Closing the opening

We’ve spoken in recent weeks about opening your novel. (Why so obsessed? Because of the Ultimate Start course.)

(And – to put two brackets back to back, which is pretty sinful in almost any context – I should probably mention our Festival of Writing, which is … well, it’s pretty obvious what it is. We’ve already sold a lot of tickets, so I wouldn’t hang around too long on this one.)

But have done with parentheses.

Openings only exist so you can, many thousands of words later, create an ending. In film-lore, those opening and closing images need to resonate with each other. It’s as though the story of the film is all there in those two glimpses.

You can see a compilation of opening & closing shots on Vimeo here (you may need to create a free log in if you don’t already have one.) But one example will maybe suffice.

In the film 1917, the opening shot shows two soldiers resting, in sunlight, against a tree. The field beyond is full of flowers. The two men look peaceful and relaxed.

The closing shot shows one soldier – one of the two from the first frame – resting in sunlight against a tree. The other soldier isn’t there: he’s been killed. And the remaining soldier isn’t peaceful or relaxed: he’s exhausted and haunted by what he’s just been through. And this field, though essentially a similar sunny French pasture, has no flowers in it.

That’s all powerful enough in itself – but the symmetry of the two shots says one further thing to the viewer as well: and now we’re back to the beginning. We go again. This never stops. The meaning of the closing image is immeasurably darker than the first.

And novels?

Well, novels are bigger and more complicated than films. I don’t think that, in general, there needs to be this kind of direct conversation between opening and closing shot. I suspect the rather literal reflection I’ve just mentioned is rare.

That said, however, stories are stories. They need to have a purpose. A sense of something accomplished by the preceding narrative.

So, Pride and Prejudice starts by telling the reader that Mrs Bennett is anxious to see her girls get married – and does so via the famous line about a truth universally acknowledged.

The book ends, of course, by marrying Lizzie off to a gazillionaire. But just as the opening chapter dwelled on Mrs Bennett’s feelings about all this, the closing chapter starts there too: ‘Happy for all her maternal feelings was the day on which Mrs. Bennet got rid of her two most deserving daughters.’

There’s a mirroring here again, as well as a sense of the narrative arc. Opening: not married + underlying anxiety. Closing: Married to Mr Handsome-Rich-and-Honourable + all-round yippee-dee-doo-dah.

Last week, we took a look at an opening chapter of one of the FG books, in which we established:

1. Fiona is nuts (she can’t hold a basic conversation about jeans without comforting herself with memories of serious road accidents)
2. She’s deceitful: she thinks about road accidents, but doesn’t reveal her inner life to her friend.
3. She’s somewhat less than human in all this. Not failed exactly – but someone who is rather less than those others around her: other people could have managed this chat; Fiona’s performance was limping, at best.

Now, my book is not the sort of book that closes with a triumphant chat about jeans or new shoes, in which Fiona shows herself a master of small-talk. But the closing scene does show a kind of before-and-after comparison. It’s not that Fiona has changed – she hasn’t – but we do get to see a side of Fiona that compensates for her other deficits.

By way of context, in the course of the book, Fiona saves the life of a Ukrainian multimillionaire’s daughter. The rich guy offers Fiona some thank-you money and she (rightly and properly) says no. But he doesn’t immediately accept her refusal, saying:

‘The money is in Switzerland. Very safe. Very private. Very, very private.’

I say nothing.

‘Eleven million dollars.’

He looks at my face and the light changes and the cedars still don’t move and he gives a slight shrug and says, ‘I send you the details.’

And only then do I move.

I shake my head and say, ‘Mr Zhamanikov, I cannot take your money and my “no” really does mean no. But there are some criminals behind this whole thing—’ I wave my hand at the big house, the house where Aurelia is a prisoner of nothing more than her own head, her own past. ‘Perhaps we will catch those men in conventional ways. In the ways of police officers. Ordinary regular law enforcement. And I hope that’s what happens. But sometimes . . . sometimes, we fail. Or rather . . .’

