By Larry Leech @LarryJLeechII

Done. Finished. 

The end of another year—an insanely, crazy, pull-out-your-hair year. Good-bye 2020. 

Mic drop.

That might be how many people feel about this year. But that is certainly not how a reader should feel when they reach the end of one of your chapters. Our job as the author is to make them want to read one more chapter and then one more and another and another. Until they are in a panic because dinner will be late, or they’ll get five hours of sleep instead of their normal eight or they’ll slide into a meeting at the last second because they couldn’t put your book down.

So, just how do you do that?

First and foremost, a reader needs to care about what happens to your POV character. If they don’t, well, they just won’t bother to find out what happens. So, way before you get to the end of your first scene, we gotta care about the character. The keys to that are for another blog. In the meantime, let’s assume your reader is so vested into your character, that they will forego everything in life for a few moments to see what happens.

Second, chapters cannot start or end predictable points. A character waking up to start a scene and going to bed to end the scene just doesn’t work. To steal a few words from an Oscar Wilde quote, readers, and you, must “expect the unexpected.”

Make your character play twister in the scene, make ’em change their mind or direction. Better yet, make someone else force them to change their mind or direction. Force ’em to do things the character just doesn’t wanna do. Create moral dilemmas. 

These are just a few suggestions. Years ago, I heard another author say that if the character’s goal is to get across the room to open or close a window, you, as the author, have to make that trek across the room a miserable one and at the end of the scene, the character may have failed to get across the room to open the window or if they did accomplish their goal, they have to be in worse shape than when they started the scene.

A blog appeared on Nownovel last year on scene endings. The summary of six different endings is one of the best I’ve seen: end with surprise, finish with a situation implying consequences, end with suspenseful action, finish with a hint of what’s to come, end with the tension of arrivals or departures, or finish with the consequences of an earlier action.

For the last few years, when I have coached a client through their manuscript, we spend the next-to-last session looking only at the beginning and ending of every scene. We don’t want a reader to yawn because they don’t care anymore.

Give the reader something to look forward to—with excitement and certainly some hope. Like we should with 2021.

Writing coach of award-winning novelists, Larry J. Leech II has spent nearly 40 years working with words. After a 23-year journalism career that began in 1981, Larry moved into freelance writing and editing in 2004. He has ghostwritten nearly 30 books and edited more than 250 manuscripts. Larry teaches at numerous conferences nationwide and can be found online on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and his website, www.larryleech.com.