Choosing Your Book’s Resolution: Status Quo or New Normal?
Inspiration is always a good thing. But as with all areas of writing, taking the time to reconsider the initial instinct through various craft lenses can put the final product on a whole new level.
—Annie Mydla, Managing Editor
Many North Street Book Prize submissions share a problem: the exposition and inciting incident are strong, while the falling action and resolution are weak. The reason for the weakness varies. Maybe the resolution comes too quickly. Maybe it feels too fragile. Maybe it's unrealistic compared to what happened in the rising action and climax. Maybe it's muddled. Maybe it hasn't arrived at all.
In this post, I'll describe how looking at your resolution ideas through the lenses of genre and character type (static and dynamic) can help you make the right choices for your story.
Establishing a new normal
There are two main kinds of resolution: establishing a new normal and restoring the old normal. Both have their functions, and it's important to know which of the two you need so that you can plan the rest of your book out accordingly.
Of the two, the new-normal ending is the most common. It's the go-to choice for nearly all stand-alone novels and memoirs. In this kind of ending, the rising action and climax have transformed at least some of the characters and their circumstances into something different than they were in the exposition. Characters in books with new-normal endings tend to be a mix of dynamic (changing over time—think Jonas from Lois Lowry's The Giver or Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars movies) and static (staying the same—like Sherlock Holmes or Mary Poppins). Statistically, if an author is writing a book-length, non-experimental, narrative work, they're likely to be looking for a new-normal ending.
Returning to the old normal
Resolution doesn't always require fundamental change. Certain kinds of books require things to go back to the old normal, the way they were in the exposition. This strategy is often seen in episodic commercial fiction series in which the main character is "on the job", as in detective novels, medical dramas, and legal thrillers. Some examples would be the TV series The Lincoln Lawyer or Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta novels. The pleasure in these types of books is to watch a familiar character tackle an unfamiliar situation. They're also great for examining cutting-edge social issues: readers love to see their favorite familiar characters encountering the latest challenges in our modern world.
In books with old-normal endings, the main cast tends to be static. There might be some dynamic characters introduced just for that episode, but they most often go away at the end or stay in the series but not change any further than they already have. While the situations the characters encounter change from book to book, too much change in the characters themselves or their surroundings would interfere with the formula and the series' ability to continue.
Winning Writers editor and head North Street Book Prize judge Jendi Reiter observes: "What I like the most in long mystery series with a main detective character is a balance between static and dynamic. The recurring characters on the crime-solving team don't change so much that the whole genre of the story shifts, but on the other hand, they grow over time in response to the crimes they solve and their interaction with each other." Some series with successful multi-book arcs for their detectives include Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley series and the early novels in Anne Perry's William Monk series (Jendi feels the quality fell off after #14).
The old-normal ending is virtually exclusive to episodic commercial genre fiction series. It's much less likely to be successful in non-episodic series with longer plot and character arcs (like Game of Thrones). It also doesn't tend to play well with psychological novels, literary fiction, and memoirs, where readers expect a higher measure of realism and complexity, or really with any stand-alone novel.
What happens when a dynamic cast is given an old-normal ending?
Giving a static cast a new-normal ending or a dynamic cast an old-normal ending can lead to confusion in the resolution. For example, a number of emerging authors I work with really want their dynamic cast to end up back where they started. Imagine a manuscript whose rising action has characters facing challenges that change them. The climax brings these changes to a head. But then, somehow, the falling action and resolution show the characters thinking and behaving just as they did in the exposition. It's anti-climactic and a little disorienting.
In discussing this situation with authors, I've realized that defaulting to the old-normal ending might be the result of cultural conditioning for those of us raised in the age of TV sitcoms. We've seen the "episode ends, everything goes back to normal" pattern so often that the old-normal ending simply feels automatic. We don't necessarily think about the genre context before making the decision. It's a reflex.
Fortunately, the answer to the old-normal default can be as simple as cultivating an awareness of what kind of cast you have (dynamic or static) and what genre you're aiming for (episodic commercial fiction versus almost anything else). This knowledge can give authors more conscious control over their endings.
Giving a static cast a new-normal ending
The opposite problem can also happen, where the static cast of an episodic commercial genre series is pushed into a new-normal ending. None of the characters have really changed, and genre-wise, they're not supposed to change. But somehow their inner and outer circumstances become different after the climax.
