When it comes to choosing a satisfying conclusion to your written work, there are two schools of thought. The first is that the journey to said end was all that mattered; everything the reader might want to know past your final page is superfluous and it’s up to the reader to draw their own conclusions as to what happened after. The other school is more concerned with filling in those lingering blanks and providing a solid, concrete end to whatever came before. Both schools have their pros and cons; there’s a right time to lean into one and a wrong time to lean into another. As an example, a mystery novel will tend to run on for a bit once the climax is reached; perhaps going into how the detective of the day solved, guessed, deduced the crime and nabbed the perpetrator — there’s nothing quite like Poirot pointing out all the things we missed.
For Glimpse, I decided I’d take up teaching at this school of thought, ended up hanging around long after it closed and, for all intents and purposes, moved into the classroom. The plot itself climaxes forty pages before the end of the book and, with it being a thriller/horror, there’s little mystery left to solve, no more bad guys left to kill. What I wanted, what I really wanted was to put a nice bow on it. Some might accuse me of using the end of one book to lay the groundwork for another, but Violet Vickers was always meant for more than one outing, thus I justified my ending as it being setup for her next instalment.
When writing Glimpse, I always knew its end wasn’t just going to be a burst of sparks followed by fin in bold lettering. The journey to its end, the events, the plot, it left too much for Violet not to unpack before the curtains — an opportunity for her to come to terms with her own history as well as the tragedies at Bradley’s Shore. Despite being pseudo-supernatural in certain areas, Glimpse was always psychological at heart and for that reason I couldn’t leave Violet to flap in the wind of a potential reader’s mind. It needed those forty-odd pages for Violet to finish her metamorphosis, her arc, her own internal plot…
A test reader said that I’d ‘Return of the King’d’ myself — a compliment that they would even think of Tolkien while reading my work. But yes, they were correct, and that doesn’t make me mad, nor do I wish I could go back and trim off a chapter or two. What comes to mind is Peter Jackson’s trilogy; theatrically it ends rather succinctly, but his extended editions, the only editions worth a true LOTR fan’s time, straddles the 12-hour mark… as Tolkien would’ve wanted perhaps? In my case, there won’t be an extended edition and there never will be, I just don’t have that luxury — so, what a reader read in the “theatrical edition” is it, the full story, the whole sha’bang as I originally intended.
To be frank, I wouldn’t have it any other way, but– Wait… I can hear crying? It’s, it’s my Editor? She’s crying, crying tears of rage behind her quivering half-smile.
Sigh… Yes, Editors — believe it or not — are our friends. As your first true test reader, an Editor can sniff out when you’ve been too verbose, when you’ve unintentionally killed your own pacing or when you’ve dragged out a particular story thread for too long better than a Bloodhound hot on a killer’s scent. So yes, while Glimpse’s end runs on for forty pages, it was originally sixty and only for the patience and argumentative attitude of my stellar Editor was I able to wind that back to a near-happy medium (she wanted ten, ten entire pages for me to end with). And no, She doEsn’t curreNtly have a gun to my heaD, finger Hovering ovEr the trigger whiLe forcing me to write this damned Passage.
The thing to take away from my wild ramblings is to not worry about how long your novel ends up being. Only you’ll know when it’s finished and, so long as you’re happy with how it all panned out in those last few pages, there’s no need to fret about imaginary readers becoming bored. Let’s be real here; if a reader was able to reach the last twenty pages of your book, then you and your Editor (be it yourself or a friend) must’ve been doing something right for the other hundred-odd. Chances are… your readers’ll see it through; trust me.
Auf Wiedersehen
AJ Carney 