DAGGER is coming along. Slowly. Usually, when I get close to the end of a book (say, around 75,000 words), it comes in a rush, not because I'm so excited about it (except that I'm always excited at the prospect of finishing the blasted thing) but because the ending is fairly inevitable. When I start a book, China has a universe of choices. She can do practically anything--well, not quite. She can't have an affair, for instance. She can't rob a bank.
But the minute I start putting words on the page, the options begin to close. By the end of the first chapter, the universe of the book has been reduced to a galaxy. The world is still China's oyster, but it's narrowing down fast. Once past the middle, the options have been reduced exponentially, and the last ten thousand words is a working-out of the consequences--the coming-to-terms, if you will--with all the choices made by all the action characters (as opposed to the "color" characters, who function more like setting) earlier in the book. The world is narrowed down to a continent, to a region, to a few blocks of Pecan Springs. This always feels like a kind of inevitability to me. It's the sort of feeling you have when you've been working for months on a giant board puzzle and you're down to the last two dozen pieces. Things "fall together." It all "fits" very vicely, as if it were planned that way from the very beginning by some omnipotent story goddess in the sky.
Which always leaves me with a feeling of unease. Life isn't like that, and as novels (yes, even mysteries, that most conventionally-patterned fictional form) become more like life, the artificiality of the "all-wrapped-up-and-tied-with-a-bow" ending bothers me. A lot. The day in my life when everything is all concluded is the day I have died and "the end" has been written to the story of my life. And even then, there will be all sorts of loose ends: bills I haven't paid, emails I haven't written, I-love-yous that haven't been said. Life is untidy. Life is full of unpuzzled riddles.
That's one of the reasons why I'm tending more and more these days to the sub-plot that isn't concluded. One story works its way to the inevitable conclusion. The criminal is caught and entered into the criminal justice system (although we never know whether the jury might acquit, or the defendant might appeal a guilty verdict, or the convicted killer might live for thirty more years on death row). The mystery is resolved, the questions answered, the riddle unraveled. It's all inevitable. It's all foregone, from the very first page. If you want to see justice done and loose ends tied, you have it.
But if I've built a bridge to another story, there's an openness about the ending. I like that. There's a promise (for me) of another story yet to be told. And in that story China and any of the other characters involved have a universe of choices, not yet narrowed to a galaxy, a planet, a continent, a few square blocks. I have a year to wonder how that's all going to work out, before I start the next book.
Which is why I like book-bridging plots. They're risky--reviewers always like to find something wrong, and an open-ended ending is an invitation to criticism--and I like risk. They offer a greater challenge, and having written fifteen books in a series, I'm ready for anything that changes the equation, even a little. And they're more like life, which is fine with me.
Back to DAGGER this morning, to work out more of the inevitabilities, tie up more loose ends, unriddle more puzzles. And contemplate the plot thread I'm leaving untied, deliberately, as an invitation to my imagination--and to yours--to play, to create, to wonder, to be surprised by something that doesn't feel completely inevitable.
Reading Note, from Room to Write, by Bonni Goldberg. Endings are the hardest parts to write. This is because they are false. Nothing truly ends; it transforms. Still, the novel must have a last page, the poem a final line. So it is helpful when writing ends to remember that you are really constructing a passageway, a birth canal, a place where the writer lets go and the work becomes part of the reader's consciousness, understanding, and imagination.