When I am writing according to my normal process, I nearly always have some degree of ending in mind from very early on in the process. It’s nearly always wrong as to specifics (if I have any specifics; for a while, every plot outline I wrote ended with “There is a big fight/confrontation and the good guys win. Appropriate rewards and weddings follow.”), but at least I have something to aim at.
Twice now, though, I’ve written books where I had no idea what the ending was going to be when I started. The first was Talking to Dragons, and it’s been long enough that I don’t have a clear memory of when and how I came up with the ending for that one. I do recall that I was somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the way through, because I was getting very nervous about not knowing.
The second one is The Dark Lord’s Daughter, which I’m not sure totally counts as something I’ve written, because I haven’t actually finished the first draft yet. I am, however, 75,000 words into it, which should be at least ¾ of the way done, and until about 70,000 words, I didn’t have even a fuzzy picture of the end. Coming up with one was a struggle, and I tried a number of different tricks along the way.
The story started with a situation: modern teenager discovers she’s the daughter of the Dark Lord in an alternate fantasy universe. I had characters galore, and all of them had problems my heroine was supposed to solve (or notions that would get in the way of her solving anything). The trouble was that I couldn’t see a main plotline for my heroine – a major problem that everything else fed into that would end up in a climactic the-story-is-now-finished moment.
So about halfway through, I started making lists. I took the incidents that I’d already written, and the ones I knew were going to happen, and I grouped them in different ways: these are the grand political problems; these are the family problems; these are the heroine’s personal problems; these are the teenager problems.
It helped, in that I could see that the story had a shape and felt like it was going somewhere, but I still couldn’t nail down where it was going.
So I did the Post-It thing: I wrote everything down on Post-Its and started moving scenes and incidents around. Some things had to happen in a particular order; for instance, the late-night conversation with the dragon skull couldn’t happen until after her first encounter with it (because otherwise she wouldn’t have known where it was or that it could talk). Other incidents had more flexibility. The council meeting started off happening right after the heroine’s arrival at the castle; then it moved to the end; then the middle; then it got split up and part of it turned into reactions to the heroine’s arrival and the rest of it became a ceremony at the end of the story.
Eventually I got a structure I liked – a shape for the story that I could start fitting all the pieces into. I still didn’t have an ending, but at least I had a general direction that allowed me to continue to make progress. Slow, painful progress, but progress nonetheless.
It wasn’t until I got to the current scene (probably two massively-long and one short scene from writing The End) that I finally figured out the problem, and got the ending dropped in my lap.
The current scene is a revelation scene that supplies some unexpected background details and some personal information for the heroine about her biological family. I expected the scene to be mostly part of the emotional plot, clearing the decks for what I hoped would be the Grand Finale.
And then, halfway through the scene, key information started falling out of characters’ mouths and fitting together to turn everything on its head. The villain is not who I thought it would be. The underlying problem is not what I thought it would be. What the obviously-villainous not-the-villain character has been doing suddenly makes perfect sense and is not really reprehensible given what she knows and is trying to do. And my problem, the reason I have had so much trouble coming up with the ending, is that I didn’t know enough about the beginning. Not the beginning as in Chapter One, but the things that happened between ten and fourteen years prior to Chapter One.
I might have come up with this ending earlier, if I had sat down and really fleshed out How Everybody Got Into This Mess In The First Place, but then again, I might not have.
My point here is that all the various things I did to poke at the story were useful, in that they allowed me to keep on producing words, which eventually got me to the point where those key background details from ten to fourteen years ago could fall out and fit together. (It probably would also have helped enormously if I’d actually had a couple of months in the past five years to sit down and focus, but c’est la vie). But all the poking isn’t actually what solved the problem. What solved the problem was putting four characters in a room and letting some of them yell at each other long enough for them to start letting out secrets that I hadn’t made up until I needed that dialog…and then pausing long enough to see the pattern that new information made.
The worst thing I ever did for myself as a writer was to set out on my first real attempt to write something, an SF mystery, with no idea who the culprit was our how it would come out…and everything came together perfectly, giving me confidence that I could just start writing and it would all come together.
Hahahahaha. The definition of misplaced confidence. Well, eventually I learned better. 😉
Meanwhile *The Dark Lord’s Daughter* sounds great. Can’t wait to read it!
Hurrah! Looking forward to The Dark Lord’s Daughter.
When I was writing A Diabolical Bargain, the main character told me, after I had written what I thought was the ending, that I hadn’t gotten to the happy ending yet because he was not happy. TWICE.
Is The Dark Lord’s Daughter the story where you were messing around with post-it notes back in July 2015? (I’d give a link, but your blog has a nasty habit of spam-canning any posts with links in them, even if the link is to another post in the same blog.)
It does sound like a great story.
Myself, I couldn’t do that much writing without knowing the ending. The story would wander off into the weeds, except that my back-brain would go on strike, first. (“I won’t let you wander off into the weeds. No progress for you until you figure out what the ending is.”)
I’ll add that “knowing the ending” just means in plot-skeleton form, more or less. Only I’m starting to think that “plot skeleton” is a backwards metaphor. The ending is the skull of the plot skeleton, the part that gives the story “bite.”
I remember those weeds. . .
I still wander off into them, but now on outlines, not novels. It’s a lot easier in a three-page novel outline to give up than a 300 page novel.
Can’t wait to read The Dark Lord’s Daughter! 😀
“Think of your everyday self as a lost rider on the back of a powerful black horse. The rider may be freaking out. That’s understandable. It’s frightening to be lost. But your everyday self is not who creates the first draft. The first draft is written by the big black horse―your subconscious mind. That horse is smart, and it knows exactly where it’s going. So trust it. It will get you home. Just write. Put down whatever feels right, even if it makes no sense to you. Don’t think too much about it, don’t hold the reins too tight, and soon you’ll see your way again.”
―Nancy Etchemendy
Or, more succinctly,
“Your subconscious knows way more than you do about writing.”
―Alexandra Sokoloff
Congrats on getting an ending figured out! Looking forward to reading it.
One wonders, would the characters yelling at each other have given you the answer if you hadn’t done all the various poking at the story first? When my back-brain does something like that, I’m never sure if it’s been lying in wait with the answer all along, or if all my unsuccessful attempts to figure it out contributed after all, just not in the way I was trying to get them to do.
`The Dark Lord’s Daughter’ sounds like it’s going to be a lot of fun, just from the title alone.
Thank you in advance for something wonderful to read! And good luck with the next several scenes!
Also, thank you so much for this post – I’m currently an embarrassing number of words and years into a piece with no clear ending yet, and am desperately hoping that the story’s recent shifts in direction contribute usefully to the end (as opposed to inflicting gratuitous pain on some already-bruised characters before the plot continues its random walk). The latest developments almost certainly wouldn’t have happened if I’d finished the first draft much earlier, i.e., before grad school, and therefore wouldn’t have written a few backstory scenes as character-development/author-needs-to-write-some-low-stakes-fiction-as-a-sanity-break exercises…