How to Avoid Explaining Your Novel
By Kathryn Craft | February 8, 2024 |
photo adapted / Horia Varlan
As a novel approaches its final lines, it’s just so tempting—for experienced novelists and rookies alike—to explain its meaning to the reader.
Intentions for doing so are no doubt good. Just in case the reader lost track of all the facets to your plot, you want to offer a review. Just in case they failed to amass the accumulating meaning of the protagonist’s inner journey, you want to hammer home the point to it all so they don’t think they wasted their time by reading it. Unfortunately, instead of just in case, your efforts can come across as, Because I fear you may not be able to follow my brilliant plot, I’m now going to insult what minimal intelligence you might possess by subverting the very nature of story by explaining what just happened.
The reader has a right to her own interpretation. Like all art forms, literature is interactive. Think of a sculpture: after it’s built, and then wrested from its creator’s hands, it is meant to be interpreted by the reader.
In fact, by the time your story reaches readers, your interpretation of it is no longer of prime importance.
Each of your readers will come to your story with their own emotional, psychological, spiritual, and genetic makeup. They’ll have their own formative experiences, from which they’ve drawn their own conclusions. And all of that will feed a worldview that may not align with yours.
But that doesn’t mean you should exclude those people from finding meaning in your book. Their meaning.
If you’ve never belonged to a book club—or heard your own novel discussed among book club members—you may not have experienced firsthand the way readers hold dear their individual impressions of a work. Some who have read my debut The Art of Falling claim greater insight into the eating disorders of loved ones, even though my intention was to create a protagonist with body image issues, not anorexia. Some dislike the director of the dance company who hired my protagonist, saying that he used her; others perceived that despite his love for her, he had a clearly stated career mission to prioritize that was important to him, and my protagonist’s problem was in danger of imploding it.
Who am I to explain the story? Art is subjective; every defensible opinion is valid. I love listening to people hash these issues through.
Because I don’t think any of us would want to send readers the message that their interpretation was wrong on purpose, we writers need to figure out how to look for the sometimes-subtle ways we try to explain our stories. As a guide, consider this quote from Jerome Stern, in Making Shapely Fiction:
The closer and closer you get to the ending the more weight each word has, so that by the time you get to the last several words each carries an enormous meaning. A single gesture or image at the end can outweigh all that has gone before.
With that in mind, here are some actions you can take to ensure your story resolves organically.
Rethink phrases like “she realized” and “she understood”
This can be especially important in your novel’s resolution.
Even if telling your reader that your character realized or understood something was well-tolerated earlier in the novel, later, it can feel like a slap in the reader’s face. By the end of your novel, the reader has been bonded to your protagonist for a long time. Honor their joint journey. Assume your reader has been paying attention.
Consider the word “suddenly” a yellow flag
This is true throughout your novel, especially when it comes to realizations. Sudden strokes of insight are possible, of course, but you want to make sure you’ve laid the right groundwork so that the change in your character’s inner arc comes across as appropriately incremental—and therefore, believable. A sudden inner change right at the end, though, may signal that you are forcing an emotional turning point instead of allowing it to evolve organically. We want to believe your protagonist will be forever changed by this story—or if he can’t/won’t change, that someone else has been changed by the story’s events—and if simply proclaiming that change could work magic in the reader, you could have just told us this preemptively and skipped all that story building.
End with a symbol
Per Stern’s guiding quote, by the time we reach “The End,” a picture is truly worth a thousand words—so if you’ve developed a meaningful symbol in your novel, you may be able to let the image speak for itself. Here’s an example.
Author Khaled Hosseini bookends his novel The Kite Runner with a symbol introduced at the bottom of the first page:
Then I glanced up and saw a pair of kites, red with long blue tails, soaring in the sky. They danced high above the trees on the west end of the park, over the windmills, floating side by side like a pair of eyes looking down on San Francisco, the city I now call home. And suddenly Hassan’s voice whispered in my head: For you, a thousand times over.
From this frame, Hosseini’s protagonist unspools the book-length memory of his far-from-innocent childhood with Hassan in Afghanistan. The novel ends with the protagonist once again flying kites. He has just asked his nonverbal son, “who walked like he was afraid to leave behind footprints,” if he wants him to run his kite for him.
His Adam’s apple rose and fell as he swallowed. The wind lifted his hair. I thought I saw him nod.
“For you, a thousand times over,” I heard myself say.
Then I turned and ran.
It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn’t make everything all right. It didn’t make anything all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird’s flight.
But I’ll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting.
I ran. A grown man running with a swarm of screaming children. But I didn’t care. I ran with the wind blowing in my face, and a smile as wide as the Valley of Panjsher on my lips.
I ran.
If you’ve read this novel, rereading that ending has no doubt left you choked with emotion. But even if you haven’t read it, because Hosseini stayed deep in his character’s POV, my guess is you have a sense of how this character felt without being overtly told—and from that, you may be able to imagine how much more satisfying and beautiful this ending would be for someone who had already been accumulating meaning over a span of 371 pages.
