WHERE DO YOU END YOUR STORY?

Anne Gallagher has an intriguing post : "Where do you start your story?"

http://piedmontwriter.blogspot.com/2010/12/where-do-you-start-your-story.html

One of the criticisms of the last LORD OF THE RING movie was that it appeared Peter Jackson couldn't decide where to end the movie

and tricked the audience into thinking they were watching the end, only to be moved to yet another false ending.

By the time the movie did end, many were grumbling about the whole experience.

Are we authors like that?

Do we linger too long, milking the afterglow of the story. Or do we end too abruptly once the crisis is averted or overcome?

Many teachers of creative writing stress not to begin writing until you have the ending clearly in mind

so that you can head to it with skillful foreshadowing and firm precision, not meandering until the end just comes to you.

I think that approach also helps you to know when to begin.

If you know the ending with its transformation of the main character, then you know where to start your story ...

and you get a sense of how to bring your protagonist to his destination.

What mood do you want the reader to leave your novel holding in his heart?

Hope. Despair. Laughter. Resolve in the face of dissolution.

Or a mix of all of the above?
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FIELDS OF THE NIGHT

Among scars, I am the fresh wound,

Among days, the one that never comes,

Among the bones you find on the beach
the one that sings was mine.

- Lisa Mueller


Fields of the night.

When that midnight of the soul blankets us in the silent, still hours, we explore them.

Some fields are deep valleys. Others are hills winding up into the mists of memory.

Anne Gallagher has written an insightful post on the writer's advice to write what you know :

http://piedmontwriter.blogspot.com/2010/11/write-what-you-know.html

What I know.

I know a good friend was buried today,

a victim of this city's callousness and unconcern. This city has a way of burying its mistakes.

But life mishandled is much like a snake grabbed roughly by the tail. It has a way of turning around and biting you for your arrogance.

The guilty in this case will, soon or late, find that out.

What I know.

Like Raymond Chandler knew his Los Angeles, I know this city in which I live.

Its sprawling expanse cups a beautiful rippling lake which it poisons daily with the petro-chemical plants bordering it much like Mordor did Middle Earth.

If you look up, an eye-aching blue sky will take your breath away. In more ways than one.

It has absorbed the poisonous fumes from endless stacks for so long, breathing the air in a course of the day is like smoking four cigarettes.

City and state politicians swear all is safe. The national newspapers cite the city as capitol of Cancer Alley which runs along the Gulf Coast.

The city is a strange meld of something Tennessee Williams and Upton Sinclair might have written in a joint affair --

emphasis on Tennessee Williams.

One of my older friends was once the "disciplinarian" of the local Hells Angels. And so I have seen a side of the city few have. He was also once a E.M.T. for the one ambulance service here.

Often he told me of dragging into the center, covered in blood, too weary from the many calls to immediately clean up.

He would turn on the TV in the break room and hear the local news proclaim the police stating that all was normal.

He laughed, "I suddenly knew their definition for normal : four car accidents, two shootings, and one fatality."

I have a Non-Aggression Pact with the city.

I don't mess with it. And it considers me too small to notice.

It still possesses great beauty. But like ugly scars criss-crossing a beautiful woman's face, progress slashes away at it.

Terrible poverty and bleak living conditions often within blocks of opulent mansions. The poor turning upon themselves. The oblivious rich attending sprawling, ornate churches.

Business owners committing suicide on the premises of the local casinos after having lost all. Silence on the TV and on the radio.

Jokes among the citizens that the logo of the local TV news is the three monkeys covering eyes, ears, and mouth. The Plants and the casinos feed the city's treasuries.

The city fathers deny that the Cancer rates, ruined lives, and closed businesses even exist.

Then why stay?

It is the city in which I spent my teenage years. All the friends I made, I made here. Here is where I grew to know my mother as one adult knows another.

(If you are wondering : not this city but New Orleans was where I spent my days with Katherine.)

This is the city in which my best friend lives. The common people here have a zest for living that I have seldom met elsewhere. If they hate you, you know it. If they are your friend, they always have your back -- even when it would be smart to look the other way.

They live large. Broad, bold strokes for them. No small, mean snipes. The city loves Mardi Gras so much that it has found a way to have two of them every year.

No ambushes from smiling faces. And the last time I checked, the powerful eat the helpless in every city in every state.

And in a few minutes, you can drive to great expanses of wildernesses.

