The trick to providing readers with a satisfying story Climax is making certain all the pieces are already there.
Stories are like puzzles—giant 5,000-piece puzzles you spread all over your table and spend a year putting together. By the time you only have a handful of pieces left—by the time your story’s Climax is coming into view—the vast majority of your puzzle should be assembled so that readers have all the necessary pieces to see the big picture.
As a reader, nothing is worse than reaching the end of a story, chewing your nails, wondering how the author is going to make all these pieces fit together—only to feel tricked because the author pulled out a brand spanking new piece you’ve never even heard of before.
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (affiliate link)
The best books use foreshadowing to ensure readers have all the pieces going into the Climax. One of those books is Suzanne Collins’s popular The Hunger Games
Collins’s Climax involves pulling her main characters out of a certain-death situation, in which they’re being forced to kill each other in a futuristic gladiatorial game. She does a beautiful job of backing the characters up to a wall and seeming to leave them no way out. She could have utilized any number of tricks to save her characters and give readers the happy ending they wanted. But most of these tricks would have been a cheat.
Fortunately, she was savvy enough to know that she could only utilize the tools the story provided her: in this instance, poisonous berries with which the characters could threaten suicide and manipulate their captors. Readers may not have seen this use of the berries coming, but because Collins had already utilized the berries in a previous scene and foreshadowed their lethal potential, the twist in the Climax was a natural outflow of the plot.
