How Your Protagonist Lives Now

The art of writing an epilogue

Photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash

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I am a lover of epilogues. (I kinda like prologues, too, but that’s a story for a different day and yes I know we’re not supposed to write them.) I like reading epilogues to learn how the characters I fell in love with throughout the novel are living their lives now. I especially want to know that about the protagonist. Did the lessons they learned stick? Are their new lives worth how hard they fought for them? Was it worth it to go through all those upheavals to get to where they are now?

Because I am a lover of epilogues, I’m also a lover of writing them. Or so I thought. Until recently. Recently like every day since the new year began. Because I have been struggling mightily to write an epilogue for my forthcoming novel, The Matchmaker’s Temptation. (This is also the reason it has been forthcoming for so long.) My writing group doesn’t think the story needs one, but I have been insistent that it does and that I shall write one.

I’ve written epilogues before and they slid off my fingers like glib words gliding off the devil’s tongue. I wrote an epilogue for Emma Jean’s Bad Behavior that I loved. Ditto for The Bonne Chance Bakery. So why in the hell couldn’t I write one for Matchmaker?

I didn’t know what was going on. And because of that, I realized that I didn’t know, really know, much about epilogues. So I set myself to pondering what it is that I like about them so much. Which immediately helped me to writing. And so below, please find the ideas and tips that I have gleaned while studying the epilogue in my efforts to please for the love of God and all things holy, be able to write one.

How to write an epilogue

First of all, what is an epilogue?

It is not the same thing as prepping your reader for a sequel or the next book in the series. It’s a fast forward a few months or a year-ish into your main character’s life. (There aren’t rules here, but I’d say go far enough into the future for changes to have stuck, but not so far that they’ve become old hat.)

I like to think of an epilogue as a glimpse into the new life of your character, a life that never could have happened without the torture you put here through. One of the reasons epilogues are so satisfying is because they are hopeful. They show us that our struggles have meaning and our efforts to change and make ourselves better actually do count. A novel ends on a (hopefully) satisfying emotional note. An epilogue lets us see how that emotion plays out in real life.

But, back to the original question. How to write one?

Let the character guide you.

If you sit quietly long enough, or take to your journal for some side writing, your proto just might let you know how things are going. Ask her what’s happening in her life now that it’s six months or a year later from the events of the novel. Is she happy with how things turned out? What would she change or not change? What’s the best part of her new life? The worst? (Pro tip: interviewing your characters is a useful way to get to know them at any point of the writing process.)