Q&A: Endings, Recurring Jeopardy, and Omniscient Narrators
The pick of the Itch of Writing Ask Me Anything Chats
Almost every week, usually on a Wednesday, I start an Ask Me Anything chat for Itch of Writing supporters. The way it works is that I start a chat thread some days earlier, and it’s open for all supporters to drop their questions in whenever they want to. Then at the appointed hour, I get stuck in and answer as many as I can in the time, and anyone who’s around is welcome to drop in and join in.
With supporters’ permission, this is the first of an occasional series of posts/newsletters which collect some of the most generally useful questions and answers into a post that can be shared more widely. (I always redact any exact details of individual projects)
Back in December 2024 I celebrated the Itch’s first birthday with two Ask Me Anything chats, and this post draws on the second of them.
If you’d like to be part of our weekly Q&A, just head over to the Itch of Writing Subscribe page and upgrade, and you’ll not only be able to join in, you’ll have the power to start a chat of your own whenever you like.
Q: My question is about the recurring jeopardy of mcs in mystery/thriller series. Some of them have excellent compelling voices (most recently I’ve been reading Maria Adolfsson’s Doggerland series) but mc is repeatedly being imprisoned/injured/abused by an evil character, often in powerfully written scenes. Yet by book 3 I know the mc will survive if not triumph and wonder what all the pain is for? Is it about more than selling the next book? About the reader’s need to affirm their own survival?
Emma: Great question. I do think one reason police precedurals so dominate crime writing (and many professional spies dominate thrillers?) is that the MCs have a professional need to get serially involved in plot after plot. But you’re right, of course - at some level we know they will survive. But our reader-self agrees to forget that, doesn’t it: agrees to pretend what happens is not pre-ordained by the writer - and I'm sure it’s right that it’s partly to enjoy the thrills and spills, and come out at the end: survival as a kind of catharsis.
Having said that, it’s always more satisfying when we sense that the MC may have survived (we always knew they would) but is changed: they end up the book NOT the same as when they started.
John Yorke’s Into the Woods is good on this: he talks about how to some extent series characters like Bond, or Poirot, or the characters in Life on Mars, which he produced: they learnt something about the other’s world/mind in each episode, but for the series to keep going, each next episode had to see them back at the beginning of that learning - just so they wouldn’t evolve to the point that the premise of the series no longer worked.
Original Questioner: Thanks Emma. I think the sense of something learned is important. In some cases though I’m left feeling that there’s something essential — almost masochistic — about the suffering. Maybe I’m reading too many of these things for my own good!
Emma: There is something about the cessation of pain - whether physical, or mental, including fear - which is cathartic. That’s presumably an aspect of masochism? (I actually explored it in the new novel [ETA: The Bruegel Boy], a propos viewing paintings of horrors, such as Hieronymous Bosch). Maybe, in commercial terms, it’s just the clearest way to build a structure towards the Act Four (of five, John Yorke style) ‘Everything’s going utterly wrong’, so that in Act Five they can fight their way back from near-destruction. And physical violence, then dragging yourself out to defeat your enemy nonetheless, is the most basic way to do that.
Q: Omniscient narrators and current trends :-) Occasionally ONs pop up in my writing group. In theory I think ONs have as much right to exist as any other kind of narrator. In practice - in my experience - the ONs I’ve read in draft MSs have been intermittent presences which lack conviction as a narrative technique. With these MSs I’m not sure why an ON is needed. Yet I hesitate to ask the author to beef them up and make them really work for their existence for fear of encouraging a narrative approach which isn't a particularly likely one towards publication. Also, the ON seems to take a lot of skill with psychic distance and POV control to get right. Perhaps the answer is to recommend Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng (which used circles of consciousness brilliantly, in case you haven’t read it). But Celeste Ng is a very skilled author. So is it right to encourage novice authors down the ON path? Obvs they must do what they wish, writing wise, but I read these intermittent ONs and wonder what to say.
Emma: I must get hold of the Celeste Ng - thank you for suggesting it. I’m always on the hunt for that kind of narrator, because like you I really want to know that it’s possible and can be done.
