How to Tell Everyone About Your Book Without Dying

When I was just out of college, my mother used to proudly tell people I was a writer, unless I first managed to stop her. I tried to stop her because I knew what would come next, the dread question, “So what has she published?”

The answer at that time was one humiliating word: “Nothing.”

The conversation would then wither up in shame.

I lived a double life. Inwardly, I considered myself professional writer, who would one day be published. Outwardly, I hid this identity from all but close friends and family. It’s perhaps not surprising that the heroine of my fantasy series, Dindi, leads a similar double life, practicing her magic art in secret.

However, I became so adept at concealing my passion that once my novels were actually published, I found it difficult to switch from secrecy to publicity.

I belonged to several writing communities online, that helped me bridge my shyness. After all, it’s okay to tell friends who are sharing my journey toward publication that my books are out there–yay! And from there, I learned to spread into the whole Social Networking Stuff. Facebook. Twitter. This blog. You know the drill.

But even after I had hundreds of followers on Twitter and Facebook, in Real Life, I was like a different person. Or rather, the same old person…shy, introverted, not likely to tell a stranger I’d published a book in a thousand years.

If someone who met me face to face found out, it was usually not thanks to me. For instance, my banker found out, because she was helping me with my account.

“So what kind of business is it?” she asked me in that polite-but-brusk Banker Voice.

“I’m a writer.”

“A tech writer?”

Ha. Doesn’t my husband wish.  “No, I write novels.”

Her eyes lit up. “REALLY? You write NOVELS? Oh, WOW! That’s so exciting! I’ve never met anyone famous before! So what have you published?”

So there it was, the Dread Question, but I no longer had to dread it. I had an answer. I told her that I write fantasy, epic but with strong romantic elements, and the name of the series and where she could buy it.

And then she went and told the entire bank that I was a famous novelist (“I’m really not famous,” I kept saying, but they didn’t care) and they should all buy my books. I was blushing like crazy, but also totally loving it.

I had read advice that one should get in the habit of simply letting everyone you met know that you’re a writer and what your book is. Not in an obnoxious way, not pinning them against the wall and giving a two-hour summery of your plot and the fishing trip with your step-uncle that inspired it, but just a line or a business card.

Today, for the first time, I took that advice. The plumber came over to fix the bathtub. After he finished everything, I handed him my business card and said, “I’m a writer. If you or anyone in your family likes fantasy, and if you don’t mind ebooks, email me and I’ll send you or them free books.”

“Thanks!” He looked at the card. “My stepdaughter really likes books about vampires. She reads constantly. I think she’d like this.”

My gosh. That was so simple and painless. No one was offended, no one was humiliated. I didn’t die on the spot from embarrassment. Maybe I could even do it again.

Killing Off Characters

I should know better than to watch Chinese movies, but I do anyway. Tragedy, comedy, romance, it doesn’t matter. They always end with someone face first in the dust. What is with that?

It used to be that only Red Shirts would have to worry on Away Missions. In epic fantasy, they were known as the “spear holders.” The bit players meant to die tragically, so the heroes could press stolidly onward. Now it’s all the rage in fantasy to kill off major characters. Joss Whedon and George R.R. Martin and Joe Abercrombie whack major characters right and left, just to prove they can.

I really hate that.

The rationalization is that if you know the major characters won’t die, this sucks the tension from the narrative. If the hero dangles from a cliff over a toxic ocean with a wyvern attacking from above and a kraken’s tentacle grabbing at him from below, the reader is only going to believe he’s really in danger if the author has proven I’m Really Serious This Time, This F#$^#r Could Die!!! 


Frankly, I don’t buy it. Or rather, I’m just not interested in that kind of tension. Yes, there’s always the possibility that the author could take a good story and ruin it by killing off my favorite character, but that’s not the kind of story tension I find enjoyable. It’s a matter of taste. Some readers want to trust that the author won’t lead them to an ending that is unsurprising and unearned. Other readers want to trust that the author can deliver an ending that is, if not a complete Happily Ever After, at least deeply satisfactory. I’m firmly in the HEA department.

All of this may seem slightly hypocritical when I admit (being careful of spoilers) that one major character in The Unfinished Song does, ahem, die. Maybe two. Probably not more than two. A few readers have written to me, worried about some of the developments in Root, and asked point blank: “Does this story have a happy ending?” 

It does. And I don’t mind saying that, because I’m not interested in keeping readers on tenderhooks on that point. The peril to the characters in the story is not whether they will die by the end of the book, but whether they will be true to themselves and to each other by the end of the book. To me that is a more interesting question, and the answer is more ambiguous.


