The Power of an Epilogue By Susan Anne Mason

Susan Anne Mason

Angie, here: if you think the covers on Susan Anne Mason's novels are beautiful, you'll love the stories. Today, she shares why she uses a somewhat controversial device, the epilogue, to add depth to her stories and to her characters.

Before I ever started writing with the intent of becoming a published author, I had already formed a passionate opinion on the necessity of an Epilogue in the stories I read. If the book didn’t have one, I felt almost…CHEATED! What do you mean I don’t get to peek into the character’s future lives? I NEED to see how things turned out—how happy they are! (OK, maybe I get a little too involved in the books I read!)

As writers, we learn about showing the Hero’s Journey, the Noble Quest, The Black Moment and the Epiphany, yet little time is spent on the Climax and the Happily Ever After. But isn’t that the moment we’ve all been waiting for? We journey with our characters, laugh with them, cry with them, face their trials alongside them, and cheer them on toward their goal. To slap a one-page wrap-up at the end sometimes feels unsatisfying. Unfulfilled. Many times I found myself thinking: “Wait a minute. I went through 400 pages of angst for this? I need to live in the world of ‘happily ever after’ a while longer!”

That’s where a well-done Epilogue comes in. SHOW the characters enjoying the fruits of their labor, the reward for their arduous journey. Let them rejoice in the love they’ve yearned for! We want to share that happiness! Epilogues provide a greater sense of satisfaction for the reader and gives us (the writers) a chance to be a bit sappy, showing the couple getting married or having their first child. These are the moments we have waited the entire book for!

In my newest release, Love’s Faithful Promise, I had to make the epilogue really count. Not only was I tying up Deirdre and Matthew’s love story, but I was writing the finale for the whole O’Leary saga. This one had to be GOOD! So I chose to do something a little different. I made a 2-part epilogue with different Points of View and ended with the musings of the patriarch, James O’Leary (whose voice we had never heard directly before). At a big family gathering, I showed him reminiscing about the past, thinking back to his immigrant parents and how far his family had come since then. I felt it was a fitting conclusion to the O’Leary saga to have James and his wife look around at all their children and grandchildren and give thanks to God for their many blessings. 

Epilogues can be very powerful! They can plant seeds for future books or simply add a deeper level of emotional gratification for the reader. Use this tool wisely and you just might create fans for life. At the very least, your reader will close the book with a satisfied sigh and, hopefully, add your book to their Keeper Shelf.

Tell me what you think of epilogues.

About the Author

Susan Anne Mason describes her writing style as “romance sprinkled with faith.” She loves incorporating inspirational messages of God’s unconditional love and forgiveness into her characters’ journeys. Love’s Faithful Promise is her third historical novel in the Courage to Dream series. Irish Meadows won the Fiction from the Heartland contest sponsored by the Mid-American Romance Authors chapter of RWA. 
Susan lives outside Toronto, Ontario, with her husband, two children, and their cat. She loves red wine and chocolate, is not partial to snow even though she’s Canadian, and is ecstatic on the rare occasions she has the house to herself. Learn more about Susan and her books at www.susanannemason.com.

Connect with Susan:
Website: www.susanannemason.net 
Blog: http://suemasonsblog.blogspot.ca/ (my blog will be incorporated into the new website)
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/dashboard 
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/susan.anne.mason.333 
Twitter: @samason
Pinterest : https://www.pinterest.com/susanannemason/ 

Love's Faithful Promise

Widower Dr. Matthew Clayborne is devoted to two things: his work with wounded soldiers and his four-year-old daughter, Phoebe. When Deirdre O’Leary, a feisty New Yorker, arrives requesting he use his skills to help her stricken mother, he won’t abandon either of these priorities to care for one older woman. However, when his daughter suffers a health scare and needs a respite, Deirdre offers a trade—they can escape to the peace of her family’s farm, if he will care for Mrs. O’Leary. Matthew agrees for his daughter’s sake, but is intent on staying as short a time as necessary. The sojourn at Irish Meadows does wonders for Phoebe, and as she begins to flourish, Matthew finds himself drawn to the O’Learys, especially to the captivating Deirdre. But since he has no intention of leaving his life up north forever, and Deirdre has sworn off marriage in favor of her career, how will they deal with the undeniable attraction between them?

Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/hjq8loo
Bethany House: http://tinyurl.com/zn8oqcs
Barnes & Noble: http://tinyurl.com/zffxbvh

Don’t Skip a Word by Susan Tuttle

Image courtesy of JulesInKY on Morguefile.com

As writers we want each word we put on the page to mean something to the reader. If it doesn’t, we pull it out. We count each word—literally—and only keep those that add value to the story we’re writing. Each one is thought over and chosen with careful deliberation. And only the best word choice is used. We pour over synonyms to create the perfect picture that tells the story exactly as we created it to be seen.

We don’t want the reader to skip one single word.

This thought was with me recently as I remembered Hebrews 12:2 where God is mentioned as the author of our faith. It occurred to me that if the words I choose for my story world are selected so carefully, then the God who writes my story is doing no less. Just as we don’t want anyone to skip a word we put on the page, God doesn’t want us to miss any of the moments he’s chosen for us.

But we try, don’t we? We skip words, paragraphs, even pages out of the moments he’s penned into our lives. Sometimes they’re too painful so we avoid them. Maybe we’re incredibly busy, so we skim through certain periods. Maybe it’s a section that doesn’t hold our attention or a portion that we’re so busy rewriting in our head that we miss it all together. Whatever the reason, we skip the words.

Yet just as people won’t get the full effect of our stories if they leave pieces out, we miss out on the fullness of what God has for us when we don’t take it word-by-word. The happy, the sad, and yes, even the painful. Each word he authors in our lives is meant to build upon the next one, and when we stick around for the entire tale the end product is beyond what we could imagine. It’s our happily-ever-after.

Best of all? He meets you on every page of your story.

So don’t skip a word of it.

Susan Tuttle

Susan Tuttle is a homeschooling mom of three who is crazy about coffee, dark chocolate, and words—both reading and writing them. Combine that love of words with her passion for leading women to a life-changing encounter with Christ, and you’ll find her crafting Inspirational Contemporary Romance stories laced with humor, love, and healing transformations. When not cheering on her Ironman hubby, chasing the family dog, or tackling complex math problems to teach her kids (yes, even the third grader), you can catch Susan at her blog, Steps.

Amore! by Terri Weldon

Terri Weldon

Being a romance writer I’m thrilled to have a chance to post two days before Valentine’s Day. After all, Valentine’s Day is the most romantic day of the year. It evokes images of red roses, chocolates, and love letters. All things you want for your heroine, regardless of the genre you write. In fact, I think our belief in love is one of the reasons we write.

Since we all know the course of true love never runs smoothly in our novels, what would cause our heroines to believe in true love? Parents? Not for my heroine in the book I’m currently editing. Her parents are more interested in money and social status than their daughter. Boyfriend or husband? She doesn’t have one. God? She feels like God turned His back on her the day her sister died.

Enter my hero. A wonderful man with a personal relationship with Jesus who was raised by parents that exemplify true love. He longs to see my heroine develop a relationship with God and then to spend the rest his life loving her. In fact, he’s willing to sacrifice anything, even his job as a homicide detective, to protect her and win her love. Sigh. A happily ever after. Just what readers want. Any editors out there reading this? Um, not that I’d turn any requests down, but please know that was meant as a joke.

Before I bid you farewell, I’ll share with you a quote from my most treasured love letter, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.” ~John 3:16 NKJV

Just think about it, God loves you and me so much that He sacrificed His only Son so that our sins could be forgiven. There is no greater love. I know that’s why I believe in a perfect love and I pray you do too.

Let’s have a mini-brainstorming session. Leave a comment and tell me what your hero is willing to give up to prove his love to your heroine.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

****

Purchase Link

Misty Winslow is determined to find her prince, and she meets the man of her dreams through an Internet dating service. Or is he, because the new dentist in town also sets her heart aflutter.

