Epilogues in Fiction

/ Lisa / Leave a comment

Be forewarned, there are spoilers here relating to a book.

I just finished These Silent Woods by Kimi Cunningham Grant. It was a great story I thoroughly enjoyed. Until I got to the epilogue. I’ve never read a book where the epilogue ruins the whole story. Typically they let you have a few more moments with a character, see how they managed after the drama of the story. This epilogue fulfilled that role, but, for me, left a gaping plot hole. It would be interesting to hear from anyone who has read the book to see what they think. Maybe I missed something, which is entirely possible.

The premise of the book is that a father had his baby daughter taken away by grandparents. He retrieved his daughter and since then they have lived out in the woods, helped by an old friend and a hermit neighbor who watches over them. The premise is believable and well-written, there are great subplots, and the story is easy to sink into. The characters are fully developed and as a reader, I was immediately invested in their story. You know from the beginning that there will have to be a reckoning, but the journey to that end keeps the reader hooked.

Warning again, here comes the spoiler.

Finch, the daughter, witnesses a murder. The consequences mean that father and daughter may now be identified and found. The father will have to turn himself in, he knows he will lose his daughter and face jail time, and that Finch will be returned to the evil grandparents. Before this can happen though, the hermit steps in and, in the middle of other plot twists, says he murdered father and daughter and has proof. He is arrested and it gives father and daughter a way out.

And then the epilogue. A few years later. Finch eventually went to live with the grandparents and went to college. In these last pages she is returning to the cabin in the woods to see her father. She has lived a full life in her teen years, and her father let her go to the grandparents because he realized she needed that full life.

Wait just a second.

The grandparents were the antagonists, but suddenly in the epilogue they are the good guys. The solution to all the past drama is that grandparents and father simply don’t speak to each other. There are no consequences for the father., or for the grandparents in how they initially took Finch. We never get to see the father face the grandparents over what happened in the past. The old hermit, presumably sitting in prison for murder, continues to do so even though father and daughter were clearly never murdered. The grandfather is actually a judge, but does nothing to show the hermit was innocent after all. They all just let him continue with whatever sentence he was handed for confessing to something he didn’t do.

The epilogue made me not like any of those main characters that I had just spent a few days with. How did no one in the editing side of things not sit up and say ‘hey, wait a minute’. How did no one mention to the author that there should have been some culminating interaction between the father and the grandparents to tie up the main reason for the whole plot? Not to mention the fact that a young girl who loved the hermit could simply just shrug shoulders and move in with grandparents who buy her a car and send her to college.

Like I said, this was the first time the final ending pages of a book ruined the whole thing. Typically when I check a book out of the library and love it, I’ll buy a copy so I can reread it. I actually was planning on doing that but now I can’t get past the epilogue.

Has anyone had a similar experience with a disappointing ending? What book was it, and why did the ending fail? I see this as a good lesson for us writers so I’d love to hear your stories.

Creativity in Driftwood

/ Lisa / 2 Comments

Last week my husband and I took a vacation to the Oregon coast. We like to go there during low tides or after storms to look for agates and rocks of all sorts. We hadn’t been in a long time and we both were very in need of a break. Plus, this was our dog’s first road trip to the ocean.

On one of our walks we saw a young man building a structure out of driftwood. He was busy digging a large hole in front of the structure, tossing out sand and oblivious to our passing.

We see people doing things like this with driftwood, typically building a simple pile of sticks for kids to play in, or to sit in while they have a small fire. But the things this young man built were different. For one thing, there were several of them along the beach. For another, they were complicated. Good sized, intricate, wood woven into arcs and organic shapes, and clearly more like artwork than just playing around building a camp.

On top of that, we noticed other things as we walked in the vicinity. Closer to the waves there was a simple circle of stones, already getting covered in sand. There was a slender piece of driftwood upright in the sand, decorated. I took a photo, which is below, but you can’t really see the details. There were feathers, shells, pieces of beach grass, and stones decorating the wood. I felt uncomfortable after I took the photo, as if I’d gone into someone’s church during service and started snapping pictures.

My husband spotted a ring of sand. It may have been a hole originally, like the one we saw the young man digging. But the tides and waves left only a hint of what had been, and left patterns of movement in the sand that showed what change looked like. It was like a subtle reminder that nothing remains constant.

I’ve been thinking about those structures since we got back. Why was the young man building so many? Why did he build them at all? Did he see them as transitory art, or were they just something to do with the things he found on the beach? Did he want people to use them? Did he sit back later and watch the afternoon crowds and how they interacted with his creations? Or was he, too, transitory, and moved on without looking back?

That led to more questions. I wondered if people saw the creativity, or just saw camps. I wondered if people respected them, or destroyed them. Did kids play in them and dream adventures? Did homeless people sleep in them at night?

So many possibilities. So many stories.

I wonder if that young man knew he would make imaginations soar? I hope so.

Oh, and Corbie loved the beach. The picture below is him with the wind blowing his ears up. He was the most well-behaved dog we have ever traveled with and we made sure to pay attention to what sticks he played with.

‘Otherkin’ is Here, For Some…

/ Lisa / Leave a comment

But not for my husband.

Typically when writing, he is involved in the process and gives me opinions on the many drafts. This time, he wanted to be able to read the new book as a reader, with no idea what was going to happen. I was able to keep him out of the process for the most part, although I had to ask his opinion on the best way to blow things up.

This book, the sequel to This Deep Panic, took so very long to write. I’ve shared some of that here. Through all the hours of questioning scenes, questioning the story, questioning my ability, I managed to keep him on the periphery.

My goal was to hand him the actual book, for him to be the very first person to hold it and read it.

I ordered a few advance copies when Otherkin was published a couple weeks ago. And then I gave them away. Oh, I kept one, for my husband, and even handed it to him when I unpacked the box. And then I gave that one away, too. Oops.

So I’ve delayed making the announcement that the book is here until I ordered one more copy, waited for the very slow snail mail, and then waited until I could hand it to him.

After, I think, three years, it’s done. Has he read it yet?

He hasn’t even cracked the spine, I don’t think. He’s being very responsible and finishing the book he’s in the middle of first. I don’t think he’s aware of me nervously hovering, because obviously, his opinion matters.

What if he doesn’t like it?

In the meantime, while he is so-very-very-slowly reading an Agatha Christie mystery, Otherkin is now out in the world.

What if you don’t like it? If you liked the first book, hopefully you’ll like what the characters are up to in this one. There was one weird scene with a character going for a swim. I cut that scene, put it back, cut it again. I couldn’t see how it fit the plot, how it moved the story forward, how it even impacted the characters. But it kept nagging me. I finally decided I wasn’t letting go of it for a reason and left it, thinking the characters might tell me later why it had to be there. And they did. That one odd little scene ended up having a huge impact on other characters and conflicts. Strange how that works out.

For now I just took a sneak peak at the husband’s copy to see if it is still pristine. Well, the book is.