Writing tip for Spring '08
Rising to the occasion:
the climax of your novel.
Someone once said, "Your beginning sells this novel—but it's your climax that sells the next." Yet it's more difficult to identify the ingredients of a good novel climax than it is to pinpoint what makes great opening, or a well-structured middle. In commercial fiction, any good beginning and middle will have certain common characteristics, which apply to almost any genre. A novel's climax is so dependant on what's happened previously in the story that any number of events can create a great climax—it doesn't have to be a big fight scene, or a death defying chase that ends with the villain's capture. In fact, in one of my favorite climaxes, a bunch of the protagonist's employees sit down and have a quiet chat about him...and the reader realizes that everything she has witnessed in the proceeding 500 or so pages, fights, riots, fire and avalanche, were not at all what they appeared. (Niccolo Rising, by Dorothy Dunnett.)