In spite of all the writing advice books and blogs and web sites that tell you to start by making up the ending, I can’t think of any professional writers I know who do this in the strictest sense, at least as their regular process. (I’ve known a couple who were struck by an ending-idea for a particular story, but it wasn’t their usual process.)
The vast majority of writers I know start with a character, or a background/setting, or an incident, or some other basic facet of story. The ending develops second (or fifth, or tenth, or not until they actually reach the point of writing the thing). And the exact point in the process where the writer finally invents the ending (or an ending) has a big impact on exactly how they go about making it up.
Because the thing about endings is: they are the culmination of the story. What has gone before builds toward the ending (at least, it does by the time the manuscript is finished). To use the old road-trip analogy, if you left Chicago driving toward the setting sun, and you’ve gone through St. Louis and Denver and the Rocky Mountains, no one will believe it if you arrive at your destination and see the sun rising over the ocean and the Statue of Liberty. You’re expecting the ocean to the west and the Golden Gate bridge, or the Hollywood sign. But you’re also going to be disappointed if you’ve traveled all that way only to have the car break down in a dusty little town of 200 people that’s not particularly scenic and certainly wasn’t where you’d hoped or expected to end up.
There is a lot of flexibility possible here. You can drive west from Chicago, heading for “somewhere on the West Coast,” and when you get to St. Louis, you decide that you want to angle southwest, aiming for San Diego. Somewhat farther on, you decide to finish the trip in Las Vegas instead. But there are still things that just aren’t going to work, like driving west through Denver and the Rockies and ending up in New York.
One of the things this means is that the longer the writer takes to figure out where the story is headed, the more limits there are on where the story can be headed without a rewrite that is so complete that it might as well be another story. If you set out from Chicago to San Francisco, and after driving for an hour or so you decide you’d much rather head for New York, it’s not that much trouble to turn around and head in the new direction. If, on the other hand, you’re two days into the trip and have reached the Rocky Mountains before you decide you want to go to New York, you either have to spend two days driving back to Chicago over the same ground you’ve already covered, or else you have to fly back to Chicago and re-start the trip, heading east this time. Either way, there’s a lot of time wasted.
Of course, with writing, sometimes one has to get half a book in before realizing what one really wants to do with these characters (or this idea). This can happen even when you knew the ending scene right from the start. When I wrote Mairelon the Magician, I knew from the very beginning that the characters were going to go back to London to confront the villain and a couple of henchmen in a warehouse near the docks. It was going to be a tense, dramatic stand-off, and I can still picture those five people in that huge, dusty, box-like building. Instead, our heroes confronted two villains, a couple of henchmen, and a raft of minor characters with their own agendas in a hunting lodge in the country, and it was more comedy than drama.
Also, “know your ending from the start” means different things to different writers. Sometimes, the writer has a very specific, detailed (wrong?) picture of the ending, as I did with Mairelon. Other times, the writer has a much more general notion (“the hero stops an invasion”) that they can’t flesh out until they know a lot more details. Or they know a specific detail (“the hero solves the problem by flying”) but they don’t know if he’s flying in a plane, on a broomstick, or with his own wings, and they don’t know whether he’s being an emergency pilot, leaping off a skyscraper on purpose, or being thrown off a cliff by the villains. In other words, you need to know enough to be going on with. Some of it will likely be right — Mairelon did end with a confrontation; it just wasn’t the confrontation I’d pictured, and it was in a totally different location.
Basically, at any given point in the writing process, the writer needs to know enough about the ending to be going on with. For a total pantser, that can be “nothing,” right up until they get to the Grand Finale; for other writers, it may be a fully realized scene that they know (or have even written) from the very beginning. For a lot of us, the ending scene is a moving target – a general idea “somewhere on the West Coast” that’s slowly refined as the story goes on.
When and how the writer makes up an ending depends on the story and the writer’s process. I’m going to talk more about that in the next couple of posts.
The road trip analogy is spot on. It’s exactly how I described my process to another writing friend not long ago. Traveling process as well as writing process. It’s something I love about both. Definite starting point, general endpoint, discovery inbetween. I guess I’m not a total pantser after all.
I write for the same reason I read: to find out what happens next. If I know how it all works out, writing turns into mere typing, and that’s a level of discipline (read “boredom”) I greatly prefer to save for the rewrite.
I can’t usually get going on a novel till I know the fundamental conflicts (personal/group/societal-world), and when I write them, even if they involve fights, flights, etc., underneath the action they’re a series of investigations and revelations, because when the protagonists know enough, they know what to do.
So endings for me aren’t usually a problem. Coming up with a good set of conflicts can be, though… 🙂
I write outlines to force my story to cough up all the essential parts, to make sure it’s really a story.
Cuts down on re-writing. Really cuts down on having the car stall out in a village of 200 residents.
Yes, my writing process has endings normally being developed fifth or seventh or tenth, and I pull my hair and bang my head against the wall. I’d like to sell that process and buy another one, please.
I’d really prefer to be able to devise an ending first, or at least a close second. So “Start by making up the ending” is good advice for me, except for the small detail of how. Advice on that point is sparse, and mostly consists of “Take what you have for a beginning and…” Which is Not Helpful.
To abuse the road-trip analogy, it would be really helpful if I could start by knowing that the end of the trip is looking at the Hollywood sign, and then get to make up the starting point: Chicago, or Atlanta, or Seattle, or even Honolulu.
Maybe it’s connected to the way I’m the kind of reader who isn’t bothered by spoilers.
I usually know the general kind of ending right from the start: “they take down the evil boss and the family reunites” or “they foil the criminal’s master plan”, though *how* that happens is often a mystery to me until I’m well into the book, sometimes fairly close to having to write the ending.
The one time I started without knowing the ending (beyond a vague feeling of pulling the rug out from under the MC at the very end), it was also by far the hardest thing to write I’ve ever struggled through. I don’t know that the one was the cause of the other, but I don’t want to repeat the experiment to find out.