Validation and Wrap-Up

Graphic by Peg Kerr

What sort of difficulties do you run into during the wrap-up? I would expect it to be smooth sailing since you tend to know when to stop. -NcT2

First off, there are two things going on after the story climax: validation and wrap-up. They can happen simultaneously, or one after the other. Validation is, essentially, reassuring the reader that the story is indeed over and the actual solution has been reached; wrap-up is taking care of loose ends and giving the reader a glimpse into where the characters will probably go in the future.

While it’s possible to leave out the validation-and-wrap-up entirely and end a story with “…the curse broke at last, and Our Hero stood revealed as the True King. The End”, this always feels a bit abrupt and unsatisfying to me. Which is why my Boilerplate Plot Outline ends with “There is a confrontation, which the good guys win. (Story climax) This is followed by appropriate rewards and weddings. (Validation/wrap-up).”

In a one-shot or stand-alone novel, both validation and wrap-up are usually pretty straightforward. The protagonist has earned something—money, status, power, love, freedom—in the form of a check, a title, a promotion, the love-interest’s heart, a pardon—and the writer can wrap up all the remaining subplots and loose ends, or at least strongly imply that all will be well from here on.

In a book that’s intended to be part of a series, things can get considerably more complicated. Even if each individual novel in a series is meant to be able to stand alone (as in most detective novels, where there is normally one case per book), there are often subplots or relationships that develop over the course of the series. Sometimes, it is possible to leave all of these at a satisfying stopping place; other times, the background story arc requires that in this book, things can’t resolve at all.

When the entire series has an over-arching plot, like the Harry Potter books, you can do a certain amount with structure and “temporary endings” (where each book ends with the protagonist defeating a lesser bad guy or thwarting one of the main bad guy’s plans, while leaving the situation unsolved and the main bad guy still free to plot again). But as the series plot arc becomes clearer and more central, it gets more and more difficult to wrap up the loose ends…because the series plotline can’t be wrapped up until the last book, leaving it as a major “loose end” in the last couple of books.

It gets even more complicated when the author wants a central plot arc, but doesn’t know whether a series will continue or not because the publisher hasn’t committed to it past a certain point. The book has to have a satisfying ending, while still leaving enough loose plot threads to support a possible next book. It is not always obvious which loose ends and subplots must be wrapped up, which can be partly or implicitly wrapped up, and which should be left dangling.

The other major difficulty in a validation-and-wrap-up is the order in which different loose ends…wrap up. This is especially hard when one has a zillion characters involved in multiple different plotlines and potential plotlines. Should the protagonist have that talk with her mother before or after she has the talk with the former-Dark-Lord-turned-librarian, and should the librarian come before or after the explanation from the visiting scholars? And just how much detail should the scholars go into? And what about Naomi?

Finally, from a writer’s point of view, “writing the wrap-up” may involve going back and revising. This can mean removing groundwork for subplots that never went anywhere, or burying some subplots a little deeper if they won’t go anywhere until a much later (hypothetical) book, or punching up some subplots or information that really has to come out now, if this is the end of the story.

The book I’m working on is part two of a possible series (possible meaning, the publisher hasn’t committed to buying another one). So part of the wrap-up difficulty is in determining which subplots need a complete wrap-up, which ones I can give an apparently-complete wrap-up that still leaves room for a hypothetical next volume, and which ones I really need to leave dangling without being too obvious. There’s also some background information that needs to be toned down just enough to look like window dressing, so it won’t be an obvious loose end but will still be there if I get to write a third book.

So yeah, writing the wrap-up on this one is not an easy downhill slide.