Writing a Children's Book

Lesson 7: Climax and Ending.

W.I.P. Section. Writing the End of your Book.

Now you have come to the climax and the end of your w.i.p. When you write the climax, make sure you give the scenes their full weight. If a climax is short, glossed-over or bridged in the most dramatic part, your readers will feel cheated. By now you should know your characters well, so let analytical writing go and put your heart into it.

Most writers feel some emotional attachment for their characters. This varies from writer to writer, and also from book to book. Most agree that characters they have invented resonate far more than “stock” characters from a publisher’s series.

If you don’t feel much attachment for your characters, it need not reflect on your writing. Some people don’t connect with fictional people whether they have invented them or not. However, if you’re the type who laughs, smiles or cries when reading or watching a film, then you probably are a “connector”.

Once the climax is written, you have only to bring the story to a natural conclusion. If you’re not sure about the proper ending note, go back and read the whole story from the beginning. Then imagine yourself reading on. You should have a gut feeling about whether the book should end quickly or rather more gradually.

Don’t feel the need to tie up every end. If the ending is too neat there will be no sense of the characters “going on”.

Where should your characters be at the end of the story? That rather depends on the tone, the viewpoint and the genre and level you have chosen. In “The Orange Outlaw”, the children and Uncle Warren are in a rental car, heading back for the city. Notice the story doesn’t go on to take them back to the apartment, let alone to their separate homes. The mystery is solved, the “reward” (Polly the pony) won, and so the story ends.

In “Alien Dawn”, the end comes when Karen and Jed have been saved from the tide, the stone has gone, and the Suits have left the area. Jed is determinedly not letting Karen tell him about her encounter with the light, but she and Jed’s dad are happily discussing it. Jed, turning his thoughts to practical matters, reflects that if there are two of “them” in his neighbourhood, there must be many, many more… and so he walks in to get the dinner. In a way, this is a low key ending, but the characters have made their emotional journeys and come to a place where they can rest.

“Trinity Street” has a much more open ending. The immediate danger is gone, and so is any chance of returning to SitNor. Tell and Gerhardt are apart, but approaching one another and their future. Emotionally they, too, have come to a point of rest.

When you have written the ending, put the w.i.p. (still so-called because it is still “in progress”) aside until the next lesson.

  1  2  3  4  5  6  7