Welcome to A Novel Approach. If this is your first issue, I encourage you to check out my back issues for more tips on how to write a novel. It's my fondest hope that I can help other writers do the best they can do.

If you have any specific aspects about novel writing you'd like me to address in future issues, please feel free to contact me and let me know what those are. Thank you for your interest, and here's to better writing!

Writing a First Novel Part 5 -
Plotting: Creating A Stunning Climax

I encourage you to read those as well, by clicking on the back issues link above, then coming back to this issue to read. Don't worry. I'll still be here when you come back...

All done? Okay. Now it's time for the climax. Are you ready?


Fireworks Time

If you've got your plot down to this point, you are now faced with only one way out. Or, should I say, your heroine is faced with only one way out.

That's right. Directly into the antagonist's path!

Now, even if you're writing a gentle romance or a children's book, you should have your readers sitting on the edge of their seats dying to know how it'll come out. Sure, you may not make their hearts pound, or their hands shake, but you do have their undivided attention.

And that's what the perfect climax is all about.


Blow Them Away

Thrillers, horror stories, mysteries, crime fiction... those kinds of stories (and many of the other popular genres) should have a little more oomph to their endings. If you've kept the reader turning pages helplessly to here, don't stop now.

Give them what they want. More pages that turn themselves. Let your heroine dodge those bullets by a hair-breadth. Let your hero have to elude six mounted black knights while he's on wounded foot.

Make the reader wonder if it'll go in the protagonists favor!

Yup, make them wonder right through the climax. That's how to keep them coming back for more novels.


Out With a Whimper

I'm sure you've read novels where the climax comes, and the hero easily outruns the bad guy.

Pretty disappointing, isn't it?

Don't whimper your way out. Keep the momentum going until, at the last possible second, you let the reader know everything's going to be alright. That makes a climax that will have your reader panting (perhaps literally) to catch his breath.

Only then is it time to wind down and relax. To resolve all the leftover conflicts that might still be hanging.

But that's another issue.

See you next time (first issue in August) for the last in the series on plotting!


More Tips on Plot

For more information about developing a plot, click on any of the links below for my other web pages about plotting.


Plot
Action
Book Themes
Developing a Plot
Drama
Novel Outline
Novel Structure

Ah, Mr. Koontz has a good reason for us to dig deep and create the perfect climax: so we won't look like idiots.

Nothing gives us courage more readily than the desire to avoid looking like a damn fool. ~ Dean Koontz