Let ambiguity stand
Sometimes, there is no way to succinctly resolve a novel because the story illuminates an aspect of the human condition for which there is no adequate explanation. The carnage with which we are left after we fight to the death for what we want, for example, can be a powerful, unresolved ending, even if your protagonist is left with a renewed determination to keep fighting for his ideals. There is nothing wrong with letting an unclear moral or ethical situation resonate at the end of your novel—in fact, it’s a great way to ensure that your story will continue to resonate within your reader. That uncertainty will also drive some great book club discussions.
Sink your POV deep within your protagonist
By the time she reaches your novel’s final pages, your reader may have spent ten hours or more getting to know your protagonist. Honor that investment. Ask yourself: Will your story really be served by flipping the camera to look back at your character to tell us how she’s changed, or could you strengthen the ending by staying deep within her point of view?
To offer the intimacy your reader has earned, use any of the tools you used to create other convincing moments of inner change in the story.
- Add a telling detail that murmurs volumes.
- Confer meaning through your setting’s narrative arc.
- Offer an impactful, perhaps understated, observation in dialogue.
- Engage the reader’s associative powers through the use of metaphor.
- Tie the current situation to the character’s backstory motivation.
- Tap sensory images.
- Build on a well-established subtext.
- Allow access to *just enough* interiority: enough word count to spotlight importance, yet spare enough to allow the reader to enter this final scene fully.
Here are two more examples of endings that deliver a turning point within the novel’s final words. Despite a third-person perspective that can make the use of emotion words seem like “explaining,” note that in these examples, the story’s “camera” never flips. The authors have placed us—and kept us—deep inside the protagonist’s point of view, to good effect.
Musical Chairs by Amy Poeppel
Before the plane takes off, Bridget tightens her seat belt and looks out the window, the words of her father’s wedding toast, a recipe for happiness, filling her with optimism, driving her on. As the plane accelerates, she cherishes this moment in time, this threshold of an adventure, the start of something new.
On your mark, get set, go!
And because Hosseini happens to be very good at endings, here is another, from his novel And the Mountains Echoed.
She turns her face to look at him, her big brother, her ally in all things, but his face is too close and she can’t see the whole of it. Only the dip of his brow, the rise of his nose, the curve of his eyelashes. But she doesn’t mind. She is happy enough to be near him, with him—her brother—and as a nap slowly steals her away, she feels herself engulfed in a wave of absolute calm. She shuts her eyes. Drifts off, untroubled, everything clear, and radiant, and all at once.
So what happens if you address all these issues and your beta reader still admits to not understanding the point of your novel?
The ending is not where you should look to fix this.
Once you’ve written a draft or two of your story, and you understand for yourself what aspect of human nature it is that you’re trying to illuminate, let that intention inform the way you revise your story throughout, rather than trying to cap the meaning readers will take away from your story with an explanation at its end.
What techniques did Hosseini and Poeppel use to keep us engaged with their protagonists at the end of the excerpted novels? Can you think of other techniques to accomplish this other than those I listed here? Does the ending of your WIP pass the “please don’t explain” test?
Kathryn Craft (she/her) is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks, The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy. Her forthcoming book, Crafting Story Movement: Techniques to Engage Readers and Drive Your Novel Forward, draws from decades of experience as both a story consultant and a movement specialist/dance critic. Learn more on Kathryn’s website.
[coffee]
Excellent post, like usual!
Thanks so much for reading, Carol!
Thank you for this valuable point, as well as reminding me what a brilliant writer Hosseini is. Those are gorgeous endings. We writers can’t control how a reader interprets our work, in fact we have to get the hell out of the way, which is not my strong suit! Yet as a reader, I know it absolutely: it is my participation in the story. It is what I want.
I had to chuckle in recognition at “which is not my strong suit”—self-knowledge is key in this regard, but not always easy to come by, as I know all too well! Knowing what you want, as per your last sentence, will get you there. Thanks for reading, Leslie!
Loved The Kite Runner and you are right about that perfect framing of beginning and ending. I cried again reading the excerpts in your post. Ironically, I’ve had readers say they wanted more at the end of some of my short stories, when I thought I was letting the ending be a bit ambiguous so they could decided what might have happened next, giving just a hint of that that “next” might be.
As always I appreciate the advice on craft that you share here.
Hi Maryann! Yes, short stories are a different animal. Since meaning has had a shorter time to accumulate, it can be harder for the reader to project a trajectory for the characters. I’ve learned much craft from those who’ve mastered the form, but since at this point I apply it so specifically to novel writing, at the end of a short story I often find myself thinking, “Wow—I could be 45 minutes into reading a new novel right now!”
Your comment is so true, Kathryn. Often when listening to Selected Shorts or The Writer’s Voice, two podcasts I enjoy for the variety of short stories shared there, I discover that the story shared that day was eventually turned into a full novel. An author who has done that more recently in James Wade. His Beasts of the Earth was originally a short story.
