If you’ve read the last couple of blog posts about my current WIP, you may have noticed that the end of the story started off as “Kayla confronts the Archmage. Kayla wins. Everybody celebrates.” This is actually more specific than the end of my first-stage outline normally is. My standard is “There is a big confrontation and the good guys win. Rewards and celebrations follow,” which says nothing about who is confronting whom or which side is “the good guys.”
As my outlines get longer and more specific, the details of the end also get clearer. This is, however, only one way of developing a story ending. Among others I have used are:
- Making it up as I go (Talking to Dragons)
- Starting with a set-piece ending and working backwards (Mairelon the Magician, Across the Great Barrier)
- Starting with a template (Sorcery and Cecelia)
- Rewriting a preexisting story (Snow White and Rose Red)
- Figuring it out in mid-book (Thirteenth Child)
“Making it up as I go” is basically flying by the seat of my pants, which is not my preferred method. It worked for Talking to Dragons, but I spent the whole book wondering if I could pull anything off. “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” was good advice for Alice, and it will work for anyone in a pinch, but it is more of a description than a system one can reliably apply. Unless, of course, one happens to be a pantser as one’s normal process.
“Starting with a set-piece” means beginning with a vividly imagined, impressive, climax scene, and developing the plot by working one’s way backwards to wherever the characters started. In the case of Mairelon, the set-piece was the confrontation with Laverham’s goons in the London warehouse; in the case of Across the Great Barrier, it was the discovery/confrontation with the medusa lizards. Perceptive readers will already have noticed that the set-piece I started with for Mairelon never made it into the book at all – there is certainly a confrontation, but it’s with around fourteen people (most of whom have nothing to do with Laverham), and it takes place in a country hunting lodge many miles from London. The set-piece that ends Across the Great Barrier, however, mostly made it into the book – there are fewer lizards than I originally pictured, and they aren’t charging across the plains in a mob, but most of what I originally pictured is there.
“Starting with a template” means choosing a type of story that has clear expectations for the ending: the traditional murder mystery that ends with the detective summing up the evidence and revealing the murderer, or the romance novel that ends with the couple reaching an understanding (which usually means a proposal and happily-ever-after). You take the template and plug in your two characters who are going to get engaged, or your detective, victim, and murderer, work up a clearer idea of the scene, and then work backward to where the story starts. Or you make the basic decisions about which of your characters fit the template roles, and then go back to the start of the story with a general idea of the end. Sorcery and Cecelia is based on the Regency Romance template – the important thing about the ending (from our perspective as writers) wasn’t figuring out how to defeat the villains, it was which characters were going to pair up over the course of defeating them.
“Rewriting a preexisting story” covers anything from fairytale retellings to novelizing a screenplay or a historical event. You have the story; you have the characters; you have “what happens;” and of course, you have an ending. Your decisions involve what sorts of changes you want to (or are allowed to) make to the story – for instance, whether you are going to retell “Cinderella” as a longer version of the fairy tale we know, digging into the emotions and relationships more or using one of the stepsisters as the viewpoint, or whether you are going to play fast and loose with the concept and do the story of modern-day Cindy attending the rock concert and attracting the attention of the star performer. Snow White and Rose Red is a Grimm’s fairytale retold in an historical setting. The entire plot, including the ending, is lifted and adapted from the fairytale, with a few contributions from actual historical events and ballads.
“Figuring it out in mid-book” is just what it sounds like – realizing somewhere around the midpoint of the manuscript just where the story will be going from there on out. It differs from “Making it up as I go” (or pantsing) in that my experience of pantsing has been that I don’t really know what the ending will be until I am almost on top of it (like, one chapter before things come together). For a mid-book ending-development, I usually have a clear idea of the character development I want from the protagonist (and maybe one or two of the other characters), but I have no idea what events are going to bring about that development. Generally, I can’t do this kind of development when there is an antagonist character with an agenda – I usually need to know too much about the antagonist’s plans, which implies how to counter them, which points at the ending much earlier in the story. For a Man vs. Nature story, though, it usually works pretty well, which is what Thirteenth Child ended up being.
Over half of my novels are voyages of discovery, usually including self-discovery, so for me, I usually include a confrontation or action scene, but the ending for one of those stories comes down to which secret is revealed last. I usually have that worked out pretty well ahead of time.
I generally find the end shortly after happening on the beginning. (Sometimes, *before.*) My problem then becomes, as Brenda Clough once put it, finding the rest of the boa constrictor between the head and the tail.
Yes, that pretty much describes my process too. If I don’t have some idea what the end is, the idea seldom feels story-shaped enough to start writing.
I’m occasionally wrong about what the end will be – and often at least partly wrong about what the end will mean – but I always have at least a sketch in mind of what I’m working towards. Often this does take the form of a set-piece, and that quite often doesn’t happen as expected…
I’ve done the set-piece ending. The problem is “forgetting” this enough to depict the characters as appropriately baffled, and thinking other things possible.
I’ve also done “vague notion of the ending” and that one, for some reason, tends to fail to supply plot turning points in the middle. Annoying.
I rely heavily on the set-piece ending, to the point where #1 and #5 come down to “Flail around and bang my head until I come up with a set-piece ending,” while #3 and #4 come down to “Either use the set-piece ending provided by the template or preexisting story, or else devise a replacement set-piece ending that fits.”
Unless the story is a short one, I also need set-piece-like bits as waypoints in the middle.
I have, rarely, finished a short story without having a set-piece ending in hand. Those have always been vignette or slice-of-life pieces, rather than stories-with-plots.
And then there’s Method 6, which happened to me with the current book.
Original concept (generic plot events substituted for the actual ones):
“1. Hero discovers he is the Chosen One to bring about the Utopia of the Zombie Weasels -> {2. Hero takes active exception to this} -> 3. Hero banishes Zombie Weasels from the land with Magic Pool Noodle.”
Story as actually develops:
“1 -> {2a. Hero runs into many more complications than expected.}-> 3a. Hero defeats First Boss Ferret with hard-earned mastery of Noodle Fu, and sails off for the Lost Locker of Plastic Pasta.”
…4. Writer realizes that this book has come to a definitive end, and that he now needs to write Book 2: the Looting of the Locker and Book 3: The Whacking of the Weasels, whilst devoutly praying that his world’s never-precisely-reliable gods will prevent any further multiplication of the mustelids.
5. Writer lies down and gibbers quietly for a bit before settling down to revision.
…I want to read this.
we look forward to reading yours
I tend to prefer the template—I’m a huge fan of fairy tales, which give me all the structure and foreknowledge I need before I start writing. I pantsed my first manuscript, learned that 20 rounds of editing aren’t my favorite, and have since then only jumped into writing after I know 90% of what’s coming. That way my focus can be on putting the words together rather than on figuring out where I’m going with this.