i have pretty much finished a novel, well first draft My final hurdle is explaining why the story is being told. It’s a first person thriller/mystery. It is heavy on plot and character development and light on description I.e each blade of grass is not described in detail. I can’t decide on how to complete the story in terms of why it’s being told. What I mean is Dracula is being told because it is diary entries. Catcher in the rye because holden is advised to write his tale down by a medical professional, if I remember that correctly. Fear and loathing in las Vegas is essentially a magazine story. So this is my problem. If you have any other examples to help me out that would be great. I’m leaning towards the reason for the story being a lecture and at the very end of the lecture someone in the audience asks a question that makes the main character wonder if Ben caught the real killer.
Good question. You have probably answered it yourself. Maybe go with the lecture idea. It could be that the accepted wisdom of the subject of Ben and the killer is not the truth. Or maybe it is. How would the main character's own perception figure in here? (Is he the one doing the lecture, etc. Is he perhaps the guilty party? Has he got some horse in the race?) Does your narrator want to set the record straight in public? Or does he want to conceal the truth? Or maybe continue to ferret out the truth till he solves the mystery himself? These are questions to ask yourself, and see what you come up with. (I don't need to know the answers on this thread. You're the author, and you don't want to give the game away, do you?) It's an idea to tie this up, perhaps with the lecture idea at the start, then finish with a lecture motif as well. Nice to bookend the story that way. I do love circular stories ...stories that end up back with the starting motif, but with a completely different set of perspectives or in a different time or place than when the story began.
A good story is being told because it's a good story. I would advise against tacking on a reason, especially for the sake of thinking there has to be a reason. Publishers tend to shy away from stories about the characters writing their story. Writing about writers writing has been done and, I believe, fallen out of fashion. You don't need it, and it could end up hurting the story.