The Lord of the Rings has a happy ending, and yet, at the same time, one of the saddest endings I have ever read. I never shed a tear for Romeo and Juliet, but after finishing Lord of the Rings (even though I’ve read it before), I feel moody and melancholy for days, as if the Elves have just departed in their ships and Middle Earth has newly died. Perhaps that’s because a major character does die in Lord of the Rings: Middle Earth itself. Frodo succeeds and fails at the same time, and because of that, he can never be the same. It is even questionable whether he “lives” at the end of the story. It could be argued that the Elves are sailing for heaven–a euphemism for death. Frodo, like the Elves is going on to a “far, far better place.” If that’s not a bittersweet ending I don’t know what is. Yet that works, whereas if Tolkien had decided to give the story a Chinese ending, and have Frodo kill himself at the end, or get shot full of arrows just as he threw the ring in the volcano, that would have been super duper lame.


I can’t stand Faux Tragique. Where an author suddenly has a character die of cancer or commit suicide to make a story seem elevated and literary. There are well done tragedies, and well done stories about cancer, but what makes them well done is that they speak a truth about human experience, not that they prove their ruthlessness. Since not all human experiences involve cancer or suicide, it is indeed possible to speak a truth about human experience without killing characters.

There’s a funny bit in The Kite Runner where the main character, while still a boy, reads his first short story to his friend. The story tells of a man who is promised riches if he can weep enough. So he kills his wife and weeps on a mountain of gold. His friend asked, “But why didn’t he just cut onions?”

Ambuguity vs Completion in Endings

That brings me to the question of whether you can have a happy ending and an ambiguous one at the same time. I think you can. I don’t mean the stupid form of ambiguousity, in which the Hero turns to the Heroine and says, “Shall we marry? Or will you take the ship and begin your life as a pirate?” and she laughs and says, “I’ll decide tomorrow.” That’s only any good if your Tomorrow begins Book 2. I don’t mean the kind of ending that leaves plot questions dangling like unraveling threads in a cheap shirt. I mean the kind of ambiguity that arises because the joy is so inexplicably intertwined with sorrow, the kind of ending that acts like an ouroboros worm, tying the end to the beginning in a shocking way that changes how you see the entire story.

In the Lord of the Rings, the Ring is destroyed at the end, and Sauron thrown down, and the great battle won. The main story question of whether Frodo would succumb to Ring was also answered, in a shocking way, but with no room for doubt. So it doesn’t meet Scott Bailey’s rules for endings, which are as follows:

1. Avoid summing up, or grand statements of theme.
2. Avoid tying up plot threads. I am bored by denouements that tell you how every character in the book’s life will turn out beyond the last pages of the book. (I shake my fist at you, Mr. Tolkien and your Scouring of the Shire!)
3. Avoid cliches and pats on the reader’s head.
4. Avoid an ending the reader will expect.
5. Avoid a complete sense of closure.

I disagree with several of these, not for all forms of literature, but for my story. I think an epic fantasy which doesn’t tie up plot threads is annoying (of course, I loved the Scouring of the Shire, so there); and I suspect I am favorably inclined toward grand statements of theme. I tend to be obvious that way, even when I try to be sly and subtle. Of course, I want to avoid an ending the reader expects, yet for me that ought to be done will still allowing a sense of closure.

I am aware of other possibilities, which I find interesting, though I’m not sure it is something I can use at the moment. There’s a lovely interview of RB at the end of my kindle edition of If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This. She said had this to say about endings:

…more and more, I have the sense that the endings that work most powerfully on me are passages that might as well be beginnings, that seem to open up more than they close down. And I think this has to do with the way those types of endings allow for the reader to keep a story alive in her imagination, her thoughts, even after the final words. I envision the ending of a story as the point at which I complete the process of handing the story over to the reader. It belongs to her by then. It’s common for people to recommend starting stories mid-action or in media res, but there’s at least as good an argument for ending them that way too. There’s a kind of generosity to not closing a story down entirely, a way that includes the reader, and I aspire to that. Of course, like so much else, it’s a tough balance to get right. Leave the wrong ends loose and it can feel like the exact opposite, ungenerous.

I love that idea, of ending the story in media res. Not in the sense of leaving a cliff-hanger (I’ve quite a few of those, but at some point there needs to be a sense of completion!) but as though the reader has joined the character on the road, walked alongside him for a while, and then causally parted ways. It’s something I think works better for short stories than novels, and almost by definition, it is more fitted to Character Based Fiction than to Plot Based Fiction. A story about a bank heist might end with the characters riding off into the sunset to rob more banks, but the heist itself is done–if it were not, that would feel “ungenerous.”

I intend to mull it over. Perhaps I shall try to do something along those lines in another work.