessive.

In the end, the book didn’t have a true antagonist at all. It just had actors of different moral weights who secured outcomes in proportion to those weights. Yes, you need some kind of high-intensity climax, but that climax doesn’t have to have violence of any sort. Mine didn’t.

Antagonist as external but impersonal force

Another one of my books was a romance where the couple met during the Russian revolution, were separated by war and revolution, and found each other again in 1945-era Berlin. There was never truly a single-individual antagonist. Really, the antagonist was the evil of two dark empires in conflict. But obviously that evil needed to act out via incident and character so, yes, there was a crucial intervention made by a Bad Guy that looked set to separate those two lovers forever.

But that Bad Guy wasn’t critical, the way that the Alan Rickman character was. He was simply a mechanical way to deliver an ‘Oh, no, everything’s ruined’ climax to the story. It’s not just that he personally didn’t need to be thrown off a roof. He shouldn’t be thrown off the roof. He wasn’t the problem. The system was.

The climax had no violence at all. The release was that the woman, trapped inside the dark Soviet system, found a means of escape. The real evil – Soviet Russia – was still alive, still unconquered; it’s just that this one person amongst millions managed to get out.

Antagonist as personal but unseen force

With crime novels, it’s obviously commonplace for there to be a bad guy – but with no one knowing who he is. You can tell there’s darkness at work, because there’s a litter of corpses, but the whole task for the detective is figuring out who that person is.

I’ve written novels where the bad guy is firmly identified and arrested at the end of the book. In most cases, that final moment doesn’t involve real violence. In one book, for example, Fiona has figured out that some dodgy monks are at fault, and just waits, peacefully, with her police colleagues outside the monastery’s church, waiting for the service to end before arresting the villains. No drama, not even shouting.

But I’ve also written novels where the bad guy eludes capture: the reader sees a shape fleeing on a hillside, but that shape is never named. Some lower-level villains may have been demolished, but the ultimate bad guy escapes. It’s easier to write that kind of book in a series novel, but you could just about get away with something similar even in a standalone.

Antagonist as purely personal force

And, in romances perhaps most of all, the antagonist can live within the protagonist themselves. Who’s the antagonist in Pride and Prejudice? It’s not Wickham: he’s just a plot device. Throwing him off a roof would feel like an accidental coda to the main book. Entertaining, but hardly necessary.

In the end, the only antagonists that Lizzie and Darcy face are their own shortcomings. They can’t find love until they’ve conquered the devils lurking within them both. That kind of book needs more careful writing than the chuck-em-off-roofs kind, but those work too, even today.

***

I’m not sure that the list above is a complete taxonomy of ways-to-handle-antagonists. And, anyway, I’m not sure it matters. What really matters is the protagonist’s (and reader’s) inner journey. Do they have an ‘oh no, everything’s lost’ moment? Do they have a thrill of victory? Is the hero morally tested? Is there a real, proper climax, suited to the tone of the book?

If you deliver those things properly, I’m sure your antagonist is fine. I mean – thrown-off-a-roof-and-thoroughly-splatted, yes – but fine in an editorial way.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / The Beast in Black

250-300 words please – where we see your antagonist in action. By all means give us a section from your climax if that works, but it’s also fine to just show your antagonist at his/her wicked worst. If you have an impersonal type antagonist – the Soviet empire – for example – show a scene where we feel its dark presence. If you only have an inner antagonist, then give us a passage which shows that struggle.

Also, if you do end up throwing your Baddie off a roof, then please please please can we see that? (I’ve never thrown a bad guy off a roof, but I did bundle one off a cliff once. Excerpt below. Still one of my favourite climax-moments.)

When you are ready, post in the Townhouse forum.

Til soon.

Harry

We’re Build-Your-Booking all this month, but before we get there, I need to say:

WHOOPS.

Last week’s email was written on the basis of a total misunderstanding. I’d assumed that Wiz’s Instagram post (talking about the pain of having work out on submission) meant that she didn’t already have representation. She did and does! And not just for her novel, but for a prestige TV show as well. Major apologies to her for messing up so badly. I’m really sorry to have caused the upset. And … as I well know, the jitteriness of submission remains, even for pro authors with strong representation. So much of the gist of what I said holds true anyway. Just sorry for causing quite unnecessary confusion.

As for the Build-Your-Bookery, this last week has seen two events, one about finding an idea strong enough to power your novel and another about ensuring your sequencing is connected and powerful. (Both events available on playback for just £1; info here.)

Those are both important themes in their own right, but I want to talk today about how they connect.

So let’s say you’re writing a book that has this as its underlying idea:

A failed businesswoman takes on the identity of her gentle, geeky sister to escape dangerous creditors.

I think that idea would need a bit more work to get it properly fit for market, but you can feel its bite already. That sense of a book you need or want to know more about. It’s that bite which makes it (with work) ready to support a book.

What we like about that idea is that it has obvious jeopardy: the dangerous creditors. Those people have to have criminal links and be prepared to use violence. It’s not remotely enough that (say) they might be able to repossess a house or something of that scale. Almost all books need some real splotch of darkness from which to work.

But also: the book promises an adventure into a kind of becoming. Our heroine (ho, hum – what shall we call her – Lori) is one thing and is being pushed to play at becoming another. But because this is a book, what feels like a temporary dodge at the start needs to be a portal into a new way of being. Lori doesn’t need to become gentle and geeky, but she needs to be changed by the experiment. That’s the heart of the book.

Now, it’s easy to think of a pitch like this as simply the thing that makes an agent pick the book up – a marketing sticker. It’s not. It must never be that.

The theme of the second event in this month’s stacked line-up is to do with connectedness.

