A Writer's Tale

2. The opposite. He is so caught up in his material, so excited, that he’s racing through it. He’s plunging forward as fast as he can, skimping on details, writing the first thing that pops into his mind because he just can’t wait to find out what’ll happen next. (I plead guilty.)

3. A deadline is approaching, so he cuts corners in order to reach the finish as fast as possible.

4. He doesn’t know how it should end.

5. A combination of the above.

Rather than dealing will these problems individually, I’ll cut corners and discuss endings in general.

As I’ve mentioned earlier and you’ve certainly noticed by now I’m a master of stating the obvious.

In this case, the obvious is: You don’t want to blow your ending.

And there is a real danger of doing so.

You’ve been working on a novel for many months maybe over a year. At last, the end is in sight. Like a long-distance runner (no longer a baseball pitcher), you’re worn out but you want to put on the big push for the finish line. You want to churn up the ground in a final, gut-busting sprint.

My advice is this: Don’t.

You’re not a long-distance runner. You’re not a baseball pitcher. You’re a writer.

Resist the temptation to make a mad dash for the end of your book.

Slow down!

You’ve spent a long, long time developing your characters and plot. What for? For this!

Every word, from the first, has been a footstep on the path toward the climax of your story.

You haven’t been writing to get the story over with you’ve been writing to reach the big climax in which all the ingredients come together and explode.

The climax, not “THE END,” is your real destination.

You do not want to “short-change” it in a rush to finish the job.

You want it to be great and memorable.

So take your time with it. Relax.

Play with it.

To a large extent, a reader’s most lasting impression of a book with be based on his reaction to its climax.

So give it your best shot.

As a final word about endings, I have always been dubious about “explanations.”

Explaining everything is fine and dandy and perhaps necessary if you’re writing a mystery. After all, a mystery story is supposed to involve the solving of a puzzle.

But I don’t believe that writers of mainstream fiction or horror novels are required to give reasonable explanations for everything that happened.

Certainly, we do not want to leave our readers befuddled and confused. We don’t want them to think we’ve created such a wild muddle that it defies explanation. We want to clear things up.

To some extent.

But we are under no obligation to explain everything.

And shouldn’t, in my opinion.

On television, in films and often in fiction, audiences are bombarded by stories that end only after every issue has been neatly tied up and explained. No loose ends are allowed.

Which seems amazingly artificial.

For one thing, the “explanations” (particularly in horror stories) are often incredibly trite or stupid or unbelievable or otherwise lame.

For another, there are mysteries at the heart of every real event. Beneath the surface, there are strange and murky currents.

We may think, for instance, that we know why someone ‘was murdered or why a car crashed or why we exist.

In the final analysis, however, what do we really know?

Not much.

If we think we know all the answers, we’re fooling ourselves.

If a writer wants to avoid fooling his reader with superficial and possibly false explanations of the events in his story, he could do worse than to leave them…

… if not in the dark, at least in shadows.

It’s not only more realistic that way, but possibly more fun for everyone.

Foes and Fans

AS A MASTER OF STATING THE OBVIOUS, I WILL START THIS PIECE BY saying that every reader isn’t a fan.

In my own case, some readers hate my books. They see my material as puerile, voyeuristic, distasteful, and dumb. “Blood and guts churned out for numbskulls,” as one critic put it. They seem to find my material not only simple-minded but deeply offensive.

If everybody felt that way, I’d be in deep trouble.

As things stand, however, I can afford to laugh about it.

Laugh as I wonder how in heck such people came to read a book by Richard Laymon in the first place. Did they wander into it by mistake? What were they expecting, Winnie the Pooh? The covers of my novels are not misleading. The artwork and the written material should make it fairly obvious to anyone with half a brain that naughty things happen in my stories. So why do these people read them, anyway?

Don’t they believe the covers?

They must not.

Often, book covers do tend to exaggerate. Though a cover might lead us to believe that a book will be thrilling, lurid, shocking, bloody, erotic, violent, etc., the story inside often turns out to be tame, predictable, trite and boring.