I taper off and Zhamanikov murmurs, ‘You might need a little help.’

I echo his phrase. ‘Exactly. We might need a little help.’

Yuri gazes at me with those steady eyes and gives, again, that half-shrug. ‘OK. Then when you are ready, you give me call.’

We leave it there. The whole thing arranged as simply as calling a cab, booking a table.

The woman who carefully protected her inner life from her jeans-discussing friend is preparing to be deceitful here on a massively larger scale. She thinks she might need some cash to bring down the bad guys. Here’s someone offering eleven million bucks. And she’s happy to take it – and to conceal that fact from her colleagues in the police and, in fact, from essentially everyone. She’s not taking the money for herself. But cops aren’t meant to do those things and she blooming well does.

So she’s still deceitful.

She’s also kind of nuts too – or at least, she’s acting here far, far outside the norms of society. She shouldn’t do what she’s just done, but we know she’s not about to change her mind.

But then we need to consider the less than human bit.

Fiona has had cause to consider the seven deadly sins in the course of the book. She acquits herself of most of them, but says:

It’s the two remaining vices that give me pause.

Ira, wrath. Superbia, pride.

The two sins whose names that night filled my mouth with an awful silence.

Am I a proud and wrathful person? Was it my pride that led me down that footpath alone? Was it the boiling heat of my wrath what enabled me to do to Anselm what few people ever do to another in their lifetime?

And it is not the first time. I own it. These things fall in patterns and I deny neither the pattern nor its dark consequences. My preference for working alone. The bloodshed which so often results.

Anger and pride.

Is that less than human, or more than human? Well, naturally that’s for the reader to decide but, in the course of the book, Fiona has single-handedly – and through her own intelligence, resourcefulness and courage – defeated a particularly nasty kidnap ring. She’s happy to give her own self-summary, in very direct terms:

I confess this.

I am a woman of pride and wrath, and my soul is troubled.

I have asked for peace and peace has not come.

I have sworn at an abbot and rubbed caustic lime in the eyes of a man I almost liked.

I have done these things and I am that woman: prideful, wrathful and without truth.

I am that woman. And I repent of nothing.

So there we have an echo between opening and closing image – not in a literal way, but in the way that a reader will nevertheless intuit:

Opening: Fiona is nuts, deceitful and somewhat less human.

Closing: She’s nuts, deceitful and both simply human (flawed) and magnificently more-than-human (a wrathful angel of justice.) She’s also declaring herself satisfied to be the person she is – implicitly including her terrible-jeans-chat in that declaration. The ‘repent of nothing’ statement includes the violence she has just done to others, and includes her hopelessness with Bev a few hundred pages earlier.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that literal mirroring makes much sense in novels. I mean: if that’s the way things happen to fall out, then fine. Just, I don’t think you have to force that outcome.

Also: I never look back at my opening when I write my ending. The ending just comes as it does. It feels right if it honours the entire preceding narrative. I don’t feel that the closing scene has to curtsey backwards to the opening one.

And also: films are visual and external. The landscapes of the novel can be both external (descriptive of the exterior) and internal (describing the human soul). The result is that the echo in a novel doesn’t have to be as literal as man-lying-against-tree. The echo can be much less directly physical.

All that said …

Yes, I think you probably should feel some echoes between opening and closing. The kind of echoes we’ve just highlighted here. Not too crass. Not too obvious. But there nevertheless. A sense of journey done, distance accomplished. To all those of you who have completed Ultimate Start, I bow to you. Well done. We will be on a new topic next week.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / The Final Polish

This is the last of our six weekly Feedback Fridays where we pick up the theme from Ultimate Start. Today Sam Jordison requests – or, to be honest, demands with menaces – that you, “Give your opening 500 words a final polish using everything you’ve learned.”

The link you need to post your work is here. 

Oh yes, and you do remember that the Ultimate Start is Ultimately Pointless unless you Ultimately complete your novel to a very high standard. I think I know a programme that might Ultimately Help with that.

Til soon.

Harry