In fact, one of the last great American wildernesses is only minutes from here : the Creole Nature Trail. { for a more detailed description of it from me go to http://rolandyeomans.blogspot.com/2010/03/last-exit-to-eden.html. }

Drive it long enough, and you can catch the faint breath of the ocean.

It is like the Great Mystery reminding me this land had once been a clean wilderness, where the waves came in, creamed up to the shore, and their breath smelled of something besides dead birds and fresh-spilled oil.


Now, tonight I sit on the terrace of my apartment, bordering a small rippling bayou,

watching the egrets gracefully settle into the tree branches and beer bottles float listlessly while listening to the voice of the city.


In the distance, the banshee wails of police sirens and ambulances. The night is never silent long here.

In the darkness, somebody is always runing and somebody else is trying to catch him. I look into the blackness

and know somewhere out there, people are hungry, sick, forlorn, desperate with fear or loneliness.

And others are shaken by sobs or anger. Mankind is not very kind.

It is a city no worse than others. A city filled with hope, pride, and ambition. But mostly, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.

This is the city that I know.


And to end the night,

here is the haunting melody ADIEMUS set to the all-too fragile beauty of the world, defiant to its impending destruction by the selfish, blind hand of Man :

HOW TO GET AN AGENT FAST!

One sentence answer :

Make the sale for her.

Before you get your hackles up, bear with me for a second.

I didn't say it was fair. It's just how to get an agent fast. You make the sale yourself.

Then why do you need agents in the first place?

Cliff Notes answer : Most publishers won't look at you without one. Agents will fight for you to get more money for a long list of rights you know nothing about, and when your editor moves on, your agent will make sure you're not shoved to the bottom of the stack (which you will be if you don't have an agent.)

All right. How do you make the sale for them?

1) Make your own market :
Conventional wisdom says start your own blog. Be unconventional. Make the "Pet Rock" of blogs. How?

You do daily posts. Don't groan. You need to build a following. Daily posts will do that for you.

You make short posts for shorter attention spans.

You make each one funny. Be the Christopher Moore of blogdom. How?

Nothing is shorter than a one panel cartoon. Create a zombie Ziggy (creation by Tom Wilson.) Call him "Nearly Dead Ned." Place him in a post-apocalyptic New York City.

First cartoon :
Ned is happily eating his own forefinger. The caption reads : "The trouble with finger sandwiches is that none are as good as homemade."

Second cartoon :
Ned is looking odd at a cobwebbed skeleton by a doorway. The skeleton is wearing sunglasses and a badge " Help the Blind." The skeleton is pressing a door buzzer under a sign which reads : "School for the Deaf."

Third cartoon :
Ned is lumbering down a street in the red light district. He has passed two bars. One advertises : "Live Nudes." The second : "Undead Nudes."
Ned is stopped in front of the third with his now classic puzzled look. Its window reads : "Don't Ask."

You do a year's worth of cartoons. Pick the ones with the largest number of favorable comments. Bind them up and submit to agents with the comments to each attached, along with the daily stats for your blog.

{Now, obviously this is just an example of an unconventional "Pet Rock" blog. You have to use your own muse to take off and run with the concept.}

2) Fan the flames of off-line and on-line interest :
Get multiple college newspaper reviews of your novel. Guest-blog on others' more popular blogs. {As Anne Gallagher has done in her insightful article on the popular GUIDE TO LITERARY AGENTS :

http://www.guidetoliteraryagents.com/blog/The+5+Stages+Of+Querying.aspx }

Get a local reporter to do a review of your novel for your local newspaper. Hopscotch that into another review from the newspaper of a near-by town.

3) Make a book trailer of your novel.
Using the students from a local university, create a book trailer. Utilize public domain music and images. Splice the images with teases from your novel. Put the book trailer on your blog and on YouTube. Advertise your book trailer on the blogs of your friends, in the local newspaper, and in the local college newspaper (hawking the fact that you used students from said college.)

4) Petition your local newspaper and those free newspapers at the doors to every grocery store to do free reviews for upcoming books and movies. Keep a record of each and every article you do for different newpapers with names and dates.

5) Be sure you state all of the above quickly and tersely at the end of every query to every agent.

And there you have the five easy steps to get an agent fast. They might even work. May we all get agents faster than we believe possible.
{Cartoon by the comic genius, Chuck Ingwersen http://wordsandtoons.com/2009/05/ }
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And a movie that succeeded due to its unconventional take on a classic subject is :