Today’s guest post is by author and book coach Miranda Keskes.
I’m a fiction book coach, and one of my current clients is writing a novel set primarily in the 1980s (still boggles my brain this is technically historical fiction). She is writing from the POV of two female characters. She has a first draft, but she’s still working through where she wants the novel to start. She’s trying to decide if the novel should start with just her protagonist, Grace, or if the first scene should have both Grace and Lily.
A great question, to which I responded with another question: “What’s the point of your story?”
If you’re writing a story about female friendship, it might make sense to start with the two female characters together.
If you’re writing a story about self-love and actualization, it might make sense to start and end with Grace alone.
Through this thinking process, my client realized she didn’t want to write a story about female friendship. This story was really about Grace, what she learned about herself, and the power to stand proudly on her own. This realization helped her see what the ending image needs to be as well.
Deciding how to start and end your novel is not as simple as picking a starting point and an end point at will. The decision needs to make story sense, and story sense is intrinsically connected to the protagonist’s emotional journey. Who is your protagonist at the beginning of the story? Who are they at the end?
Decide on the emotional experience you want your readers to have
Another client is pondering a different question. She has a general sense of what her story point is, but she’s not sure how she wants it to unfold on the page. She’s writing women’s fiction, and we’re working through her ideas and early drafting. She is considering dual timelines and in a recent session, she wondered if she should start her story with her protagonist, Sarah, already broken up with her boyfriend, and then flash back to show the steps leading to the break up. Or, she wondered, should she write chronologically and leave the break-up for the novel’s end?
An excellent question, and one I answered with another question, “What emotional experience do you want your reader to have?”
If you write chronologically, readers are emotionally invested in finding out if Sarah’s relationship with her boyfriend will last. The story is tracking the emotional arc of Sarah’s relationship with her boyfriend, with readers learning alongside her.
If you write with flashbacks and start with the breakup, readers are emotionally invested in retracing the steps that led Sarah to this breakup. The story is still tracking the emotional arc of Sarah’s relationship with her boyfriend, but now readers have a hindsight view of a tumultuous relationship they know will ultimately fail. Totally different reader experience.
Again, the question that truly needs to be answered is, “What’s the point of my story?” Getting clearer on this makes it easier to see what the reader’s emotional experience needs to be.
However, answering the question, “What is the point of my story?” is not easy. It requires deep thinking into your purpose for writing, what wisdom you want to impart to your readers. It requires thinking about the emotional journey your protagonist must experience and, in turn, what the reader’s emotional experience needs to be. Focusing on the beginning and ending first helps reveal what the point of your story is.
Try this exercise
Grab five novels you’ve already read (unless spoilers don’t bother you). Read the first scene and the last scene. Then, answer the following questions for each book:
- Who is the protagonist at the beginning of the novel?
- Who is the protagonist at the end of the novel?
- What has changed in their thinking?
- What has changed in their world or circumstances?
Next, brainstorm at least five potential beginning and ending pairings for your manuscript. These can be brief descriptions. Most importantly, push your thinking. Start obvious and then get strange. Explore any and all possibilities. Which one resonates most for you?
Pick your favorite pairing and answer the same questions you did for the novels you grabbed. You’ll be amazed by how much you need to know about your protagonist in order to answer these seemingly straightforward questions.
Finally, write the scenes! Don’t overthink it. Set a timer if you need to. See what comes up organically from writing quickly. You may realize you love this pairing. You may realize the ending isn’t quite right. You may realize you want a different pairing altogether. The act of drafting these scenes is essential. Through drafting, you find your style and your voice.
Bookends keep your manuscript from falling apart
Deciding where to start and where to end your novel is a way to ensure that your protagonist’s emotional arc is complete. Stories are about change; readers need to see how your protagonist is changed from beginning to end. Writing the bookends also forces you to think about your story’s point and the emotional experience you want your readers to have.
I know some writers use drafting as a way to discover the ending. There’s value in this technique; it lends itself to creative play and exploration of the protagonist’s inner journey. At some point though, you need to know what happens to your protagonist so you know how to write the middle. Otherwise, you run the risk of writing hundreds of meandering pages with no clear throughline. This is where many writers throw in the towel, leaving the manuscript unfinished, collecting dust in their Google Drive.
Write the bookends of your manuscript to help avoid (or at least diminish) the spiral of self-doubt.
Miranda Keskes is a high school English teacher turned Author Accelerator certified book coach. She enjoys coaching educators and mothers at all stages of the writing process. She is also a creative writing instructor for the National Writers Series and the Membership Chair for the Michigan Writers Board of Directors. An award-nominated flash fiction writer, she is querying her upmarket women’s fiction novel, The Teachers’ Lounge. Miranda writes a weekly newsletter, Yes, You Can Write a Novel, and you can join her in the The Teachers’ Lounge on Substack. Learn more at www.keskesink.com.
Thank you for this exercise, Miranda. I realize it can be applied to memoir as well as fiction, in order to map how what happens impacts the READER’s emotional journey. I don’t think I’ve focused adequately on the emotional experience of my audience.
Hi Kathryn! I’m so glad you found the exercise helpful. I do agree it’s helpful for memoir as well.
The four questions you built around the opening and closing images are going directly into my analysis toolkit: who is this character at the start, who are they at the end, what changed in their thinking, what changed in their circumstances. The simplicity is the point — they’re fast, transferable, and they cut immediately to what the arc is actually doing rather than what the writer thinks it’s doing. And the Grace/Lily example demonstrated that cleanly: the question about the opening image turned out to be a question about the story’s entire governing point. Knowing where you’re going tells you what the throughline is. That landed.
The exercise of reading opening and closing scenes becomes especially sharp when you apply it to short fiction rather than novels.
In novels, the opening image sometimes doesn’t belong to the structural protagonist — Anna Karenina opens on Oblonsky, not Anna. So before the bookend question can even run, you have to locate whose arc the novel is actually tracking. Short stories remove that ambiguity by formal necessity: one arc, one character, one opening and one closing image. And because compression means every move between the two images has to carry structural weight, the bookend relationship is both more visible and more consequential than in the longer form. The opening image either earns its place or the whole structure is exposed.
I love your point of using short stories as a way to study the relationship between beginnings and endings and how they correlate to the protagonist’s emotional journey. And it’s true that some novels do start with an opening that is not from the protagonist’s POV. In those situations, I love to consider why the author did this and how it affects the reader’s emotional journey.
So glad this article was thought-provoking for you!
Exactly, what is the story about is a key question in the rewrite. I argue, even later in the creating process.
Let the story not your desires dictate the story you are telling.
This is the great shame of mary shelley’s frankenstein. The film adaptions show most film makers reading of the story is about frankensteins creation. But the book is truly about the crime and inquisitiveness and danger and self inflicting harm through the creation of frankenstein himself.
Yes, it’s so interesting to see how filmmakers adapt any novel’s point to best suit the screen. I’m glad you found the article thought-provoking!
The thing I’ve always strived for in the ending is that you can see the character’s change from the conflict (if a conflict driven novel) or the twist (if using Kishōtenketsu). If the ending doesn’t show growth, it needs to show destruction to one degree or another. The protagonist shouldn’t reach the ending and be the same.
Agreed! A change of some sort in a protagonist is the crux of storytelling. The change can be subtle, but it still needs to exist.
So glad you found the article engaging!