Charting the Ending
Originally published at ipse illum dicto. You can comment here or there.
So. I’m still trying to come up with straightforward ways you can analyze a market to see if it’s right for your story or novel. And one thing I’ve found is that there are a lot of editors who have a very strong preference for certain types of endings. But “happy” or “sad” aren’t descriptive enough to really make sense of the complexity of possible endings out there. So to that end, I’ve worked up a matrix…
I think there are two axes along which an ending can fall. The “happy-sad” (or “positive-negative”) axis is the obvious one. But there’s another one. There’s a school of thought that says stories should resolve all issues that have been raised in them (“tie it up in a bow”). There’s another school of thought that says stories are more evocative if they leave the ending unresolved. And, of course, there’s a middle ground, where some things are left hanging or implied, but where the major story elements come to a clear resolution. So let’s picture this as a chart:
Now, take your favorite magazine, look how the stories end, and plot the endings on the chart. You may end up with something like this:
So, is this the market for your story that leaves everything powerfully and tragically unresolved? Probably not. This is an editor who likes stories fully resolved and leans heavily toward happy endings, but will take overall happy but partially unresolved stories. Of course, there’s an outlier. In this case, you need to ask yourself what it was about this story that made the unusual ending appropriate for the market. (Often it’s because it’s from a popular contributor, but there are many other factors that come into it.)
I tend to feel that even editors who say they like “all sorts” of endings often don’t end up with stories that are all over this chart. Rather, they tend to fall all along one axis, but cluster on the other one (most often they have a strong preference for either fully resolved or unresolved endings, but will take both upbeat and downbeat endings along that axis).
To work best, this is something that needs to be done over time, with as many examples as you can find. And you want to try to do it editor-by-editor, as within one house tastes can vary widely. And, yes, it’s possible for the same editor to have one set of tastes at one magazine, and a different set of tastes at another - that’s part of knowing their readership.
I’ll be curious to hear if/how thinking about endings this way works out for you. Do you tend to have your endings cluster in one part of the chart? Do you have one axis you tend to fall on? Are your endings all over the place? Does mapping your own ending into the taste of a particular editor help you target your submissions better?
This is all still very much a work in progress…
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