Okay, we know how you feel about prologues and interludes. Basically the same way Inigo Montoya felt about the six-fingered man.
What about epilogues?
Thank you
-Dave L
Hey Dave, great to hear from you again!
The short answer is that Mythcreants loves epilogues. Epilogues are great and most works longer than a short story should have them. All epilogues all the time. It’s epilogues all the way down, baby!
So, why do we think that? Because the epilogue serves an important purpose that makes the story better. Prologues, by definition, take place before the story has actually started, which means we don’t need to read them. Likewise, interludes are specifically a break from the story to go do something else. Why would you want to take a break from the story? The story is what we’re here to do! While there are lots of other common mistakes in prologues and interludes, those fundamental issues keep them from working even if the writer does everything else correctly.
What purpose do epilogues serve, exactly? They give readers time to wind down and wean themselves off the characters that they’ve (hopefully) grown attached to. If a story just cuts off after the climax, it usually feels very abrupt. Yes, the hero won (or lost), but what happened then? We need a bit more to assure ourselves that they’re doing okay now, that they’ve moved on from whatever conflict motivated them in the story.
To illustrate the difference, look at the book and film versions of The Martian. In the book, the story ends right after Watney reaches the rescue ship in orbit of Mars. That’s it, we’re done. It’s not the most pleasant experience. Watney’s a really compelling character and we just spent a whole book cheering for him to get back home! Even though he’s overcome the biggest challenges before him, not getting to see his return leaves us on edge. In the film, they added a short scene of Watney teaching a new class of astronauts, which is exactly what we needed. We see him on Earth and doing okay. This gives us a little more time to say goodbye when we’re not on the edge of our seats from the climax.
Of course, epilogues can be done poorly, like any other aspect of storytelling. A common mistake is adding a long time jump between the climax and epilogue. At this point, the characters are essentially different people than the ones we knew, so we’re back to the original problem of not getting a chance to say goodbye and wind ourselves down. It wouldn’t work for Return of the Jedi to flash forward two decades and show Leia restoring the Republic or what have you, but it’s important to have a sequence where the heroes party with the Ewoks to celebrate the Empire’s defeat. Epilogues can also go on for too long, introduce new problems that feel anticlimactic, etc. There are a lot of ways to get them wrong.
Nevertheless, a good epilogue will vastly improve a story, while leaving one out will detract from the readers’ experience. So remember your ABEs: Always be epilogueing!
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A really bad epilogue choice was killing off Cassandra in urban fantasy comic book story “the wicked and the divine”.
The MC, Laura, originally disliked Cassandra for being so sceptical and questioning of everything which she just wanted to embrace with wonder. Later in the story, she begins to respect Cass and comes to her for help, since she realizes that this attitude might actually be much needed sometimes.
In the main story, Laura is only sixteen, and Cass a twenty-something. In the epilogue, we learn that they became a couple and got married years later, which was cool to know! That could definitely go in an epilogue.
HOWEVER, the epilogue takes place when the old gang are all together again for Cass’s FUNERAL, because after being this kick-ass hero, she died from a RANDOM ANEYRUSM when she was in her sixties (so she got a pretty long life, but still died prematurely for nothing).
What makes matters WORSE here is that Cass is a trans woman of Japanese origin.
They could just have had the whole gang get together decades later for some OTHER reason in the epilogue, and it would have been a good one.
That does indeed sound very bad!
On a sidenote, it’s a little surprising to me that you guys LOVE the Martian so much… I kind of prefer the movie to the book, because the longer I read, the more I felt that I wasn’t reading about a human being – Watney seemed more like, IDK, the physical embodiment of a motivational poster or something, with his RELENTLESS optimism and INDOMITABLE fighting spirit. (Of course, movie Watney never gives up either, but it makes a difference that I’m not in his head when watching the movie.) I’ve seen other people make that critique, and have fans reply that it’s because he’s an astronaut, and only people who are truly like that get picked to be astronauts. Perhaps that’s right, but I still couldn’t relate to him.
I didn’t like The Martian much, either, but a big part of that is because I had just finished The Fated Sky, which is a well-researched story taking place on a NASA-style mission to Mars. (I’m also from a family of NASA-fanboys). In Fated Sky, it’s made very clear how precarious and designed-to-efficiency space equipment is, and how unrealistic it’d be for someone to use it the way he does (by himself and perfectly every time) and survive.
I also hated the “meanwhile, back on Earth” story line in The Martian– all of the characters, dialogue, and space-mission planning were simplistic and silly.