Hello Kathryn. So many useful things to take away here. I was first struck by this: “…by the time your story reaches readers, your interpretation of it is no longer of prime importance.” So true. Outside of Q&A following a public reading, who cares what the author thinks about her story? As you go on to say, each reader brings unique personal backstory to her reading, and that’s something no writer can control. Except for this: the writer can do her best to know which readers she is writing for. Donald Maass has spoken of how writers submitting manuscripts to his agency often insist the story will appeal to all readers. This is ridiculous. You start with a fact: last year, half the adult population didn’t read a book. The other half is made up of many different kinds of readers. Which ones are likely to respond positively to what you write?
One more thing: I would say an important technique for not explaining too much at the end of a novel is to seed the essence of the message by repeating and alluding to the core meaning made whole at the end. I am trying to do this in my current WIP. The end offers the reader a kind of O’Henry discovery that I hope makes sense, but only because I’ve paved the way from the beginning. The reader isn’t blindsided by the reveal, but will understand it in the light of what went before. The trick is to do this without making what you’re doing obvious.
A really good post. Thank you.
Barry the point you raise at the end about seeding gets a big thumbs up from me! That’s exactly what I was talking about when I said you can’t solve the problem of an all-of-a-sudden inner change at the end. Seeding throughout is key and you give a really good example of that. Also key is your phrase “that I hope makes sense”—where would we be without our beta readers, and all they bring to our work?
As for a novel that will appeal to everyone, I’ll third what you and Donald have said. What we need are cult readers, lol. I feel like I have pulled a tooth for every follower I have on my almost completely ineffectual FB author page. My son, however, used to be the front man for a hardcore band named Agitator. This is such a minor genre, musically speaking, that their “shows” on tour were sometimes held in the basements of houses—but everyone knew the lyrics of their songs. They had 22K+ followers on their FB page, and lost no teeth obtaining them!
Barry:
The seeding technique you describe is a hallmark of the best mystery novelists: lay out a breadcrumb trail of clues so the resolution makes sense in retrospect without being predictable. I read mysteries to learn how they do it.
Good morning, Kathryn…I do tie up loose ends in the last chapter. Now I am wondering…but isn’t it also true that readers want to know? My ending does not explain or try to announce how THE READER should feel. It does bring some characters to the hospital where my MC is in a coma, everyone anxious and eager for her to wake up. She does. And with a few sentences outlining her future, the novel ends. As always, your posts make me think.
Hi Beth, thanks for raising this concern. Once again, this is subjective!. Every reader has a different tolerance for how tidily they want the story wrapped up. In general, it would seem there’s a sliding scale: commercial fiction tends to wrap, seal, and add a ribbon, whereas with more literary works, you’re often lucky if the author tacks the wrapping paper with one piece of tape. For me, as soon as the story question has been addressed, my interest in reading more starts falling away.
That said, I just finished reading a novel that kept going on and on after the protagonist’s inner arc had evolved to the point that the plot could conclude. I found myself skimming through the books final pages because I knew all that would happen. And yet the public has spoken—that same novel has almost 2500 reviews on Amazon with a 4.5 star average. So clearly, a little late-story rambling isn’t going to be a make-or-break deal. That said, does your reader REALLY need to know how things “turn out”? Or do they simply need to believe that the events of your novel were transformative? Maybe you’re writing that part for yourself, so you know what impression you want to point the reader toward.
As long as you stay in the POV of your character, attuned to their inner change as opposed to simply reporting a few newsy notes as to what happens because of the story, we’ll feel its inner power—and still have something to talk about at book club!
Kathryn, I’m laughing over explaining the ending. Whenever my mother read stories aloud, she’d look at me when giving the moral of the story. I hated that. Why not my sister? I suppose it was my guilty conscience. Thank you for these great examples and the reminder to allow the reader to sit with the story at the end.
I loved Kite Runner and Thousand, how Hosseini framed the stories, and those endings brought everything back. I do enjoy the circular structure–focusing on a similar image before and after–and seeing that things are different now. Better. I also like endings that state a truth. My favorite is from Charlotte’s Web by EB White: “It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.”
I agree completely that once a story is out in the world, it belongs to the reader. It’s been nearly 6 yrs since I released my novel, BOUND, and very early on I discovered how much parents of disabled children loved my book. It gave them so much hope and joy. I never set out to be an advocate for disabled kids but the characters took me there organically.
Hi Vijaya, you had me laughing, too, with “Why not my sister?” HAHA! I’m so glad you had that experience with BOUND. I received similar feedback parents who lost children to cystic fibrosis due to a major secondary character in THE ART OF FALLING. The emotional power of research.
So much to chew on, Kathryn. Thanks!
You’re welcome Bob. Thanks for reading!
Kathryn:
“Understated” and “just enough” are the takeaways for me. I tend to write a page or so after the story has ended. Or I can’t decide between equally good endings that each put the story in a different light, so I include them both. Your advice means less work and lip-chewing for me and, I hope, a more satisfying or thought-provoking ending for the reader. Thanks!
Thanks for your comment Christine. I don’t want to come across as anti-resolution, though. Ending the story right when the story question has been addressed could feel abrupt. Some stories need more resolution than others, depending on how many characters or even groups of people or nations were impacted. And trying out different endings, as long as you don’t use both, sounds like a decent process to me! But I suspect you’d discover that there is only one ending you were aiming toward all along.