Act I HERE
Act II part 1 HERE
Act II part 2 HERE
Act II part 3 HERE
Act II part 4 HERE
ACT III: THE FINAL BATTLE
In Act III, we're getting off the boat for the stone mattress viewing tour, and this is where Verna will kill Bob . . . or our world has gotten more and more restricted, till the whole family is in the kitchen, food and cigarettes running out, and the radio stations have stopped broadcasting . . . or we're confronting the witch in her own castle . . .
This is where the Final Battle takes place.
In some cases this is really close to the end, with not much occurring afterwards. For example, in "The Birds" you could argue that the very Final Battle actually occurs after the end of the story. We pretty much know what's going to happen, but we don't see it-- we're just left knowing that it will happen, which in a way is worse.
In The Wizard of Oz, though, the final battle with the antagonist-- the Witch-- happens well before the end, with lots of twists and turns following, as we get the broom back to the Wizard, then learn the Wizard isn't who he says, then he teaches everyone a valuable lesson, Dorothy thinks she won't get back to Kansas (Wizard has no magic), then she thinks she will (but he has a balloon!), then she thinks she won't (the balloon leaves without her), etc.
In Stone Mattress it's pretty much in the classic place going by Freytag's triangle, at least the way I was taught it in graduate school, with the climax coming quite close to the end, and then a short denoumont tail coming after that.
Verna kills Bob, then there are just a few paragraphs about how she tidies things up and arranges to hide his absence. I would argue that this story ends low on the "falling action" slope, leaving us to wonder about the resolution: Will Verna will get caught or not?
This is a classic and (to me) satisfying type of short story ending, which leaves us, not completely in the wilderness, but with one or two definite, but divergent, paths that the character might take after the last line of the story. In this case, Verna eiter will or won't get caught.
However, not all endings work that way. "The Birds" leaves us with basically one possibility for what will happen after the end, and that's effective too; and The Wizard of Oz tells us very little about what will happen next; it just leaves us with a general sense that things are tied up and okay now, in a way they weren't at the beginning of the story: Dorothy's restlessness is solved. We have gone all the way into the "resolution" stretch of Freytag's triangle. So there are many ways to handle Act III.
The classic movie ending is essentially a happy ending, with the character's basic problem solved. Often, they may not have gotten what they Wanted, but they have gotten what they Needed, but didn't realized they Needed until the story's adventures taught them. This is what happens in the Wizard of Oz. Dorothy wants to leave home in the beginning; soon this changes to wanting to be back home, but it's only after she's proven herself through many adventures that she has the power to really go back and inhabit that world, and feel satisfied to be there. She Wanted to escape to a world over the rainbow. She Needed to see that home was where she belonged all along. (And only by going over the rainbow could she truly learn that.)
This basically happy ending does not exist at all in the short fictions by Atwood and DuMaurier. What does happen is that things have come to a head, and a change, an irrevocable change, has occurred in the main character's life. They have gone on a very definite journey and have wound up in a different place than they were in the beginning. Although they may or may not have solved their initial problems, movie-style, we know this narrative is truly a story because a significant change has occurred.
Looking back at Hemingway's "Indian Camp," we also see an un-movie-like ending, but different from the other short-story endings. After the climactic passages, in which we as the readers really feel the the unnamed woman's pain and its impact on others in several different ways, we end with falling action (finishing up, leaving), then the last line, which feels so powerful every time I read it. We learn that these experiences, which have changed us just through reading about them in a very short story, have not really touched Nick after all. He still sees the woman essentially as an other: female, "Indian," living on an island apart from where Nick lives. He doesn't really get it. Yet. I think it's that sense of "yet" that makes the ending so effective, that seems to leave me at the edge of a cliff after that last period.
TO DO:
Bring your character to the Final Showdown. Whatever you have promised or planted earlier in the story should bear fruit now. If you have shown us a gun in Act I, this is where it has to go off. By the time you write the climax, you'll probably have a pretty good sense of what needs to happen between there and the end--what shape you want the end to take.
Next comes the really fun part: revising with a knowledge of the shape of your plot. If you find you want a gun to go off in the Act III climax, don't worry about whether you've shown it to us yet. Have it go off. Then go back and revise: plant it in the beginning, and make sure we glimpse it a couple more times before the payoff in Act III.
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