If I asked you why you used bookends, what would you say?
Envision that long line of books and how those first six books are staying in place … but then the last few stragglers won’t line up. Bookends create order – helping a row of books stand up straight.
While we sometimes need a pair of bookends tucked around the outside of a collection of books, have you ever utilized bookends between the book covers your story?
What: Bookends are the “mirror elements” of a novel’s 1st and 3rd acts that brings a character back to face the same issue, situation or conflict and reveals the character’s growth
Why: The hero and heroine readers meet in chapter one of a novel is not the same (imaginary) person by the time readers reach “The End.” If they are … well, you have wasted your readers’ time. A novel should include a series of events (scenes) that the hero and heroine has to confront – and in the confronting, they change.
One way to show your character’s change (aka character arc) is to throw them back into a similar situation to one they faced at the beginning of the story – but show them handling it differently.
Examples: In the opening scene of Wish You Were Here, Daniel shows up at Allison’s apartment. She’s trying on the out-of-control wedding gown she’ll wear when she marries Daniel’s brother in five days. But the packing boxes are all stacked in the corner of her apartment, waiting to be used. Daniel teases her, “You are moving in with Seth after the wedding, aren’t you?”
At the end of the book, Daniel shows up at Allison’s basement apartment where she is surrounded by packing boxes. Why? She’s moving on with her life – literally and figuratively. She’s changed, and now she knows who she is and what she wants out of life.
What about the movie The Proposal? At the beginning, Sandra Bullock’s character, Margaret, and Ryan Reynolds’s character, Andrew, have a adversarial work relationship – and Margaret (Andrew’s boss) always wins. She even bullies him into pretending to be engaged to her so that she isn’t deported to Canada. At the end of the movie, they have a final showdown in the office. But guess who wins this time? That’s right: Andrew! Both he and Margaret have changed because they’ve fallen in love with each other.
Consider your work-in-progress (WIP): How can you work bookends into your story?
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MBT’s Skills Coach, Beth K. Vogt provides her readers with a happily ever after woven through with humor, reality, and God’s lavish grace. Her inspirational contemporary romance novel, Wish You Were Here, debuted May 2012 (Howard Books.) Her second novel, Catch a Falling Star, releases May 2013. Beth is an established magazine writer and former editor of Connections, the leadership magazine for MOPS International. Visit with Beth at her website bethvogt.com.
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