Yeah we’ve been fans of The Martian since way back. The Lady Astronaut books are also very good, though the two series scratch very different space itches. Other than the first section of Calculating Stars, Lady Astronauts is mostly a personal and political drama, where The Martian is an adventure/survival story. Both stories have a few places where they get, let’s say, creative with realism and hope you don’t notice.
As for Watney feeling unrealistically optimistic, I can’t say he struck me that way, but I’d also never say that astronauts are “just like that.” Astronauts are human too.
Aw, I’m happy to see you say that about the movie of The Martian, because I felt the exact same way. I thought the movie really worked because it stuck closely to the book except it a.) trimmed some of the repetitive challenges and b.) added that short epilogue. It brought out the best in the original—one of the truly great book-to-film adaptations IMO.
Yep it worked very well!
Does your definition of an epilogue include all “falling action” that happens after the climax? Like a “denouement”?
While definitions are squishy, falling action typically refers to tying up a few loose ends after the climax, like apprehending the bad guy after the main action of stopping their bomb from exploding. So long as this isn’t present as a conflict that the heroes might fail, it’s typically not a problem, and it’s often a good place to put closure you can’t fit in the climax. To continue the Return of the Jedi example: Luke being with Vader when he dies is falling action, while the Ewok party is epilogue. In the former, we’re still technically resolving the Death Star conflict, but it’s pretty much over.
I love Ursula Vernon’s books, but tbh every one of them needs a good epilogue. I always thought that they end way too abruptly, right after the MC finishes whatever they’re doing during the story
Epilogues are often neglected and it’s weird. What’s not to love about making your manuscript both more enjoyable and extending the wordcount a bit at the same time?
Sometimes you just want to be DONE w/ writing the @$#% story!
A lot of authors and readers probably associate epilogues with what is everybody doing now and maybe a sequel hook at best. The standard what is everybody is doing now basically is about romance, family, and career. “After defeating the Evil Star Lord, our heroine is in a loving relationship with her partner, raising a family, and pursuing her career in the Imperial Intergalactic Sanitary Service as Cosmic Toxic Waste Disposer, 2nd Class.” Many authors probably want to avoid this.
Thank you for answering my question
I’ve seen good and bad epilogues. One mistake I’ve seen is to focus on entirely different people who were not even in the rest of the story
But won’t an epilogue make writing a sequel more difficult?
Depends on what kind of epilogue but yeah, you would usually wait until the series is done before writing one where all the problems have been solved.
Epilogues are a standard feature of genre romance. They show that, yes, after the tumult and angst that was the courtship, the couple is indeed living Happily Ever After – or at least Happily For Now. They may still have some minor residual problems or character flaws, but any big issues that might stand in the way of their contentment have already been resolved.
A word of warning: many romance epilogues do feature the couple’s child or children. But there’s been pushback against the Babies Ever After trope – not everyone needs a child to be happy, and some child-free readers may lose engagement when the character they identified with is revealed a parent – so you can find plenty of romances that don’t use it. Reader beware.
Also skipping forward far enough for the lovebirds to have kids probably runs afoul of another problem: it’s far enough in the future that these feel like effectively different people.
I have found that most Babies Ever After epilogues take place about 1-5 years after the main story, when the characters’ children are very young – often literal babies. Weirdly, one romance epilogue I read was set 40 years later, and did not mention any children or grandchildren! It actually worked really well for me, because the hero is reading the heroine a love letter he wrote for her in their youth, and it’s nice to think about an old couple reminiscing on their young love. Just goes to show that there’s always exceptions to the rules of writing – you just need the wisdom to know when and how to break them.
Plus at least the letter is from a character you’re more likely to recognize!
Exactly!
One romance epilogue I did *not* like was from *200 years later,* and involves a present-day descendant of the couple tracing her family roots and meeting a cute guy who happens to also be a descendant. Setting aside the ickiness of a Meet Cute between two cousins – even very distant ones who didn’t know about each other – the characters spend way too much time thinking and talking about their family tree. Why did you do that, Author? You killed off the characters I spent most of your book getting invested in, then introduced a bunch of new ones, most of whom are already dead, and expected me to care about them all? No way! Write these characters their own books if you want me to read about them so badly!
But maybe skip the cousins’ story. Or revise it so they’re not related. ~_~
But, shouldn’t the falling action be part of the story? like the last chapter. I use two epilogues, but made the one about the protagonist the last chapter (despite it being a short time after the resolution and being told from another character’s POV) and the one about the other POV character a full on epilogue.
I think that if it is connected to the story arc it belongs in the actual story. As a prologue i think an epilogue must be stand alone, expanding on the plot but not being neccessary to get the whole picture.
