Cinderella, Mount Doom, and the Plot Dragons

By T.K. Thorne

If, like me, you break out in hives at the word “outline,” plot dragons can lie in wait before you get to the end of your book.  But knowing the ending, even the first draft of an ending, is critical to driving your story.  Two things can help you shape an ending—location and character.

Terrain can be a constriction that limits your plot choices or it can suggest opportunities. Your story may require a specific place or type of location. JRRTolkien (Lord of the Rings) had a super-powerful ring that needed to be destroyed. That meant either a very hot forge or nature’s forge—lava. Lava was definitely the more dramatic choice, so he needed a volcano environment for his climax scene. The trip to Mount Doom pushed the entire plot of the trilogy.

Using a location that is already familiar territory requires less description at a point when you need to focus on what is happening. For her climax scene, Cinderella is home. No need to rehash the general layout or the characters. We can focus on what decisions characters make and what happens physically and emotionally. In Lord of the Rings, the reader has never seen Mount Doom, but by the time Frodo and Sam get there, it feels familiar from the previous references. We don’t need many clues to imagine the bubbling lava, the smell of burning sulfur, and the stark rocky terrain.

Another way to approach the ending is to look at your character arc.  How does she change and how can you show that? Cinderella is a retiring, quiet, obedient girl, but she casts caution to the wind to go to the ball. When the prince appears, she defies her sisters to put her foot in the glass slipper. In Lord of the Rings, Frodo faithfully bears the burden of the ring to the edge of the cliff, but at the last moment, he can’t overcome the ring’s power. At the same time, that power is the ring’s doom.  Tolkien made his ending work in a complex way that satisfies.

Make sure the central character plays an integral part in the solution, either by wits or bravery—or, like Frodo, by failing—but not by coincidence or employing a contrived solution. Cinderella’s decision to attend the ball and be her true self caused the prince to fall in love and search for her. Sure, the fairy godmother could have poofed them together, out of reach of the clutches of her conniving family, but the reader would have felt cheated. Your ending needs to be surprising or, at least, not completely foreseen by the reader and, at the same time, inevitable in the sense that it needs to arise out of what has come before. The reader should say, Oh yeah, I should have seen that coming when Cindy lost her shoe. When Gollum appears at the end of Tolkien’s trilogy and grabs the ring, we are surprised, but it is not contrived. Gollum’s actions are entirely in keeping with his character and previous behavior.

Use location and character to help shape your ending as soon as possible to outwit the plot dragons, keep out of a writing lava pit, and have a happily-ever-after writing your book.

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T.K.Thorne’s childhood passion for storytelling deepened when she became a police officer in Birmingham, Alabama. “It was a crash course in life and what motivated and mattered to people.” When she retired as a captain, she took on Birmingham’s business improvement district as the executive director before retiring again to write full time. T.K. speaks on life lessons--how she accidentally became a police officer, didn't end up in a space capsule, and tackled historical novels about unnamed women in two of the oldest and most famous stories on earth, as well as writing a book from the case investigators' perspectives about solving the most infamous church bombing in Civil Rights history. Her writing has garnered several awards, including ForeWord Review Magazine's 2009 "Book of the Year" for Historical Fiction for her debut novel, NOAH'S WIFE. The New York Post’s “Books You Should Be Reading” list featured her first non-fiction book, LAST CHANCE FOR JUSTICE which details the investigation of the 1963 Sixteenth Street church bombing case. Rave reviews have followed her newest novel about the unnamed wife of Lot, ANGELS AT THE GATE, which won the IBPA's Benjamin Franklin Award for historical fiction and an IPPY award. Her screenplay in the film "Six Blocks Wide" was a semi-finalist at the international "A Film for Peace Festival" in Italy. Her website is TKThorne.com, where you can read more about her books and sign up for a Newsletter with inside info on her research and adventures. She blogs there, as well, and loves to hear from readers. T.K. writes at her mountaintop home near Birmingham, often with two dogs and a cat vying for her lap.

A Southern Writer’s View of Go Set a Watchman

By C. Hope Clark

The reviews of Go Set a Watchman have been all over the place, a lot of them tinged by the fact Harper Lee is elderly, in assisted living, and possibly not 100 percent aware of her new notoriety. But I just want to look at the book, the writing, and its effect on me.

I – Loved - It

I am a child of the deep South. Born in Mississippi. Reared in Mississippi then South Carolina. My parents are Southern. My grandparents, great-grandparents, and however many greats were Southern back to the late 17^th century. My mother grew up the sixth of six kids in rural Mississippi on a cotton farm. As a small child visiting the farm in the summer, I recall begging for a cotton sack so I could go out with the hands in the field to pick my grandfather's cotton. My grandmother sewed a miniature floral sack that fit over my shoulder, a version of the white ones the adults used. It didn’t take me long to understand the hard work and the work ethic of those workers. I remember admiring them for being so grownup and efficient, yet a tad distraught about watching them sweat once I gave up the effort and sat in the shade.

I had a sweet aunt who lived in Jackson, Mississippi who could've stepped into a character in the book The Help. She employed a lovely lady who worked for her for decades, in a white uniform. As a child I looked up to her as someone who ran the house and understood what any child needed. We won't get into the pros and cons of that arrangement.

