The Best of the Thinking Quill – Denouements

Bonjour mes braves,

It is one, Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV. The teacher beloved of your hearts and minds. The author of the remarkable and much remarked upon science fantasy ‘Fatswhistle and Buchtooth’. The pedagogue on whose delicate prose depends your understanding of the literary arts. That happy man who breaks from the few moments of ecstasy this life will allow him to present you with the fruits of his mind and the essences of his labours.

Lesson 34: The Write Denouement

Thus far one has been leading you gently by the hand through the rose garden of the literary arts, providing you with the petals of perennial wisdom and alerting you to the sharp, tearing thorns that await the unwary novice as you struggle with your first stumbling steps into the wonders of writing.

Today though, one shall thrust into the meat of the matter, penetrate boldly into the underbrush with decisively strong and muscular intent. For this is the climactic moment of your novel and it needs to leave your reader breathless and fulfilled.

Ah yes, the denouement.

That moment when all becomes clear. That place to which one has been leading, through passages and parlance, the unveiling of understanding where one’s magnum opus finally brings the reader.

It is the climax if you will.

The crescendo when the conductor brings his baton crashing down and the horns blow, and the drums crash, and the strings wail. It is that place where you offer some reason for all that those who travelled stumble-footed through your works endured. That place where you choose whether to bring your reader laughter or tears, happiness or despair, completion or destruction.

It is your big moment. Treasure it. And write it from the bottom of your soul. Use words that drip with drama and exude emotion. Drench it delicious descriptors – all those admirable adjectives and adverbs you have been practising so assiduously. Pump up your prose, that your words are wrought with wonder. Spare not the syllables, for this is the place to prove your true literary worth!

If it is sad, make of it a tragedy. Ensure that it wrenches tears and painful sobs from your reader’s very soul. If it is happy, make it joyous and life-affirming, let it fizz through the bloodstream like champagne and uplift the spirit into ecstatic rapture.

I offer for you one humble exemplar:

When the doorway brought the golden one to his eyes, he felt tears of pain and anticipation sting at the back of his own orbs. Would he be sufficient that such magnificence even deign to notice him? Would he be able to speak around the thorny lump in his throat? Would the dampness of his palms give him away? And what was that hot and heavy sensation in his hitherto unfulfilled loins? He dropped his eyes in real fear, and did not see his destiny approaching him. It was not until a voice like unto nothing he had ever heard before bespoke him that he dared to raise his eyes. He found himself transfixed by a warmly golden gaze and his lips turned up into a smile as the golden one cupped his chin in long fingers and traced the contours of his mouth with the forefinger of the other hand.
“Why do you tremble, pretty one? I won’t hurt you. Much.”

And whether this ending is happy or sad I neither know nor care…

Study well my children.

Next time. Erotica.

Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV

You can find more of IVy’s profound thoughts in How To Start Writing A Book courtesy of E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago.