Wonderful coincidences

 

We love coincidences. They’re bound to be unusual and so we receive them with joy. I can quote a few real life ones:

• On a trip to London I got off my train and walked along the platform just as my business partner’s train drew out of the station from the other side of the platform.
• We travelled all the way from Holland to Denmark and visited a colleague of my husband.  His front door was opened by one my former students who was staying with his daughter.
• My PhD supervisor moved from North Wales to the south coast and then back again. Once when retuning to the south coast, where I lived at the time, I followed a haulage firm that specialised in moving between the south coast and North Wales – and the company and my PhD supervisor shared a surname.

However these days if we include such happenings in our stories commissioning editors are known to tut and say “That wouldn’t happen in real life.”

Yet Shakespeare, Dickens and Molière used them a lot. Not only did they get away with it but that is what particularly delights us in their stories. 

It is delightful again in Ann Booth’s Girl with a White Dog. The protagonist’s grandmother has a close connection with the family she befriends as she works with the white dog. And the connection is all about another white dog.

These have to be handled well. You can’t simply have a deus ex machina. It has to be convincing and possible.

Maybe the answer to all of this is that we actually move in quite restricted circles. And that, of course, is an enticing premise for story.  

Image by David Mark from Pixabay 

Endings – getting them right

I’m currently working on my second edit of my fourth Peace Child novel. I call this edit “Is the resolution satisfying?”  The Peace Child novels are YA or new Adult so a somewhat open ending is possible and actually desirable. But “open” doesn’t mean dissatisfying.

A common fault

I note that new writers often do not make their endings satisfying. This is in fact one of the most commonly occurring faults in new writing.  I notice this often as a publisher and as a creative writing teacher in higher education.

If the ending isn’t right the story isn’t right. As a publisher I reject most often because the story is not well-formed. My students get lower marks when their ending is poor as they are not showing that they understand story. 

What constitutes a poor ending

I’ve established three main faults:

1.      Nothing much happens

2.      The ending is melodramatic and improbable

3.      The writer has used a ‘deus ex machina’. This is another improbable ending. This expression refers to Greek drama when a god appears in the story and is whisked on to stage through some clever contraption. The god makes everything all right.  In the 21^st century this often translates as a hurried ending with an unlikely set of circumstances solving all of the issues.  

Where an how open-ended can be fine

Indeed young adults like to have some control over the ending. They like to interpret what has actually happened and what will happen to the protagonist after the story has ended.  Endings for this reader tend to be upbeat but inconclusive.

If the work is part of a trilogy or series, the ending of one book may point to the beginning of the next. Even if some matters are resolved news issues may be raised at this point.

At a book reading of a so-called literary novel, tongue in cheek, I asked the author how one defined a literary novel. He explained that if you turned to the last page before you’d finished the book you didn’t get a spoiler. Well, well. Let’s see.   

How to avoid poor endings

Make sure there is growth in your protagonist. Are they different at the end of the novel / story from how they were at the beginning?

Make sure that throughout the story there is cause and effect and that this is logical.

If you’re a planner, you should know how your story is going to end.  Make sure you work towards that ending all the time.

If you are a panster you should at least know what your story is about.  Keep that in mind all the time.  Maybe have a post-it note stick to your computer screen.

Some examples

The second book of Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses trilogy ends with us not sure whether someone has died or not. Actually though you only have to read the blurb for book three to find out the answer.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles has a surprise ending. We don’t see it coming and we wouldn’t have thought it of the protagonist.  However, you soon realise that all the clues were there. The has been cause and effect.  

Maggie Gee’s Virginia Woolf in Manhattan has a surprising premise; Virginia Wolfe comes back to life and must learn to live in the 21^st Century. The ending provides a plausible explanation for why and how this has happened.        

    

What the Dickens? Some thoughts about the great man’s writing

My admiration

I love Boz. I really do. The proof? As a writer, sure, I want to be as well-known as him. But I also want to write stories that people love as much as they love his. For my sixtieth birthday I asked for the complete works of Dickens. I got them – all loaded onto a Kindle. I now make a point of rereading one - it is mainly rereading – every Christmas and every summer. This summer was The Old Curiosity Shop. Even though I couldn’t completely silence the hacking critical voice of the Creative Writing teacher I actually enjoyed this more than some modern novels I read.

I once read that when Dickens was established as a writer he would spend from eight until two writing. Then he would walk along the shore for three hours. He would spend a couple of hours in a pub from five to seven, chatting to the locals. Then he would dine, often at the homes of others or at his own, with invited guests. I could live with a routine like that. But these days is it rather the gym, Facebook and Twitter, and occasional dinners or other social gatherings with writing friends.     

Apparently also, he would act out the gestures and words of his characters in front of his mirror. I used to find that odd and a sign of his eccentricity. Now, though, I do it myself.

But. And the “but” or the “buts” are quite considerable.

A narrative problem

The Old Curiosity Shop starts off with a fictionalised author meeting Little Nell who is lost. This author-character also poses a mystery which is never quite solved. He likes to walk at night. Well so does Nell’s grandfather but we soon find out why: he is trying to win a fortune for Nell by gambling. We are not so sure about the stranger. The mystery is intriguing and this creates a good introduction to the main characters. But it isn’t going to work unless the narrator is a key figure too. He clearly isn’t. If Boz were a student in my creative writing group I would have advised against this. Possibly he realises his error; he decides to allow the characters to tell their own story and switches to a third person narrative. And maybe we need to remember that word processors were not available then.  

Characters large than life

The BBC’s The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff may seem to mock but I think it laughs with Dickens not at him. Monty Python, Mr Bean and Blackadder may appear to be inventions of the 20^th and the 21^st centuries but actually Dickens was way ahead of them. Look at all those characters whose names suit them so much: Noddy Boffin, Sally Brass, Bumble, Louisa Chick, Chuzzlewit, Bob Cratchit, Dedlock, Fezziwig, Flintwinch, Uriah Heep, Krook, Nubbles, Quilp,  Smallweed,  Snodgrass, Squeers, Steerforth, Dick Swiveller, Polly Toodle. Their names and their behaviours match. They amuse us and may even make Bean and co. seem rather tame. Dickens is most enjoyable when we understand his irony. That he also maintains the natural and rounded characters is genius.

Dei ex machinae and other dirty tricks

But here’s another problem. Come on, Boz. There are just too many lucky coincidences. Nell and her grandfather just happen to bump into the school master who had been so kind to him. There is a job vacancy for Nell just at the time she arrives at the village with the schoolmaster and her grandfather. Swiveller inherits a huge amount of money just in time.

I won’t tolerate this sort of plotting in my students’ work, I avoid it myself and I and several other creative writing academics condemn Dan Brown for doing it.

Yet here it seems to work. Dickens almost has the pantomime in his stories and a little of the fairy-tale. Is this even where his greatness lies? And perhaps precisely so because he combines it with giving the reader a sense of real life through his detailed descriptions and having key characters who are rounded and believable?

Dickens as popular fiction

Now English Literature students in higher education study his work. However, his novels were considered to be popular fiction at the time he wrote them. Indeed, Jo in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women admits to sneaking off to read a book that she thought wasn’t quite as good as some of the others a particular author had produced. She had to read in secret because this type of novel wasn’t quite approved of in her home. Which novel was it? Dombey and Son!

Despite all of this or maybe because of it, Dickens remains a very fine storyteller and a great creator of memorable characters.