‘So’ is the biggest word. Finding the ending.
‘So’ is the biggest word.
If you write with your ending in mind you should know where your narrative is headed. Though you may decide to change the ending later, you are writing with a destination in mind. Citizen Kane will die and we’ll know what ‘Rosebud’ means. You would not think of telling a joke without knowing the punchline.
So a story should be a logical chain of cause and effect. Each incident should be caused by the previous incident, or some event which happened earlier in the narrative.
The word ‘so’ will lead you from the inciting incident through to the denouement.
In the legal drama The Verdict, for example, Frank Galvin, the character played by Paul Newman, is humiliated when he is thrown out of a funeral. A mourner recognises Frank as an ambulance chaser, a lawyer who only preys on the vulnerability of grieving families.
This humiliation leads Frank to realise how low he has fallen – he’s a drunken bumbler with a failed career and a failed marriage. These days he holds court in the local bar, rather than in court.
To recover his self esteem, Frank decides to fight the Catholic Church and the medical establishment over a case of medical negligence. A wrong dose of anaesthetic has left a young woman in a coma. The church is willing to settle out of court and compensate the family.
But Frank decides to fight the case. He is humiliated, SO he decides to try to win back his dignity and self respect.
When you get blocked in a story it is often because the logical next step is missing. Perhaps you don’t know what will happen next, or how to move towards the denouement.
This is where ‘so’ comes in: This happens, so this happens, so this happens…
The computers on a returning spaceship tell the crew stop at a passing planet. So…
The computer wakes the crew. So…
The crew go down to the planet, where they find mysterious eggs. So…
One of the crew, unwittingly, returns to the spaceship carrying an alien within his body. So…
As the crew eat their last meal before returning to sleep, the alien hatches out. So…
There is a hostile alien at loose in the confined space of a ship. So…
Only one woman is left. So…
Ripley must defeat the alien alone. So…
…the biggest word.
