alternatives to an epilogue

Question

I'am writing a novel. The events in the novel take place in about two years. In this time the events of the main plot and conflicts between the characters get a conclusion. However, there is a secondary plot that cannot be resolved in two years because it would be completely unrealistic, however I would like to provide at least some clues about how that turned out and what happened to the characters.

I know I can write an epilogue, but are there other options?

In case it is useful, the narrator is a character that is a child while the events of the novel take place. I mean, the child becomes an author and the she writes the book in third person. Maybe I keep this information to myself or maybe I reveal it to the reader at some point.

Answer 1

I know I can write an epilogue, but are there other options?

Denouement

Traditionally this character wrap-up happens in a novel's denouement.

19th Century authors could go overboard with the long explanation on every character's eventual fate, but this matched the (hanging) story threads. Jane Austen has massive info-dumps at the end of all her novels, but her stories have an extreme number of characters each with their own trajectory – she's also skilled at twisting dry information into ironic humor, and we get to know these characters first so her denouements are entertaining.

(Austen's also shuffling everyone's character relationships right up to the climax so the denouement is the only way to tell us how everyone fared in their final situation – it's not just a bow on the end, there's still new information we want to know.)

"And they lived happily ever-after," is also a traditional denouement just very brief and on-the-nose.

My point is a denouement is flexible, but there needs to be a compelling reason to keep reading.

Flash Forward

No need to over-think it. The 'leap' here is simply that your final chapter/scene takes place many years/decades later.

Readers don't need an explanation. Your story already has methods for establishing time and place for each scene. This is simply another scene, with cues woven into the prose to show how much time has passed.

Frame Story

A frame story is a second narrative outside the main story. The cliche is rigid 'bookends' with an opening scene and a closing scene – reducing the main story to a 'flashback'. But there are more creative ways to interweave a frame story so it appears more like a dual narrative, or where the two stories appear to blur/align, or one changes the direction of the other.

Your narrator-as-author could be the frame story, but it will need more than a reveal ("...and Dear Reader, I was that little girl!") to be a compelling 2nd narrative with its own conflicts and characters that somehow still relate to the 1st.

(For instance, the film Titanic has a frame story which doesn't add new information, but helps ground the main story as 'historic reality' – in contrast to it actually being fictional melodrama.)

Epilogue

I think an epilogue is appropriate when the perspective shifts completely.

An example might be a new character who has just read the authors' book, and wonders how much of that story was true since the author would have fabricated details they could not have known. This character could attempt to research what became of these people, perhaps specifically to find answers that are not in the book, and discover the author must have been that child in the novel.

This 'perspective shift' allows for character resolutions that would have been unknown to the narrator at the time of writing, and also the extreme shift of having the story continue after the original narrator's death. It also allows for an ambiguous resolution where the researcher can't be sure of what really happened, and the possibility of contradicting the original narrator.

Cut It

Hard to let go of our babies. Beta-readers or an editor might have a better perspective whether the epilogue is contributing to the novel, or tacked-on for the sake of completion.

Answer 2

Personally, I would have the victory lap on the two-year story, a wrap-up.

But at the very end of this wrap-up, you have your protagonist, or one of the more serious characters, alone with his drink, looking out at the night sky.

A fellow hero joins him.

"What's up, Jake? People want to see you in there. It's your plan."

Jake looks to Bill, looks away and shrugs. "We're not done yet, you know."

Bill sighed. "We've been fighting for two years, kid. Take the win. We stopped them, you'll stop them again. And again after that. Have a drink and shake some hands, we'll plan tomorrow, tomorrow."

Jake looked into the night one more time, nodded and rose. "Yep. Alright."

Then start your final chapter with a sub-title, "Twenty Years Later."

Not an info-dump, in story form. The final chapter on the bigger war.

Jake, older, lined and prematurely gray, walks with a pronounced limp but mounts the dais without help. The room quiets, all eyes turn to him.

Jake raises a glass. "To my Commander, Bill. He always knew this day would come. He never lost faith, to his last words. He should have been here."

Everyone in the room raised glasses to Jake, and spoke in near unison. "To Commander Bill!"

Answer 3

In The Lord of the Rings there are four chapters that follow the climactic battle and destruction of the ring that ends the main storyline. There is one chapter of leavetakings, and three chapters that narrate the hobbit's return to the Shire, the changes they find there and how they deal with them, Frodo's eventual departure to the elvish otherworld from the Grey Havens, and what became of everyone else.

If you have a long, epic narrative it is perfectly fine to have a long epilogue. Readers will be reluctant to leave your world and the characters they have come to love, and they won't begrudge you some delay before the final end. The few pages of epilogue in Harry Potter where in fact disappointingly short for most fans.

If you have written a slim work of 40,000 words, I wouldn't add another 10,000 after the climax, though. The epilogue should be that: brief in relation to the main body of work. If you find yourself trying to cram too much more into the epilogue, consider writing a sequel instead.