6/23/24
Getting to “The End”
This is number sixty-seven in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
MY EDITORS LAUGH when I tell them a book is nearly finished.
“One more chapter. Two at the most,” I say.
“Right,” they laugh.
Seven chapters later, I send them the final draft. It is just so hard to get to the end! For lots of reasons:
1. Too many unanswered questions.
2. Too rushed or abrupt to end.
3. Too many people asking, “But what about…?”
4. Too many things I intended to say earlier.
5. Too long a timeframe from the climax to “Happily ever after” to skip everything between.
6. I don’t want to rush the characters’ relationship. They should have a chance to enjoy this.
That last one is more often the case than not. My characters are real to me and I don’t want to cut down on their enjoyment in order to move the story forward. This care for my characters manifests itself at times when I’m writing the all-important first love scene between the two. I’ll get halfway into it, then just before consummation, I’ll take a break for a day or two so the characters have a chance to enjoy what’s about to happen.
And still, I get comments from readers at the end of every story, no matter how hard I’ve tried to end it satisfactorily.
“That’s all?”
“What about the abuses you alluded to in college?”
“That was abrupt.”
“Finish it already.”
I’ve commented about listening to reader feedback in previous blog posts, so I won’t go into that again.
When I started releasing my first erotica in December of 2011, I’d dug up a manuscript I began twenty years before and then quit because “I don’t write stuff like that.” Nonetheless, I hadn’t thrown it away. I’d simply locked it with a password twenty years before. By some miracle, I remembered the password and was able to read and revise the two chapters I’d written. I began posting the story two days later, releasing chapters as I wrote them.
I released the last of twelve chapters on January 5, 2012. The total was 45,000 words, not quite long enough to really call a novel. And it had sped to its conclusion. It bugged me that I ended it too abruptly. In fact, it bugged me for nine years. I rewrote and expanded the story in 2020, adding 20,000 words and ending up with eighteen chapters.
There had been too many plot holes in the original, not enough models, and no real conclusion. The Art and Science of Love—Refresh is a much better rendition and is available on Bookapy. Part of the reason for that is having acquired three excellent editors over those years, partly as a result of having released that first inadequate story. They were not afraid to tell me when I wasn’t fulfilling my obligation to my readers.
So, when we’ve told the story we want to tell, how do we get to Happily Ever After—or in some cases, Happily For Now. That’s the ultimate goal of erotica, or at least of romantic erotica. The reader paid their money and time to feel good.
While the dramatic death of one partner might be a logical conclusion to a story, it is seldom if ever an HEA conclusion. To get to that conclusion, we have more story to tell. It can’t fairly be told in a paragraph.
I make an event log titled GETTING TO HEA. It could be expressed as a PERT chart (Program Evaluation Review Technique, developed by USN in the 1950s.) if one wanted to go deep into the analysis. In my instance, it is simply a list of things that have to happen in the story (including conversations, actions, world situation, etc.) in order to get to my happy ending.
For example: I’m currently writing a new story about an Olympic gymnast. I know the story has to end sometime after the 2032 Summer Olympics. In order to get there from the current point in 2028,
1. Three years have to pass as he travels the world seeking training from great gymnastic coaches.
2. He has to fail to make the team without actually failing as a gymnast.
3. He has to resign his life to the daily tedium of his work as a trainer and massage therapist.
4. He has to run into his old friend. (Sidenote: she has to be the only one left of her acrobatic team, one having left and one retiring.)
5. He has to realize that he’d be a lot happier helping his acrobatic friend than competing as a gymnast in the Olympics.
6. They have to audition for shows with a new act.
7. The director of the new show has to be his former lover.
8. He has to reunite with his former lover and find fulfillment in a favorable opening of his new act with his new partner.
9. HEA.
You would think with this chart of activities that are known, I should be able to sit and write it in an afternoon. In fact, I think 2-9 could be covered without rushing in two or three chapters. The problem is point number one. How do I deal with three more years of his life before he gets to the things he needs?
Fortunately, I’m not writing in a diary style. I don’t have to account for every day. That is a trap of that style of book. You can’t just skip three years and have him resume as if he hadn’t left off. Even in the plotted story, a blank period always leaves the reader wondering what went on during that time. Just starting a paragraph that says:
I decided to go to Japan first. Three years later, I couldn’t believe how time had flown.
How many of you would put down the book at that point? Raise your hand.
No. Without creating a detailed diary, I need to focus on two or three things that were significant in that time and tell their story, perhaps looking back from the point I was trying to get to all along.
The point is the author has to figure out how they are getting to HEA and then plot a strategy for getting there. In writing this blog post, I may have stumbled upon my strategy for resolving my current dilemma. One thing I know, though, I won’t just skip it. I won’t condense the timing and make it three months instead of three years. I won’t simply abruptly say, “They lived Happily Ever After, for now.”
What I will do?
I will spend some time working on the story instead of blog posts!
Ah the trials and tribulations of being an author. Sigh! If I didn’t love what I’m doing, I would no longer do it. And I will continue the blog, even though I’ll be traveling for the rest of the summer. Next week, “About Being an Author.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
