The Ending Process

After last week, I was all set to write a series of posts on ways to make up an ending at different points in the writing process – starting with the ending, making it up in mid-story, pantsing right up to the final chapter, etc.  And then I woke up at 4 a.m. with the realization that there is no difference in the process itself. What’s different is the amount of information the writer has, what constraints they’re mostly stuck with, and where they are on the decision tree.

A writer who’s at the absolute start of things, staring at a blank page, can just pick an ending: the heroine is crowned queen, the protagonist blows up a warehouse, the hero’s One True Love dies of the plague, the asteroid wipes out the dinosaurs. At this point, the writer’s only constraints are personal: Do they want to try a new challenge? Do they hate writing romantic plots or war stories or mysteries? Do they want to avoid certain easy clichés? Do they like writing screwball comedy, or realistic slice-of-life, or certain types of characters or situations? What ending will keep them interested long enough to actually write all the way to it? What do they want to write about? Once the basic ending has been chosen, the writer then goes on to figure out the who, what, when, where, how, and why.

By mid-book, the writer almost always has a main character (who), and a general time and place (when, where) that the story is taking place. They usually have at least a general sense of the problems their protagonist has (what) and why those problems are important. All of these things limit the possibilities for a plausible, satisfying ending. If the protagonist is a doctor in modern-day Argentina who is trying to identify a new, often-fatal disease, an asteroid wiping out the dinosaurs is not likely to be a satisfying ending, let alone a plausible one.

The farther into a book one gets, the more limited the writer’s options are. If you’ve written 75,000 words about the Argentinian doctor investigating a deadly modern virus, the only way to make the asteroid-killing-the-dinosaurs work as a satisfying climax is to rewrite the first 75,000 words so that that’s what the story is about … i.e., stop, go back, and write a totally different story.

Sometimes, that’s what it takes. Mostly, though, drop-back-to-Chapter-One is a distraction, because the writer doesn’t want to do the work of figuring out or making up the missing parts of who, what, when, where, how, and why.

Because in terms of process, it doesn’t actually matter where in the story you are when you make up the ending. What matters is that you have all the pieces in place, which means climbing the decision tree.

The decision tree for fiction is actually more like a decision bush, or better yet, a decision web. Tree implies that you start with one major decision (say, will it be a tragedy or a happy ending?) and then make others that form a nice, regular, tree-like branching structure. In actual fact, there is no one decision that is the right one to start with. Some writers begin with “Who is the protagonist?”; others with “What is the situation?” or “I want to write something set in pre-Columbian Central America.” It doesn’t actually matter which decision comes first or what order one makes them in, as long as they all get made and they all work together.

The process of inventing or finding the end of the story starts with gathering up all the pieces one has. If one hasn’t started writing or outlining, one generally doesn’t have very many pieces and what one has are very large and general, and leave plenty of decisions still to be made. If one is nearing the end, the decisions that are left tend to be more specific: Do they catch up with the villain in the park, or in the subway? Does George have the bomb trigger, or did Janet take it with her when she left the warehouse? Did the message Sandra sent last chapter arrive just in time, or just too late?

But the underlying process of generating an ending is the same: The writer looks at the pieces they have, and makes up the pieces they don’t. You start from where you are and what you have, you look at where you can go from there and where you want to go, and you make decisions about these things. You have to make decisions, because there is always more than one possible choice, and more than one way to get to whatever place you want to end up.

The tricky part is, most people don’t like making decisions. Because we’re afraid we’ll get them wrong. People want a recipe or a template that will give them some confidence that the decision they’re making is the best possible one. There isn’t one … but there are techniques that will at least let you look at possibilities.

The basic process is: Look at what you know is true. Look at what you know isn’t true. Look at what you want to be true. Look at what you’ve tried, and what you haven’t tried. Look at the parts that are working and not working, and think about why. Define the problem(s) that you/your characters are facing. Think of a lot of alternative courses of action (paying no attention to whether they will actually work or not). Whittle them down in light of the things you know are true, not true, what you’ve tried/not tried, what works/doesn’t work. Keep repeating from different angles until something clicks. I’m planning to go into this in more depth next week.

On May 1, 2019   /   Writing  

Tags: Ending, process