Well falling action and epilogue are different things. Like I mentioned before, falling action is wrapping up a few remaining issues that weren’t resolved in the conflict, while epilogue is what happens after the conflicts are wrapped up. So long as the falling action isn’t presented as some major obstacle that the characters might fail to overcome, it’ll be fine. If it is, then it’ll feel anti-climactic.
For example: Luke trying to get Vader off the Death Star in Return of the Jedi is falling action. There’s still some conflict there, but there isn’t an expectation that Luke might fail it. If he had a life or death battle with stormtroopers, that would be weird. In comparison, the Ewok party is epilogue. There’s no conflict there at all, we’re just having a well earned celebration.
I imagine that some authors show the protagonist’s children as a way of introducing the next generation, who are going to have their own story arc in the sequel.
I can’t say I’ve actually seen that very often, but I’m sure some authors do it. The Expanse often uses it’s epilogues to introduce new hooks for the next book, which is usually fine. That’s not an epilogue’s main purpose, but it’s not a problem unless it looks like this is a conflict that needs to be solved right now.
The worse epilogue I ever read first gave the reader a warning. Several warnings in fact. Foolishly I went ahead. Then they revealed the protagonist had been replaced with a shapeshifter since the climax of the book during which time his old wife passed away so he could marry and impregnate his destined lover. If I wasn’t reading it on my tablet, I would have thrown the book across the room.
I hesitate to ask but was the shapeshifter destined to marry this lover?
Not from my understanding. I’m not sure I’m explaining it right.
1) At climax of the book, hero and villain fight
2) Hero walks out and seals the villain away
3) “Happy ending”, Wife #1 dies peacefully from cancer so hero can marry Wife #2 and impregnate her
4) Epilogue, we find out it was the hero that was sealed away and the villain is posing as the hero.
It was either a free ebook or one for a buck. Even without the epilogue, I hated the book. Too much senseless killing and violence. Hero and Wife #2 were hyper-competent and revealed to be genetically improved and nigh-perfect. Explicit biblical parallels to Adam and Eve including returning to the Garden. I only finished the book because I like to finish every book I start. Even the bad ones.
A good epilogue is incredibly powerful, even if it’s completely lacking in action. The Walking Dead’s final issue gives me the feels every time, as it was the perfect tribute to the world of equality and human solidarity Rick had fought so hard to build.
I may be the only person to hold this view…but I liked the ending of The Martian in the book much better than that in the movie. The book ends with the hint of more problems facing the crew — if I remember correctly, the filters are dirty and it is hard or even impossible? to clean them, and supplies might be running low. Cool! How are they going to get home? Will they make it safely? Perhaps a sequel is in the works? It gave me something to wonder about. The movie ending, however, was typical Hollywood fare: rah rah we succeeded…Meh.
I found both the movie and the book entertaining, though, and I suspect life on Earth might be better if we had more (good) epilogues.
“A common mistake is adding a long time jump between the climax and epilogue”
You mean like showing what the three main characters are doing nearly twenty years later, showing them as adults parents sending their kids to the same magic school they went to whereas we left them as barely more than teenagers…
I have no idea what witchcraft and wizardry story you could possibly be referring too… ;)
It’s a mystery!
I just finished Swedish fantasy trilogy Tvåhjärtat, and I really liked the epilogue even though it’s a hefty time jump.
The epilogue is told in the first person by a girl who was just a baby in book three (although a baby of some significance). In the epilogue she’s eight. Still, I thought it worked well.
Everyone is not in a great place, but you see that society now is more mixed and multicultural, not as segregated as it was during the trilogy. Some people who had a romance going are married now. There were these siamese twin girls in the trilogy who had some magic powers and played a significant role, and in the final battle it’s like they levelled up A LOT in magic. In the epilogue, though, they’re still around and seem to live a pretty normal life (well, except that they read books and write, which no other main character can…). I was happy to see that they didn’t just disappear to another dimension or something, like became straight-out divine, which I suspected during the climax. That would have felt too much like killing off the disabled characters for my taste. But they’re still living human lives, jumping around on their crouches.
I just really enjoyed this epilogue.
There’s one thing that makes epilogues hit or miss for me. There should be few, if any, questions about how the characters got to the epilogue from the final chapter. This is what mades me dislike the epilogue of A Close and Common Orbit. It jumps ahead to show that a main character has made some important, interesting changes in their life…changes that weren’t even mentioned before the epilogue. I was left wondering how the character had decided everything, and feeling like the story of those decisions would have been interesting to hear.