Drawing out an ending

How much can you multitask? I'd assume these plots led into the main ending, so maybe some of them can be concluded as part of the main ending.

If worst comes to worst, there's always how The Banned and the Banished handles it. Before and during the final battle, it sets up what each character will do if they survive. Then afterwards, it only follows one of the survivors, because he's the only one whose ending really needs to be explained after the fact.

 

I feel that it's best to wrap things up fairly quickly after the climax. It's a dramatic high point, and I would like the reader to go away remembering that rather than a (relatively) quiet scenes, or scenes. I've used brisk epilogue a to suggest what my survivors will be doing next, and hopefully the drama and action of the finale stays fresh in the reader's mind as they finish those last few pages.

 

This reminds me of watching The Return of the King with one of my friends. All of the climactic battles wrapped up, and he gets up to leave, but there was still at least a half-hour left in the movie, while the book had a whole other plot line that took place afterwards. Wheel of Time FINALLY ends with a Ragnarok-like affair, followed by a massive funeral and one of the characters leaving everything behind to go wander the earth.

I think it comes down to how much are you trying to wrap up, for how many characters, and are these events relevant to plot arcs or character development. If so, you might be able to put hints into some of the preceding chapters that maybe the climax isn't the END. Just like after running a race, you go on a short jog afterwards to ease up the muscles. Maybe do the same with your story. Ease the audience out and let them get some closure instead of coming to a dead halt with a bunch of, "Oh and so-and-so did this and this..." tacked on.

 

My taste is very much like AM's, let's get it done after the climax. I think you risk losing your readers interest trying to do nine things after the major plot is wrapped.

The end of a book is very important. You want to leave them wanting more, not less.

 

Allow me to add a note in the other direction: while I love his work, Neal Stephenson's endings are abrupt bordering on the shocking. I'm still riding high from the finale when the book ends and I'm slammed back to earth. So I definitely think it's possibly to be too brusque in conclusion.

I don't think there's a problem with resolving material after the grand finale, as long as that material resolves questions we've had before the finale. (Where Lord of the Rings goes wrong, for my money, is raising new conflict after the resolution of the major conflict.) For instance, you've resolved your major plot with an epic battle, but what about the will-they/won't-they romantic subplot between X and Y? We need to see that one resolved. Not to mention character Z's ongoing father issues, and the question of who, precisely, kept stealing character Q's lockpicks. Or whatever little personal arcs and subplots you have going on. Wrapping up all of these in the last chapter is, to my mind, what the last chapter is for! Each is a little satisfaction for a reader, and those just increase the overall satisfaction of the ending.

Consider, of course, the possibility that you don't want to be too neat and tidy, because life isn't neat or tidy.

 

If it were mine, I would consider going back to the previous chapters and adding bits and pieces to help wrap it up, if at all possible.

 

Reader patience is going to depend mostly on how much you've managed to make the reader care about all those things you need to wrap up.

Personally, I have less patience for writers who DON'T wrap things up after the climax and go for a quick ending. Nothing annoys me more than having invested my time, attention and emotions for hours in an author's work to have them brush aside everything I care about except the Big Battle at the end and then end it with some kind of pithy line that doesn't address ANYTHING beyond the moment. Seriously, that's the easiest way to get me to pan you as an author.

 

Pacing questions never have an easy answer. On the one hand you need to know how much your book's style has convinced the reader to slow down (Tolkien took his time, but he made us expect that), and on the other just how important each point really is. Hard questions.

But you do have a range of choices for each character. Reveal someone's issues and what they'll do next before the climax? combine several characters' resolution into one scene; some heroes only need a few heartfelt lines to sum up what we need to know. Or there's your author website, a perfect place to give fans extra scenes that didn't quite carry their weight in the book itself.

Never think "one character= one wrapup scene." You want the fine-tuned option that works.