Here's Where The Story Ends (WisCon 32 panel)

146 Here's Where The Story Ends

The Craft & Business of Writing Science Fiction & Fantasy • Saturday, 2:30-3:45 P.M. • Wisconsin

Maureen McHugh's novels, some say, don't have proper endings; others think that since life goes on past the end of the novel, the ending's a matter of the author's choice. We'll discuss where to end a novel, how much denouement to give the characters, and other questions of wrapping things up.

M: Jim Munroe, Rachel Swirsky, Maureen McHugh, Paul Stevens, Lyda Morehouse

Transcripts and Notes

Notes by Janice Dawley:

Munroe: What do the panelists consider IMproper endings?

Stevens: something that DOESN’T end. There is an implicit promise in fiction that you are going to resolve at least one of the major plot elements. Don’t cop out on the reader.

McHugh: she believes that if something promises to deliver X, Y, and Z, and it does that (like many TV sitcoms), it’s FINE, but doesn’t really satisfy her. “I’m sure that will come as a shock to people who’ve read my fiction”.

Morehouse: going off on a completely different angle. There is a difference between a successful and a satisfying ending. She had an epiphany when she read Charlotte’s Web aloud to her son and realized that the book ends twice, once when Charlotte dies, and again in the spring when Wilbur gets a chance to grieve over her again. She realized that she had always written her books to stop at the end, and is surprised that no one complained. (“Hm… that might be why my books are out of print…”)

McHugh says that that’s the difference between a plot ending and a thematic ending. The second ending is what the book is all about: renewal, and Wilbur not being turned into pork chops.

McHugh: the ending of Snow Crash completely finishes the plot, but is quite unsatisfying.

Munroe: what motivates people to end stories without traditional closure?

Morehouse: story starts when the status quo is broken, and it ends with something slightly different. She loves Maureen's story “Ancestor Money” and offers to pay her a quarter for it. (It isn’t supposed to still be online; SciFi never bothered to take it down.) She loves that the untraditional ending is present in the main character’s description from the very first line.

McHugh re: The Lovely Bones, which she describes as “very compelling”. “Twelve-stepping. [...] It’s a very American impulse, to be always improving. It’s not the end, it’s the process. When you’re dead, do you kind of get to quit that?”

Munroe: short story endings vs. novel endings. Different stakes? Cultural difference between conventional literature and SF when it comes to endings. Morehouse thinks that there actually are a lot of “poetic endings” in modern SF short stories.

McHugh: the shift in endings that happened with the modernists. The epiphany, the shift of perspective. (Joyce’s Dubliners as an example.) Now it is very common. She says this is easy to get away with in short stories, because readers will only have lost an hour reading them and won’t get too mad.

The problem of serial storytelling: each unit should have some kind of self-contained story, but you don’t want each book to be a repeat of previous ones either. Morehouse on the Stephanie Plum books: “I like them, but the main character never seems to progress. By book 11, I’m ready to give up because I want her to just choose one of the guys, already!”

Swirsky mentions television, and how it has in general moved more toward story arcs and away from mere repetition. Babylon 5 as example. McHugh says a counterexample is a show she likes a lot: the X-Files. “Season 5. Mulder says, 'I think it’s a chupacabra,' and Scully says, 'Mulder, there is no such thing as a chupacabra.' What?! It’s been FIVE YEARS and she hasn’t realized that he is ALWAYS right?!”

How does cleverness factor in to the success of an ending? The “twist ending”. This can often go bad. McHugh talks about O. Henry, and how there are only about 5 of his stories that are taught in school. He wrote over a thousand, and most are unreadable because of their crappy twist endings.

Janet Lafler in audience says that she loves open endings, and really dislikes what a friend of hers calls “brick wall endings” beyond which you have no inclination to think about the characters. Returning to the example of Casablanca, she says some things are ending and others are beginning.

Henry in audience says that different endings often appeal to different age groups.

An audience member asks when writers decide what the ending will be? When they first start writing? At the end? Responses are various, but Munroe says he thinks most people are much more likely to rewrite the beginning than the end. There is nodding agreement.

McHugh says that when she was in China she couldn’t listen to Chinese classical music (as opposed to pop music) because it didn’t have a beginning, middle and end for her. An audience member later says that a lot of readers have that reaction to McHugh’s fiction. She specifically asks about the end of Mission Child, where we never find out what has happened in Janna’s home village. She wonders if McHugh knows what happened and didn’t write about it, or if she doesn’t care.

McHugh: “I don’t know what happened where _I_ come from. I mean that quite genuinely. I have an innate distrust of solutions.” She is not sure she would like her own fiction if she read it. She writes about things she wants the answers to, which means she doesn’t KNOW the answers, and often doesn’t at the end. But she feels more comfortable.

McHugh: “When a book ends, no matter how it ends, it’s time to start another book.”