You often mention faux-resolutions. Can you go into greater depth about what this means, how to best accomplish this, how close to the real resolution it should come, etc?—Joe Iriarte
Of course, Joe.
Now, I know as well as you do that you people would never fake out your reader. Because that would be insincere, right? Manipulative? Dishonest?
Reality can be such a cruel teacher.
A faux resolution is the place in your plotline right after your final really devastating conflict—which is your second plot point, the end of Act II—which conflict you want your reader to think is your climax. (I made that term, “faux resolution,” up, just so you know. You won’t find it if you google it. But you will find the device if you look for it in published fiction, not to mention plays, screenplays, and scripts.)
Whew! your reader’s thinking, when you finally let go of their collar and let them stagger gratefully out into the faux resolution. Close call! That was some rollercoaster of a story!
This is where you want them to think it’s all over and the last 1/4-to-1/3 of your novel is, well, just feelin’ groovy. They could probably tell if they checked the number of pages left that that can’t possibly be true. But they never do.
And the reason you do this is to maximize the impact of your climax, which comes next. Not only do you want to raise your reader’s hair off their head, you want to lift them right out of their chair and crunch their head up through the ceiling to the next floor (or even out the roof). You know why?
Because the view from up there is really amazing, that’s why.
And don’t even worry about your real resolution until you’ve written your entire novel first. You know why?
Because you have no idea what that view is going to be until you get there.
(This is covered in greater depth under ‘Faux Resolution’ in Chapter 17 “Lulling Them into a Dream, Then Whacking an Epiphany Out of Them” of The Art & Craft of Fiction.)