The conclusion of a book, a novel or a short story is generally like the closing of a camera lens, the cap coming on. You’ve watched such and such for a period of time, given the reader a view into their lives and now it fades to black.
I don’t think of it as death. In my fiction work I don’t have a lot of death, it’s more of something that is inevitable, I want to examine a period of time and then end there.
But characters linger. when they linger then I know that the tale isn’t finished. Sometimes that means for a short story that there’s a book in there or that the story itself isn’t finished.
I’m working on a short book titled Puzzle. It’s structured around days but then I realized that I could play with Time itself, that if I were mixing ethnic perspectives of time there weren’t just 7 Days. There’s also Yesterday, Tomorrow and Today as viable time frames. Now that gives me 10 “chapters” so I’ve got structure. I wanted mostly nameless voices to talk about the clash between two families, a clash of love and of hate, and envy. So far so good. Then I needed a child, a mix from the two, to be the cementing link between them. Then an affair between the matriarch of one and the patriarch of the other. Still good.
I wrote, hand wrote, then typed up about 150 pages and then sort of just looked at it for awhile. I liked it but it didn’t want to do anything. No one was talking much anymore. Not the granddaughter, the daughter, the matriarch. Then the patriarch told me what happened from his side of things. Hmmm, interesting. It was actually different than what someone had said in the beginning. Who was telling the truth?
Then an old Indian shaman told what had happened in-between the days and I got to see why everyone had a differing perspective. But it felt like there was something being covered up. That a simple illegitimate child wasn’t really what was the crux of the conflict. How could a child who was illegitimate, the whole town aware of it, be so profane? Then I realized that one sister was actually standing in front of another sister—-there was a double voice going on. But the second sister’s voice, no sound, everyone else filled in what happened, what she went through, what she said and what she did. Interesting, a powerful voice that made no sound. A voice that made no sound.
Another piece to the……puzzle!
In finishing the current behemoth titled Stay, 600 pages handwritten—-twelve 50 page legal pads plus 125 pages already typed——I finally finished the last pages a couple of days ago. I’ve got about 100 pages left to be typed in, I’ve got three or four cover concepts in place to try out on the proof copies and then we go through the editing process and I get to the really real end, the end point.
Whew.
But….
There’s a couple of spaces, gaps really that need to be filled in. Would the protagonist, a libertine, get married so quickly? I need to throw in a little more “time”, simmering to the relationship that turns to marriage. A date or two, an argument. Make it a bit more real. Ok, that’s easy.
Then I want a scene or two further beyond the end, so the end, an explanation of how children are adopted or perhaps a parable for traveling between parallel universe, I can push a few more pages, slip in a couple of scenes of interaction with the children, they have small peeping voices in my head. It will be more “natural” that way. I could hear the parents talking to the children, interacting with them so I knew it didn’t “end-end” right there in my last handwritten scene.
Will these people be alive after these books?
In Stay I have a character that may or may not be dimension hopping. In another forthcoming polylogy work, Myriad, which deals with all manner of sci fi multiverse stuff someone who could be the character from Stay appears in and is helped to get back to his home dimension/world… with two children. I liked writing that outcome, that hidden story, into another work as a possibility from a work where I wanted the answer to be vague, oblique, fuzzy about the whole—-is this character consciously crossing dimensions or not?
In a way the character from Stay gave me a link into the character in Myriad who then recognizes they might be a doppelganger of another character in Stay and they have all had some mentoring by yet a third (fourth) character who originates in another book Hush but appears as directing one character in Stay and challenging another in Myriad.
I realize I was playing with a theme throughout at least 3 different novels and that’s kind of fun because then——wait for it—- a character from Hush appears in a a fourth novel S at that tail/tale end. I think all of these voices are like a pantheon of characters, and of course i have other work that don’t have these linkages but sometimes good, strong characters linger at the end of a work and if you can think of your work as a panorama then you can answer a question in another work, catch up in a third and I’ll probably touch on others in passing, on a TV screen, in a newspaper article, something to suggest this is all occurring in the same multiverse and there’s an omni connection.
Characters to me are like spirits that you capture in a snapshot but still move on, through other works.
But characters linger. when they linger then I know that the tale isn’t finished. Sometimes that means for a short story that there’s a book in there or that the story itself isn’t finished.
I don’t think of it as death. In my fiction work I don’t have a lot of death, it’s more of something that is inevitable, I want to examine a period of time and then end there.
The conclusion of a book, a novel or a short story is generally like the closing of a camera lens, the cap coming on. You’ve watched such and such for a period of time, given the reader a view into their lives and now it fades to black.
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