Khanh Ho is writing the first Vietnamese American Detective Fiction ever. Why? Because being the first is a power trip. Like what you read? Share, comment, subscribe.
I just wrote my ending. And man, what a good idea that was. I can’t take full credit for the idea. Montserrat Fontes gave me this advice when I invited her out to do a reading at my college.
For those of you who don’t know: Monsy Fontes is the American Book Award Winning writer of Dreams of the Centaur. She is one of the great Chicana writers. Monsy was also my high school English teacher and I remember her smacking a whip made out of a dried, braided bull penis on my desk: “When you’re writing a trilogy, write the last book first” were her actual words. “That way you know what’s got to happen.” For me, every word she says is always punctuated by a smack!
I’m not writing a trilogy but the theory behind this advice still holds. It’s best to know your ending. And dutifully, this weekend, I wrote the climactic action sequence, which takes place in the Ambassador Hotel, the pleasure palace where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Boy did I learn why this important. I’ll list my epiphanies: 1) I realized I had to set up the locale early. Otherwise going through a description of the hotel—its historic value, its splendor—would slow the action. When you’re stalking a murderous villain, it’s not a good time to describe the chandeliers. 2) In the climactic scene, my detective is going to get his ass whupped but will triumph through a common item he always carries on his person. This means that I need to describe this item early on, so it doesn’t come out of the blue…and its reemergence will feel serendipitous and inevitable.
These are the two major things I realized: silver coins, jingling in my pocket. I never had these coins before; it’s like I found them on the ground and took them to an antiquarian and found out they’re rare Susan B. Anthony’s. There are other, smaller epiphanies but I won’t bore you with an exhaustive list. If I had written this novel sequentially–from beginning to middle to end—I would not have known what to set up early. And in second stage revision, I’d have been faced with a labor-intensive task. So if you’re writing any kind of novel but, especially, a plot intensive novel, the ending is probably one of the first things to tackle. Now go write! Smack!