It's love at first sight for Tyler Davenport, but before he can finish his first root canal, Misty is involved in an exclusive online romance with Wes99—Tyler’s online persona. How can he tell her he’s the man she’s been waiting to meet, and how rational is it for him to be jealous of Wes99! Soon Tyler's pulling out all the stops to woo Misty.

As Christmas approaches, Wes99 and Tyler both ask her to meet them under the mistletoe. Which man will she choose?

Terri is a lead analyst by day and an author by night. She enjoys gardening, reading, and playing in the hand bell choir. One of her favorite pastimes is volunteering as the librarian at her church. It allows her to shop for books and spend someone else’s money! Plus, she has the great joy of introducing people to Christian fiction.

She lives with her family in Oklahoma. Terri has three dogs – a lovable mutt and two adorable Westies.

Terri is a member of ACFW and OCFW, a local chapter of ACFW. Her dream of becoming a published novelist came true in November 2013 when Mistletoe Magic, released from White Rose Publishing. To learn more about Terri visit her website at www.TerriWeldon.com.

When Happily-Ever-After Isn’t Enough by Amanda Cabot

“Nothing happens.” It’s been many years since I received that particular rejection, but I still recall my confusion. How could the editor say that nothing happened? I was writing short contemporary romances for the secular market at the time, and I thought I’d done everything right. The book was set in an exotic location and was laced with fascinating (at least to me) details of life in a place most of us only dream about seeing. My hero and heroine met, they fell in love, and after resolving a few misunderstandings, they lived happily ever after. What could be wrong? And why did the editor say that nothing happened?

When I recovered from the sting of rejection, I realized that the editor was right, although I still thought she was wrong in saying that nothing happened. What she should have said was that nothing interesting happened. I had written a story of a close-to-perfect romance, and while readers might want to live that story, they don’t want to read about it. Perfection is boring, or as Tolstoi said in his famous opening to Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” What was missing from my book was conflict.

I hate conflict. After one of those stressful job interviews that used to be popular, the recruiter looked at me as if I were an unknown species. “You’d rather walk around a wall than through it,” he said. Duh! Who would willingly bang her head against a wall? There’s only one winner there, and it’s not the head. But that aversion to pain and conflict wasn’t helping my writing. If my characters weren’t willing to fight, if I wasn’t willing to put them through pain, then I was going to continue receiving rejection after rejection and hearing editors say, “Nothing happens.”

I wanted to make another sale, but I hated the idea of torturing my characters, and that’s how conflict felt to me. It seemed like an insurmountable impasse. And then I realized what I had to do. It might seem like a matter of semantics, but the technique worked for me. I told myself that I wasn’t torturing my characters; I was healing them. And since I believe in the healing power of love – both God’s love for us and that between a man and a woman – it became easy (okay, a teeny, tiny bit easier) to create characters who were in pain. Sometimes the pain was emotional. Sometimes it was physical. Though I wept and cringed as I wrote some of the scenes, I wouldn’t let myself off the hook. No matter how dark the story was, I knew that eventually I would give my characters – and my readers – what they deserved: healing, followed by a happily-ever-after.

And now, as I give thanks for the people who’ve touched my life, I include the editor who told me, “Nothing happens.”

With both parents avid readers, it’s no surprise that Amanda Cabot learned to read at an early age. From there it was only a small step to deciding to become a writer. Of course, deciding and becoming are two different things, as she soon discovered. Fortunately for the world, her first attempts at fiction were not published, but she did meet her goal of selling a book by her thirtieth birthday. Since then she’s sold more than twenty-five novels, all of which feature happy endings. Her most recent release is Christmas Roses, which answers the question, Can an itinerant carpenter searching for his father and a young widow who seeks only her daughter’s well-being find happiness in a small Wyoming mining town in the fall of 1882?

Amanda can be reached through her web site (www.amandacabot.com) or on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Amanda-Cabot/110238182354449?v=wall) or her blog (http://amandajoycabot.blogspot.com/).