There’s a causal issue here. Event A has to drive Event B, which has to drive Event C and so on.

You can certainly have subplots in here. So at some stage in the book we’ve outlined, Lori will need to meet a guy quite unlike anyone she’d have dated before. She doesn’t necessarily need to end up with him, but the relationship needs to be transformative.

But the existence of secondary plots doesn’t stop the basic A -> B -> C logic being true. All it means is that we now have secondary, romantic causal chain that runs A₁ -> B₁ -> C₁ in parallel with the main thread.

Now this causal connectedness matters because it gives the story a compelling inner logic. There’s no point at which we can put the book down, no hinge to break its flow.

But the basic pitch has to be there all the time.

This book is about one sort of Lori engaging with the experience of being another sort of Lori and under the shadow of something dark. That’s the book. You can never leave that pitch.

So, for example, you cannot simply get rid of the dangerous creditors halfway through. The ‘causal connectedness’ thing on its own would let you do that (as long as event A still flows into event B and so on.)

But the pitch has to be there on every page. The creditor threat can’t fade in the second half of the book; it has to increase and get darker. (We probably, in fact, need a physical manifestation of that lurking violence. A house set on fire or a car blown up.)

Likewise Lori can’t use her sister’s passport as a way to escape to Greece where, all of a sudden, she has some interesting adventure or romance that doesn’t engage with her sister’s geeky / gentle nature.

The book has to connect causally, but it has tie back to your basic idea, in every chapter.

When plotting works well, these rules give your book an easy and natural flow. The book can be pretty easy to write, in first draft form at least.

Other times, the rules feel like a really tough constraint and it can be a battle to produce that  satisfying first draft. (I’ve had both sort of experiences. You can get a good book out in both ways – just one feels like a tougher wrestle.)

But the rules are the rules. You can’t break them. Compelling short pitch + tight connectedness all the way through. Do that right and your book essentially can’t be wrong. You’ve bound yourself tightly to a pitch you know to be right.

Next week, and still on our Build-Your-Bookery theme, we’ll talk about the opposition: what’s pushing back against your character? It’s not just finding the right level of opposition, it’s about finding the right flavour.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Is your pitch always present?

The big difficulty in dealing with plots is that the damn things are big. To understand them properly, you need to read the book. To read them in miniature, you still need at least 400+ words and it’s arduous writing those words, because there’s a lot of brainache in condensing big to little like that.

So for this week’s FF, we have two options for you.

1. If you have a synopsis, or feel like scribbling one out, then give us your short pitch plus the synopsis.
2. If you don’t have one, then give us your pitch and any 3 illustrations of how we’re going to feel the presence of that pitch throughout the book.

In terms of feedback, the big question is “does this pitch feel alive right throughout the book”? The clearer your pitch, by the way, the easier it will be to give a precise answer to that question.

When you are ready, post in the Townhouse forum.

Til soon.

Harry

This week, our radio telescopes picked up a signal from the further, darker reaches of the galaxy, apparently from an author in distress.

We had our cryptographers analyse the data and they extracted what seems to have been a genuine signal. Their reconstruction of that signal can be found here.

As far as we understand it, an author (“Wiz”) has two manuscripts currently out on submission (that is, lost on Planet Agent) and is complaining about a feeling that she refers to only as “angst”.

She says she needs to get herself “a Hemingway” which we think may refer either to a cocktail favoured in Jazz Age Florida, or to possibly an American writer.

Support for the latter possibility is supplied by Wiz’s inclusion of a page of manuscript in her signal. The page seems to be a letter sent by “Hemingway” to a person known only as “Scott” and who appears to have authored something referred to only as “Gatsby.”

The gist of that letter is supportive. A crucial passage in it reads:

“You can write twice as well now as you ever could. All you need to do is write truly and not care about what the fate of it is. Go on and write.”

And –

Damn right.

Hemingway is damn right. Pretty much any writer who has huffed and puffed their way through the JW steam engine is twice the writer they used to be. Or five times. Ten times.

Think back, any of you, to the way you wrote a few years back. Haven’t you got better? Haven’t you (at times, not always) absolutely loved the act of creation? Haven’t you also loved editing your manuscript – seeing the way the thing starts to tighten and strengthen and gain motion?

These are things that feed your soul. That decorate your life.

And yes, yes, yes: family, kids, relationships. Those things, of course, first and always.

But after that? Isn’t it the writing that matters? These things you’ve made. These creatures of ink who shouldn’t be alive, because they’re just marks on a screen, but who are alive, dammit.

And, if you’ve made those things right, they make the world just a tiny bit more beautiful. They make you slightly more human, a little bit better today than you were the day before.

All this matters.

Planet Agent has its own dark logic. A logic made up of slushpiles and prosecco and the smell of new books and (yes) rejection emails and (yes, yes, yes) also book contracts and royalty cheques.

I’m a massive believer in Planet Agent. If you can figure out its twisting paths, you can (will!) unlock the doors to Paradise. (Well, a book deal, at any rate.)

But all that is a secondary blessing.

The first is that you are a writer now. A writer blessed by this act of creation. A writer who wrote badly once, and better now, and better again tomorrow.

So go and write. And edit. And send your books out. And keep your fingers crossed, your cats black, and your candles lit.

I hope that more luck comes your way. But, no matter what, you’ve already won.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Triumph

250 words please – and words that speak of a triumph or success. That success may be fleeting (perhaps your character is about to tumble into a very large pot of boiling glue), but we want what’s on the page to be sunny and bright.

As ever, title please, and genre, and an explanation of context.

Also, you win this competition completely and forever, if the passage you select is in fact followed by one involving your character falling into a cauldron of hot glue.

When you are ready, post in the Townhouse forum.

Til soon.

Harry