Christopher Pike's Writing Advice

Chapter Eleven: Writing A Great Ending

I have spoken at length about how to start a book. Equally important is how you finish a book. When you leave a movie theater...what do you carry with you? The ending. In fact, if the ending is bad you'll walk away thinking the whole movie was awful. It's the same when it comes to any book you read. First impressions are crucial; final impressions can be killers.

How do you plot a great ending to your novel? That's a complex question that requires more than one answer. You can surprise your readers with a major twist. Beginning writers love major twists. More experienced writers are wary of them because it's rare that a well plotted novel can be turned upside down in the last few pages. I've done it myself but only a few times.

One example was an adult book I wrote called, "The Blind Mirror." On the last page of that book, everything the reader thought he knew was wrong. I pulled it off, I think, but barely.

 Why are major twists so difficult? Because they have to make sense. They have to be logical. And you have to play fair with the reader. You have to give him -- or her -- enough information to guess the twist before you reveal it. At the end you can't suddenly bring in a character out of left field and say, "Here's your man. Here's your killer. Be careful with him. He's not even human!"

I know the above example sounds silly but it's amazing how many authors -- even experienced ones -- try to get away with such plot devices. I have an old rule I made up that has largely kept me out of trouble when it comes to story climaxes. Indeed, this rule may be the single most important piece of advice I can give a wannabe writer. It specifically applies to thrillers but I'll show how it actually can apply to any genre.

The rule is simple. It goes as follows...

Your villain must be unique. And everyone of your villains must have a unique Achilles Heel.

Let me give an example. Twenty years ago I wrote an adult horror novel called, "The Cold One." The Cold One was the offspring of a woman who had been in a coma since the moment she had been impregnated -- since she had first conceived her child. I'd read about such children being born to comatose women and I thought it would form a clever basis for a new horror mythology.

Think about it. Imagine a fetus developing for nine months without ever being fed a single natural living breath, growing only from air given to it by a machine. How would such a child be different than other children?  What would it crave? I let my imagination run wild, and I came up with a wild idea...

Rather than having a vampire that needed blood to survive, I invented one that craved the living breath of normal human beings. Naturally, I made it so that whenever The Cold One fed from someone, she invariably changed them into a creature similar to herself. I made her very powerful, physically, very detached emotionally. She honestly didn't know what she was, or why she was different from everyone else.

Yet one man did. The man who had semi-raped her mother and then struck her over the head and let her fall into the sea where she drowned -- but did not die -- because the man was a doctor and was able to keep her alive with CPR until she could be brought to a hospital and hooked up to a machine.  And so The Cold One was born -- nine months later. 

However, I had a problem. I had made The Cold One so powerful it was virtually impossible to kill. How could I destroy it so that my audience would be satisfied? I reflected on my own rule. Every villain must have a unique Achilles Heel...

Then I had the answer.

The Cold One wasn't really alive. The only thing keeping it moving was the living breath of it's living mother, who was still in a coma in a clinic on the other side of the country. The only way to kill The Cold One -- my monster -- was to disconnect the air tube that was pumping air into it's mother's shriveled body.

However -- and this was a big HOWEVER -- the man who had put the woman in the coma was the only one who knew of her connection to The Cold One. To kill the woman, the mother, to cut off her air supply, he would have to accept responsibility for murdering her. Of course it would have been silly to think he could just cut off her air and walk out of the hospital -- like in a Hollywood movie.  An alarm would sound. No, I thought, he'd have to take a nurse hostage with a knife or a gun and disconnect the woman's air tube and wait five minutes until her body died -- permanently.

That was the key to the whole climax. It provided me with a logical means to kill the monster I'd created by using the Cold One's Achilles Heel. And it forced the man to pay for what he had done to the woman -- since he would automatically be arrested for holding the nurse hostage.

The point of this lengthy example is to demonstrate two aspects to a climax. There's the physical climax and there's the emotional climax. You have to have both. Just having your hero defeat your villain isn't enough. Your hero must overcome something inside -- an inhibition, a fear.  He or she must complete their emotional arc before your book ends.

Your villain doesn't have to be a literal monster. It can be a disease, an addiction, an unhealthy relationship. Villains and monsters come in all shapes and sizes but whatever form you choose, make sure it's unique, and give it at least one weakness, a fatal flaw. Then make sure your hero conquers it in an original fashion, using that flaw, and that he or she grows in the act.  That is another one of my rules. To satisfy your readers, your hero must be changed by the events of your story.