The Misfits of Carnt strikes again and we are now officially on book 5, and I’m just finally getting to the apocalypse I’ve had planned from book 1. This one is called Whimsical Death and Other Pirating Dangers, with quite a hunky pirate on the cover. I’ll let you all figure which character that is depicting. For those of you wondering, is this it? Is it finally the end of the series?
Nope, I still have 1-2 more books left. I hedge my bets on the number of books left because it might be one long book, or one really really long book that really should be 2 books. After this book, all the characters will be where they are supposed to be for the end of the world and a final confrontation that will leave a broken world and some bodies along the way.
If you’ve been following this series, my hope is that the ending is as satisfying as all the parts that got you to book 6 or 7. Too often endings are neglected. Writers, (and I’m guilty of this too), often get so wrapped up in what is currently flying from their fingertips to the page that they often lose focus on the ending. And it’s easy to do, when you start a story, it’s more fun to discover it as you go along.
Most writers I know are pantsers not plotters. I can see the allure of pantsing a story. You get to experience it like a reader would, it’s way more exciting, and if you’re a dedicated and critical editor of your own work, you can cut out all the boring parts in the second draft. However, pantsing becomes harder and harder to do once the volume of books get larger and larger.
Take a trilogy for example. Those are easy to write by the seat of your pants. Just start with book 1. Then at some point (maybe even after book 1 is published), you’ll think of an idea for book 2. Then you’ll bumble, plow, write, (pick your verb), way through book 2, and at some point, you’ll realize that you need a book 3 just to finish the story because it’s just getting good by the end of 2!
But a 7 book series (or six), that’s hard to get right. At some point, it will be a challenge to keep it going as well as the earlier books. Perhaps the story ended in book 5 and because you signed a 7 book deal, you now have to drag something out beyond its natural conclusion. Or maybe by book 5 you realize the story was not what you thought it was and really just missed out on a bunch of foreshadowing opportunities. Or maybe you just tried to thread together a bunch of plot elements that just don’t want to wrap up nicely by 7 (or 6)
I’m not saying that writers can’t pants 7, 14, or even 21 book series, but to have it done in a way that is just as satisfying on book 1 as it is 7 is hard. Knowing where you’re going helps. So while I may not be a plotter with a formal outline for every chapter. I’m a plotter in that I at least try to think of the ending. Where’s this story going? How will it end up? Will it feel deserved and natural, or convenient and forced?
As an enjoyer of fiction, I always tend to enjoy complete stories. Ones that go on too long eventually feel like they are wandering in the dark, just trying to get to an ending because the real ending happened earlier. Take Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Stranger Things. Both shows were such a big hit, they went on beyond their expiration date, leaving the ending limp rather than me wanting more. They both had seasons that ended with me wanting more and thinking it was the best television ever made.
And then they made another season, and they slipped from a show that I was excited to watch, to just a show that I was getting through so I could just say I did it. That’s not to say the later seasons of those shows were so bad that it was torture. Some of my favorite episodes were in season 6 of Buffy and the nerds were the best villains ever, but the show naturally concluded on 5, the rest was just squeezing more commerce out of a show that could have just blown people away.
Spoiler Alert! Skip the next two paragraphs if you plan to get to the end of Stranger Things one day.
Stranger Things did the same thing with Vecna, while one of my favorite characters was introduced with Vecna. (Eddie Munson, those of you who’ve read a lot of my books will see Eddie-like characters appearing in my stories over and over before Eddie appeared on TV.) But the show started the downhill slope in the Vecna season. The strange cool world of the Upside Down, just turned out to be a construct of another psychic. It felt to me that there were three seasons of building mystery, and then we got to the reveal where “Oh yeah, it was just a Freddy Krueger like guy all along, and all that weird shit was just a dream.”
Sure, I was happy to get Hopper back, and I certainly enjoyed Eddie Munson, but over all the plot felt as if I had watched three seasons of an unrelated show. It felt as Vecna was not an idea baked into the very beginning of the story, but rather plot shoe horned in to keep it going past the original story arc, a pantser who had to write more after season 3. I could be wrong on that assessment. Maybe Eleven’s classmate was where they were always going. But it didn’t seem that way, at least from an outsider who pays way too much attention to the writing in a show.
With my personal writing, I try to avoid that when I can. For me, the simplest way is to think of the ending before I write the beginning. I do modify and adapt my endings, and haven’t thought of the ending for everything I’ve written (for example the Time Burrito series, I thought I would just endlessly write new books in the series and never formally end it. Then I got to book 4 and realized that I ended it and then teed off another book when it was already over. Time Burrito 5 was my Vecna, which actually turns out to have spawned something new which will excite Time Burrito fans).
But I try my best as a writer to end things when they should end, and make those last books just as exciting as the first ones. With that Whimsical Death and Other Pirating Dangers I feel is exactly that, if you enjoyed them all up to this point, you’ll like this one too. And you’ll finally see something I’ve been foreshadowing for a while now, but I promise you, it’s not quite what you think, but it has been there since book 1.
Enjoy the book!
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