WritersDigest.com I 61Bs & s
In Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Invisible Monsters, the
narrator—Shannon, a former fashion model—is shot in
the face and must undergo facial reconstruction, losing
her beauty. In the hospital she meets Brandy Alexander,
a transgender woman preparing for sex reassignment
surgery. Brandy’s female form looks uncannily similar to
how Shannon looked before her accident. At the end of
the novel, the reader isn’t sure how Shannon feels about
herself now that her beauty is gone. What the reader
knows is that she has made some sort of peace with the
past and found friendship in Brandy. Th e fi nal sentences
convey Shannon’s feelings on her identity:
Completely and totally, permanently and without hope,
forever and ever I love Brandy Alexander.
And that’s enough.
Brandy represents the self she used to hate, who was
pretty on the outside but tortured within. By admitting
her love for Brandy, she admits to loving herself.
A summary, thought, or refl ection on your narrative
works best when it’s unclear how the narrator feels at
the end.
Final Images
Images resonate with the reader more than actions or
interior monologue because they trigger emotional
responses without an intellectual interpretation.
In Richard Lewis’s novel Th e Killing Sea, two teens in
Indonesia are aff ected by the tsunami of 2004. Th e life of
Sarah, an American girl on vacation with her parents and
brother, is changed drastically when her mother is killed
in the tsunami strike and her father disappears. In the
aft ermath, struggling to get back to a place where she and
her brother can get help, she meets Ruslan, an Indonesian
boy, and winds up helping him fi nd his father. Th roughout
the narrative, Sarah’s grief for her mother is tangled. She
has always believed that her mother didn’t want to have
her, and this haunts her. In the fi nal scene, Ruslan draws
Sarah a picture of her mother as he imagines her:
And in the simple, graceful lines of her gently smiling face,
in the eyes that looked right into her, Sarah saw all the love
that her mother had always had for her, and how abso-
lutely, utterly wrong she’d been to ever have doubted it.
While that is a lovely sentiment, the fi nal sentence plants
an image in the reader’s mind that conjures not only
tears, but also the waters of the tsunami itself that took
her mother and father away:
Something gave way within her, and the raw waters of
grief came rushing in.
I’m a fan of images that symbolically speak to the jour-
ney the protagonist has undergone. Th ink about your
narrative’s themes. It helps to make a list of images that
come to mind for whatever your themes are, then select
or create a fi nal image that especially speaks to your pro-
tagonist’s journey. WD
Excerpted from Make a Scene Revised & Expanded Edition © 2017
by Jordan Rosenfeld with permission from Writer’s Digest Books.FROM THE WD EDITORS:
O B s s
The best beginnings toss readers into the whirlwind
that is going to be your story right as the action
begins, giving them no choice but to read further. The
best endings stick with readers for years after they’ve
closed the book. WD editors got together to talk
about their favorite beginnings and endings.
“Where’s Papa going with that ax?” E.B. White’s classic
story of friendship, Charlotte’s Web, opens ominously;
Fern discovers a grave injustice occurring on the farm—
a runt pig has been born, and her father aims to do it in.
—Ericka McIntyre, editor-in-chief
The opening of Charles Webb’s The Graduate fi nds
Benjamin Braddock freshly graduated from college
and hiding in his bedroom from a house of well-wish-
ers. I love that this “successful protagonist” starts off
by hiding from the world.
—Robert Lee Brewer, senior editor
“Pledge,” the fi rst poem of Roger Reeves’s collec-
tion King Me, introduces readers to a speaker who is
clearly a voice to be reckoned with. “I leave, I leave—
this will surely leave a stain,” he writes.
—Cassandra Lipp, associate managing editor
I was furious the fi rst time I read the ending of George
Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. It wasn’t the happy ending I
wanted for Maggie and Tom. After several re-reads and
years of refl ection, it’s the un-ideal ending that’s most
true to the story, containing a satisfying inevitability.
—Amy Jones, senior editor