Speaking as a teacher, I wrestle with this dilemma a lot, because I know too many people who were told that they ‘shouldn’t’ try X (writing, or something else), when the possiblity of X was what they were excited about and therefore willing to grapple with. On the other hand, as you say, they may not do it well, or they may do it well but come up against examiners, agents and editors who just think you ‘shouldn’t’ do this.
FWIW, I usually lay out the possibilites: as you say, understanding psychic distance is a huge help in starting to make it work, because it breaks the binary, either-or shackles. Something else which helps is beginning to think of the narrator as a personality and an entity in themselves, which helps to give the further-out psychic distance levels some inviduality and voice.
But in the end, it is true that if a writer is doing something unusual-for-nowadays, which writers before them have done badly, it is possible that the MS will therefore start off on the back foot with *some* agents and editors. The writer does probably have to be doing it better than they’d have to be if they were handling a more usual setup...
Another thing which helps them do it better is maybe being aware of what kind of things so easily go wrong: of the vices that come with the virtues of an omniscient narrator, if you like. All literary techniques have an achilles heel, as it were.
Perhaps rather than overtly encouraging and saying ‘Go for it!’, the trick is to help the writer towards seeing and coping with the aspects which are harder to do well: being aware of the pitfalls. If they still want to do it, then it’s probably the right way to go. If trying to make it work shows them that actually they’re not sure they CAN make it work, then they could retreat to a more usual setup?
Q: My question is about endings - and further to a Note you posted earlier. Why does there seem to be so much emphasis on beginnings & avoiding baggy middles in CW courses/books but so little on endings? As a reader a bad ending can stop me buying any further books by that author. I can find a truly awful ending so disappointing and infuriating. Do you have good resources & thoughts on endings?
Emma: This is a terrific question - and Andrew Wille’s note about his workshop made me realise how much we neglect it. (AW is an ace teacher, by the way - can't recommend him too highly)
This is the only Itch post specifically about endings, but I hope it helps. I’ve made a note to do a post about it here in the future. https://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/2011/02/handclasps-explosions-and-ribbons-and-bows.html
I do think the massive emphasis on the opening - and the three-chapters-submission-package - encourages writers to focus hugely on those, and just not look hard enough at the ending. Certainly anyone writing under the pressure of a contract may also simply have run out of time - or, indeed, steam - and if it’s OK up to there, their editor (also under deadline pressure) may also have a ‘Good enough’ head on.
But I do think that some apparently excellent premises (premisses?) can turn out not to have enough to them to provide for a escalating sense of danger that leads really naturally to the Big Final Showdown, and the resolution, that we all want. Maybe it’s also that we don’t think hard enough about our premise in the first place? Maybe we should think backwards?
I have a writing exercise I sometimes use for teaching, which sets up a little scene involving two characters - and when students have rough-drafted that, I get them to imagine a) that’s the first chapter, b) that’s the middle chapter, i.e. the midpoint, and c) that’s the climactic show-down of the novel. And for each of those possibilities, I get them to sketch out what the novel would be like that, grown out of that scent.
Maybe we should get better at thinking not ‘Where does my story start?’ but ‘How does my story climax?’
Another participant: As a reader I’m a fan of openings which contain some aspect of the ending. Do they generally do this by referring to the theme in some way? Though not in a way which will reveal the theme right at the start.
Emma: I agree - I love feeling that the ending brings me in some way back full-circle, and it’s definintely a very classical way to round off a story: it resolves the problem which the opening set up. (Pride and Prejudice a peerless example of that, and how it embodies the theme which has driven the whole book.) And maybe that’s another thing which can help to make sure an ending doesn’t feel sketchy or rushed, but doesn’t dribble on for ages either: it makes it feel more substantial. Certainly I’ve had stories that I knew how they would end, and worked backwards from there to figure out how it should therefore start.
Another participant: Perhaps writing a prologue and epilogue could also help shape the book. Not necessarily for the final MS but as an exercise, a top-and-tail to see what comes up.
Emma: That’s an interesting idea - thinking about what you might put before, and after ... and then seeing if they should in fact be incorporated into the main narrative. As you’ll know from my posts about Prologues, I do think they’re often an effort to solve a problem which is better solved by other means - but as a tool for thinking, that could be very interesting!
To explore the full conversation click through to the chat itself.