: Re: My Conflict Doesn't End at the Climax. What can I do? I am currently writing a short book. I've neared the end of the plot, but now I'm seeing a problem: my conflict isn't ending at the

@YK4692630

Vote Up Vote Down

Two thoughts:

Shift the Magic Flight into the scenes preceding your climax. (In any case, this is where the Magic Flight traditionally pops up.) In your specific case, you could make your hero think about a way out before he finds X. He could prepare an escape mechanism that is simply triggered when he actually does find X. You would not need to tell how the escape is managed, because you have already told it. This would shorten your "post-climax" text considerably. Plus, it could add an interesting doublet of hope/despair to your story, since your hero wants to find X very badly and is blindly following his hope - so much so that he prepares an escape mechanism of which he doesn't even know whether he will need it -, while on the other hand he is never sure he will actually make it to X. The escape mechanism in popcorn entertainment would be to blow up the building. For example.
Hang on. What's the Magic Flight? Glad you asked. The Magic Flight is the stage of a story that propels the hero out of the situation that allowed him to make a crucial change, back into an environment that could be considered his or her everyday life. It is part of the Hero's Journey. Chris Vogler gives a very nice interpretation of the Hero's Journey in his Writer's Journey. In a nutshell, the Hero's Journey describes how a specific change is achieved. In your case, the change would be to save X from the "less than savory characters". The story would traditionally enfold like this*: The hero realizes X needs to be saved and sets out to save X. The hero finds out that he indeed is able to save X. (This is not equal to actually saving X. The term for this point in the story is crisis.) The hero saves X. (Climax.) The last two points do not necessary need to be separated. - A different interpretation would be that saving X is the crisis and making it out of the building - delivering X back into the everyday life - is the climax. What is what in your story depends on your focus.

Hope this helped.

*Mind: The story is not necessarily identical to how you tell your story. You can shuffle the elements of your story around as much as you like, but they will still be there. Otherwise, the story could feel decidedly incomplete, unsatisfying, or, to be traditional here, plain tragic.

P.S.: So why is it called Magic Flight? Read Vogler, or any other of the abundant literature on the Hero's Journey out there. Knowing the Hero's Journey, in any case, turned out to be the one advice on creative writing that really stuck with me over the years. For me, it is indispensable.

(0)

Login to post a comment!