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 of the story you’re writing?
What: Bookends are the “mirror elements” of a novel’s 1st and 3rd acts that causes a character to face the same issue, situation, or conflict and reveals the character’s growth.
Why: The main characters readers meet in chapter one of a novel are not the same (imaginary) people by the time readers reach “The End.” If they are … well, you’ve wasted both your word count and your readers’ time. A novel should include a series of events (scenes) that the hero and heroine confront – and in the confronting, they change.
One way to show your characters’ change 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 of Almost Like Being in Love, my new destination wedding novel, my heroine makes a rash decision based on her father’s actions — because she is searching for his approval and feels like, once again, she hasn’t gotten it. At the end of the book, she once again makes a decision about her future based on her father’s actions — but is she still caught up in the same seeking approval cycle? You’ll have to read the book to find out.
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 , who is 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?