For example, imagine an episodic commercial medical thriller series. In Book 1, the static main character, a female virologist, prevents a public health crisis with the help of some static supporting characters, as well as opposition from a static antagonist. The rising action develops the crisis and character interactions. The climax catalyzes the various conflicts and the day is saved. Then in the falling action and resolution, we learn that the virologist goes to therapy, finds herself, and leaves virology to become an art teacher.
Becoming an art teacher might be a nice outcome for the virologist. But given the intended genre, a disconnect is created between the plot-driven main body of the book and the resolution when the focus belatedly switches to character development.
The reader has an awkward moment of switching gears at a moment when they need to be experiencing closure of the conflicts of the rising action and climax. And from a commercial perspective, the book's genre identity is changed. The ability of the series to continue as episodic commercial genre fiction is compromised.
In my experience, the problem of forcing a static cast into a new-normal ending tends to happen in two different kinds of situation. First, perhaps the author wanted to write an episodic commercial genre fiction series but hadn't considered how the choice of ending might impact the genre identity of the product. Second, the author might have wanted to write a different kind of book than episodic genre fiction—say, a literary fiction coming-of-age novel—but in the drafting process ended up with a static cast instead of the dynamic one that leads more naturally to a new-normal ending. In both cases, the problem could have been avoided by becoming familiar with how genre, character type, and resolution type work together, and letting that knowledge guide the book's composition from the exposition onwards.
Troubleshooting messy or nonexistent character resolution using the ideas above
What does it look like to use genre, character role, and resolution type to guide choices within the main body of a book? Here's a short example of how analytical questions about these topics can stir up new thoughts about how to proceed.
North Street judges often encounter messy character/resolution combinations that make their books less immersive. Editor Jendi gives the following example: "A lot of novels and memoirs have a mother or father character who is critical, dysfunctional, overbearing, or otherwise fails to support the protagonist for who she is. The two most common mistakes I see are a rushed reconciliation towards the end, and conversely, repetitive scenes of the dysfunction without any shift at all."
In the situation Jendi describes, a plotline has a main character whose parent mistreats them, but both characters' arcs are muddled by a lack of clarity on the overall function of the plotline within the narrative and/or genre. In one case, the resolution is rushed. In the other, it's nonexistent. What we want is to get from this to either a new-normal resolution where dynamic characters' plotlines are given closure, or an old-normal one where a cast of static characters is given a clean slate from which to start their next adventure. To achieve this, we might ask a series of questions such as the following:
- Is the book in a genre where a child/parent dysfunction plotline would normally be prioritized—e.g., domestic drama, horror, crime, memoir, YA or middle-grade coming-of-age story?
- In this particular book, is the plotline a major source of plot movement, tension, or thematic meaning? In that case, is it being given the space in the narrative that it needs in order to achieve its purpose, or is it being overcrowded by secondary elements?
- If the parent is meant to be a dynamic character, does the story of their change take place over the course of the entire book, or is the change rushed—as though the character's role were being switched from static to dynamic at the last minute?
- If this plotline is not typical of the genre, should it be given less prominence or removed? For example, make the parent a static secondary or tertiary character, and the relationship with the parent could raise tension in the background rather than having to come to the fore.
- If the parent is a static character, are there other plot elements to guide the dysfunction plotline to a new-normal resolution? (Example: the child character is dynamic and escapes, or otherwise renders the parent harmless somehow.)
Conclusion
This blog post presents these ideas about resolution, static/dynamic character types, and genre identity in broad strokes. Real-life books often show more flexibility—for example, it's pretty common to come across central characters in episodic commercial genre fiction who do change over time, albeit subtly enough not to shift the series' genre or main selling points.
Those nuances don't diminish the fact that broad-strokes concepts can be useful for authors seeking to stay within the fundamental expectations of their genre. Knowing the relationships between new- and old-normal resolutions, character types, and genre can help authors to catch and rework rushed, incomplete, or unrealistic character arcs. And, as so often while writing, crossing your original inspiration with craft consideration can reveal unexpected, exciting choices waiting just on the other side of the page.
Categories: Advice for Writers, Annie in the Middle