I recall aging a few more years and feeling like Jean Louise does in Go Set a Watchman. My generation was remarkably more modern than the previous one and the one before that, and I recall the differing schools of thought regarding race just as is presented in this book. Some of the beautiful people in my life had quasi-racial views that I recall labeling as outdated, and I recall feeling in my heart that I was glad my generation would move this issue forward to new ground. But after a hard look at my family history I realized that each generation handled that subject differently, with each one advancing a step or two as the culture of the time allowed.  Mine wasn’t the only generation trying to be progressive. Mine didn’t get it all right either.

And this is what makes for remarkable writing . . . chapters that make our own experiences blend in with the fiction until we can hardly tell the difference.

The opening of Watchman wasn’t anything to be excited about if you listen to the how-to gurus of today. Chapters One and Two did little more than establish the time, setting and introduce us to the characters. The disadvantage that Watchman had to overcome, which was not what Harper Lee could ever foresee, was the reader having a preconceived impression about Scout/Jean Louise and Atticus. However, I’d never read To Kill a Mockingbird. I’m reading it now, but I’m glad I read Watchman without any preconceived notions as to how the characters ought to behave. But while the opening wasn’t dramatic, it caught the reader. No word was wasted. Each word mattered. Each sentence built precisely on the one before until we realized we were two chapters in, eager to see where this story went because if the writing was so beautiful with nothing happening, how fantastic would this be when the plot hits the fan?

I’m a dialogue fanatic. Striking dialogue rocks because conversation inserts energy into the players who in turn define the story or plot. In the case of Watchman, dialogue also meant internal monologue, or Jean Louise’s thoughts. We were her. We got angry. We felt the pain in our heart at her disappointment in humanity in her beloved hometown. We felt the conflict of home versus New York, how one didn’t understand the other yet she could not one-hundred percent side with either.

I’m also a strong believer in setting as character. Again, as a child of the South, I’m always on the lookout for the frauds who feign Southern. It’s difficult to write about a region you do not intimately know. But I smelled the biscuits, tasted the too-strong coffee, and choked at the overdone perfume clinging to hair and hats at the coffee clutch. The old-fashioned furniture, the cool water during an evening dip in the lake, cigarette smoke during a time when lighting up was as second nature as tucking hair behind an ear.

Detail after detail. This story was not complicated . . . simple actually. A girl comes home to be disappointed in the experience – the painful changes that occurred atop the ignorant struggle to remain the same. All done with elementary word usage. Deep character, deft strokes of setting, and dialogue to make you almost look up and hunt for the voices. A combination that stirs us into anger or tears, just because we read a page in a book.

Harper Lee wrote this book so intensely as to make people of today uncomfortable. I’m actually happier that she released it now, when its message is being felt differently that it would have been if published during the period To Kill a Mockingbird hit the bookstores. She snared the time period, more colorful when read today than back then. The political arguments were intense and honest. The coffee clutch party was pretentious and stifling, accented by a huge degree of internal monologue that I’d be afraid to use, that Harper Lee used with relish. Loved the aunt's old-fashioned ways of corsets, dresses, and hats in public compared to Jean Louise's slacks and cigarettes – the contrasts subtle when presented, but loud in a big picture way.

And I adored the ending.

No, Atticus was not painted a racist like some profess, but should be considered more of a realist. To me, he was no different than what I’ve read thus far in To Kill a Mockingbird. He was part of change, but recognized it as a difficult and complicated changing of the guard. Change is painful and is never handled with a clean break regardless of what people want, and he chose to remain in the middle of it to better understand and help with the transition. Sitting across the table from a racist did not make him one. Yet the ending rousted readers to challenge their beliefs, quite evident from the reviews on Amazon, and across the blogosphere. As an author, that would just make me quiver with satisfaction.

This book is so real about humanity and change that it stings, yet the words are delicately chosen, the prose stunning. The book’s earned a place on my top shelf of books, alongside Prince of Tides, The Stand, Lord of the Rings, The Paris Wife, and The Lewis Man. It's so refreshing to read something that doesn't fight so hard to be PC.

Now I'm reading To Kill a Mockingbird. I wish Miss Lee had written more. Lee speaks of a subject we're afraid to talk about without yelling and picking a fight, and she enables us to slow down and study it with a more level head because that raw part of our culture took place a long, long time ago. There has to be some omniscient hand in Watchman not being found for decades, as if we needed the discussion now more than ever.

Go Set a Watchman is beautiful literature with a serious message, showing us how life isn’t simple, isn’t perfect, and isn’t readily fixed when broken. But it’s best to remain in that world, amongst its flawed and struggling people, in order to make it better. In other words, I wish I were still in that story. That’s the epitome of great writing.

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C. Hope Clark writes mysteries set in humid, beautiful South Carolina. She adores setting as character and colorful Southern players, and she continues those strongest traits of her writing in her new release, Edisto Jinx, the second in The Edisto Island Mysteries, released October 1 from Bell Bridge Books. Learn more about Hope at www.chopeclark.com and about her mission to assist writers atwww.fundsforwriters.com . The Carolina Slade Mysteries, Bell Bridge Books and The Edisto Island Mysteries, Bell Bridge Books