Sep 12 2009
Happy endings?Are they all they are cracked up to be?
Are they all they are cracked up to be?
The time is coming closer to say goodbye to my family of characters - set them loose in the mercenary world of the reader? Will their stories be followed to the end, and what sort of ed will it be? Will they get their ‘just desserts’ - will justice be served? Who will end up with who? Will anyone care who ends up with who?
You know perhaps by now, I am at editing point with my first novel. So how best to approach it? Let go and put to rest, at least for a while.
Something we all do - some of us intentionally - is state the obvious. But in all honesty can you say you have never done it? I can’t. So I will say this. You’ve got to come away to go back. You can only appreciate something by stepping away and breathing independently for a while. So how long is a while? How long is a piece of string?
Before I get off at the next stop in central cliche city, the advice when you have a written piece of work, novel, flash fiction or poem is to step back and go back to it with fresh eyes. The same advice can be applied to many a situation also - be it real or fictitious.
There’s this crazy idea that when you go back and look again, you will see where the changes are needed, make them and it’s happy ever after. Second draft heaven….
So I want to look into this Happy ending idea. Is it really what we are all striving for? Even Disney is disgruntled with the idea - after all even Cinderella has another film about what happened afterwards. I haven’t seen it, but it probably ends much in the same vein, maybe with a couple of princes and princesses, playing happily in the castle grounds, knights in shining armour standing discreetly on guard nearby
When you read a novel, do you want it to end happily ever after? do you want to know that these characters you have come to know are going to be okay? Then we can put the book down, start another. Or do you want to be left wondering, just a little bit, about what their future holds?
Do you want to see the present or another layer of wrapping paper?
