8. The Irresistible End

Sergei.Gussev, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

‘But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.’ – The House At Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne

And now we reach the end. Although the end of the blurb is (cross fingers) a beginning – the point of embarkation for the reader who has been convinced by the proposition they’ve just perused as they head for the till and many happy hours voyaging on a sea of words. 

So without giving away our book’s ending how do we finish our blurb in such a tantalising manner that the reader is sold on it? In other words how do we make the end of our little story irresistible? 

We can start by making life easier for ourselves by having written a blurb with carefully weighed oppositions and our understanding of Hegelian dialectic (thesis / antithesis / synthesis). If our synthesis is powerful and resonant with our clashing thesis and antithesis then the end may already have written itself. The end, as they say, was written in the beginning.

However, we might want to add something to that or perhaps we’ve taken a different approach and we’re searching around for some new or more novel angle.

Broadly speaking, I think there are six main ways of sealing the deal on the back or flap of a book.

Make a Promise

‘Kings and queens, knights and renegades, liars, lords and honest men.
All will play the Game of thrones . . .’

I found the above words on the back of a copy of George RR Martin’s A Game of Thrones. It wasn’t at the end of the copy but I’ve always felt that it reads like the last words you want to read before you dive in. Here, they insist, lies a world of adventure just waiting for you . . . Irresistible (says the person who has yet to read a word of the novels or indeed seen an episode of the TV series). 

Or how about the below from Dorothy Dunnett’s first book in the Lymond Chronicles:

'I despised men who accepted their fate. I shaped mine twenty times and had it broken twenty times in my hands'

1547. After five years imprisonment and exile far from his homeland, Francis Crawford of Lymond - scholar, soldier, rebel, nobleman, outlaw - returns to Edinburgh.

But for many in an already divided Scotland, where conspiracies swarm around the infant Queen Mary, he is not welcome.

Lymond is wanted for treason and murder, and he is accompanied by a band of killers and ruffians who will only bring further violence and strife.

Is he back to foment rebellion?
Does he seek revenge on those who banished him?
Or has he returned to clear his name?

No one but the enigmatic Lymond himself knows the truth - and no one will discover it until he is ready . . .

Here’s a book where the author plays her cards close to her chest. The reader is as in the dark about the protagonist’s plan and motives as the rest of the characters. This is the journey promised.

Make them feel

Art wouldn’t be art if we didn’t feel it inside us. We want to be touched by it in some way. I’ve already spoken about the powers of emotion to engage readers and the final sentences of our blurb are our last chance to excite them. What’s appropriate? A joke? Something heartbreaking? The end of the world? What serves your blurb and your book best?

Here’s the blurb from a Penguin Modern Classics edition of Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker:

‘Walker is my name and I am the same. Riddley Walker. Walking my riddels where ever theyve took me and walking them now on this paper the same.’

Composed in an English which has never been spoken and laced with a storytelling tradition that predates the written word, Riddley Walker is the world waiting for us at the bitter end of the nuclear road.

If you grew up in the seventies and eighties those final words ‘bitter end of the nuclear road’ echo a bleakness that years of daily news reports carved into your soul.

Deepen the intrigue

‘Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water . . .’

Perhaps your conflict says it all. The tensions of your story when laid bare have their own dramatic force and you don’t wish to temper them with some suggestion of peace or resolution. Or perhaps you are the kind of maniac who thinks nothing of turning the dial past eleven. Whatever groove you’ve been furrowing in your blurb why not deepen it? Go bolder. Cut deeper. Take your audience to the very brink – and push them over. 

Here’s The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.

The future is small.
The future is nano . . .

And who could be smaller or more insignificant than poor Little Nell – an orphan girl alone and adrift in a world of Confucian Law, Neo-Victorian values and warring nano-technology?

Well, not quite alone. Because Nell has a friend, of sorts. A guide, a teacher, an armed and unarmed combat instructor, a book and a computer: the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer is all these and much much more. It is illicit, magical, dangerous.

And it isn’t Nell’s. It was stolen. And now some very powerful people want to get their hands on this highly desirable object. Nell is about to discover that the world can feel very small indeed . . .

I wrote this. I could have ended it at the bottom of the second paragraph but I wanted to add a further layer of intrigue, which then, pleasingly, allowed me to play off the opening.

Questions need answers

Pose a question. Or, better yet, pose three. The three question beginning to a blurb is a classic opening for non-fiction but its converse, the three question ending, is more typically used in the crime genre: who murdered Selma? How did they do it? And, goddammit, why? This can be tricky to pull off in both science fiction and fantasy where the questions often relate to multiple story threads and can seem to barely relate to one another. I try to make the questions I use build on one another, as if one leads naturally to the next with the final one being so tantalising you just have to read the book to get the answer.

Here’s Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven, posing two powerful questions at its end:

What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty.

One snowy night in Toronto famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage whilst performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening a deadly virus touches down in North America. The world will never be the same again.

Twenty years later Kirsten, an actress in the Travelling Symphony, performs Shakespeare in the settlements that have grown up since the collapse. But then her newly hopeful world is threatened.

If civilization was lost, what would you preserve? And how far would you go to protect it?

Raise the stakes

Entropy rules. Things fall apart. Everything goes to pieces in the end. And in a really good blurb trouble for our heroes should just get worse and worse and worse. The end of your blurb is a good point to raise the stakes. It’s not just our heroes’ lives that are at risk, it is the fate of all they hold dear. But sometimes it can just be a little not to what is coming.

Here’s Patricia Highsmith’s The Cry of the Owl and a blurb from my 1980s edition:

Robert Forester is a nice guy,
but he’s also a prowler.

Robert’s ex-wife says that he is a nut, and it seems that the Rittersville, Pennsylvania, police think so too.

To Jenny Thierolf he acts as the catalyst that ends her relationship with Greg.

The cry of the owl is the portent of death . . .

Putting aside that this may be the best opening line to a blurb every written (how can he be both a nice guy AND a prowler? That’s an impossibility that needs resolved!), the last line raises the stakes significantly, from some clearly troubling relationships to the clear signposting that this is going to end in death – but whose demise?

Add a twist

We’ve already discussed how wrong-footing the reader can be a good way to start a blurb. Equally good is to wrong foot them or put an unexpected twist in at the end of the blurb – just when they think they know what they’re dealing with. This suggests increased intrigue, narrative unreliability, that this story is not going to be straightforward. You may have to set it up so it feels earned.

Here’s Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life.

What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right?

During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath.

During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale.

What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to?

A blurb of mostly questions, but what I love about the last one is that it suggestively undermines the entire enterprise – why bother saving the world? Well, we’ll need to read the book to see why such a startling conclusion might be warranted. Both unexpected, and a twist.

Concluding the conclusion

We’ve looked at story types, audiences, pitches and emotional hooks, grabbing beginnings, opposition as structure, blurb geometry and, finally, endings. It’s a lot to take in.

What I’ve tried to outline here are a series of processes to help you write a blurb that connects your book to its readers. But don’t let these processes be a substitute for creativity. If you’ve a cool idea, go for it. Afterwards, you can go through the analysis stages and see whether you think the blurb does justice to your story and will connect with your audience. You can then modify it as necessary.

That’s what I’ve been getting at all along. A good blurb, like a great cover, forges a connection with the reader. In combination, they’re the brochure hinting at the journey author and reader are about to undertake together. 

It is a journey reader and author alike embark on with some little trepidation but always a great dose of hope.

This is the last of eight instalments in my series on how to write a novel’s blurb for your book, revised and reposted here after original publication at the Milford SF blog.