Endings are the point at which whatever changed in the protagonist’s life at the beginning has been resolved, and the story is over. Endings give many writers almost as much trouble as beginnings or middles (though often it’s not the same writers), though for different reasons.
The key to a lot of the problems is to keep an eye on where one is going. Many writers interpret this to mean “I must know exactly how the protagonist is going to kill the dragon/win the court case/save the farm. In detail.” It does not mean this. In the vast majority of cases, it is enough for the writer to know that, eventually, the protagonist is going to have to kill the dragon, win the court case, or save the farm. For most writers, having a general direction to move in is enough, at least for the first half of the story.
Some writers have trouble coming up with even this much. They have a situation, some characters, and a really bad case of choice paralysis. They can’t decide whether they want to send their protagonist off to slay the dragon, tame it and start a circus act, or make it a dream-metaphor for the character’s difficult childhood. This is particularly true for writers who 1) have no idea what kind of story they want to write, or 2) have a misguided idea that the ending “has to” focus on something that they’re not interested in writing about. (For instance: “There has to be a huge battle at the end,” or “The evil protagonist has to/cannot be reformed.”)
The flip side of this are the writers who look at all the different possibilities inherent in their opening and discard half of them as “too easy and obvious” and the other half as “impossible for this character to achieve.” I’ve also run across a few who took one of the “easy and obvious” endings and used the middle to make it harder, only to end up with something impossible for the character, as presented, to succeed at. They then take one of the impossible endings and try to make it easier, only to end up with “too easy and obvious” again.
Most of the time, the solution in both cases is not to focus on what is the “best” ending or the “best” sort of story to write, but on what the writer wants to have happen to these people and/or this situation. By “want” I don’t necessarily mean “what is the happy ending for these characters?” While “what the writer wants” often is for their favorite characters to have a happy ending, sometimes “what the writer wants” is “something that will be fun to write.” Obviously, “something fun” is going to vary from author to author; for one, it’ll be writing the villain go down in flames, while for another writer, it’ll be smacking their goody-two-shoes-obnoxious protagonist upside the head, or digging into both characters’ “dark night of the soul,” or setting up the “good guy” protagonist to turn into the villain of the next book.
Another problem is that the ending the writer started off aiming for can be totally derailed by things that happen in the middle. This is often a Good Thing, in that it usually means that the writer is having their characters make in-character but unexpected decisions in the middle. Still, it can be disconcerting to set off from Chicago intending to travel to Seattle, and end up finishing one’s trip in Los Angeles instead. If the writer is too fixated on the ending they thought they were heading for, they can end up forcing the characters to stay on the road to Seattle (which generally turns the characters into cardboard puppets), or else overshooting the ending by deciding that the characters still have to go to Seattle even though everything they really needed to accomplish has been accomplished by the time they get to Los Angeles. (Try not to do this.)
And of course pantsers can end up writing themselves into a dead end, which can only be resolved by backtracking to the middle and rewriting (either giving the characters a different route to take, or providing them with the skills or tools that will enable them to get out of the dead end and finish the story).
The specifics of the ending depend on what happens in the middle. My current WIP was supposed to end with a huge Final Battle. Halfway there, it became obvious to me that too many things would have to happen before then to fit in one book. So this one is going to have a different ending, with less world-changing drama but more character growth and life decisions. It required an almost total rewrite to take out some things and add in others, but I am much happier with how it’s going than I was when I was trying to rush everyone along to a predetermined battle scene.
What this means is that, while writing the middle, one has to pause periodically and ask, “Is this getting my characters closer to being able to kill the dragon/win the court case/save the farm/etc.?” If the answer is “No,” the next question is “Well, is it getting the characters closer to something else that is more interesting/important and that will give me a more dramatic/touching/effective/fun-to-write ending?” (This is where one sometimes realizes that the story will not end with the protagonist killing the dragon, but with the protagonist taming it and founding a dragon-preservation society and teaching other people how to tame dragons. Pantsers only have to ask, “Does this feel like my characters are getting somewhere?”) If the answer to the second question (or the pantser question) is also “No,” the final question is “Then why is this scene/chapter/section in this book at all?” This one generally takes a lot of thought, (unless the answer is “Because I love it to pieces,” in which case the “murder your darlings” advice comes into play). And sometimes, the answer is “I don’t know, but it feels right and I stall dead every time I try to go on without it,” in which case…trust your demon.
All my years (and years and years) in technical writing/nonfiction naturally shaped my approach when I got back into fiction later.
I remember being handed a mess to “edit” more than once and going back to the writer and saying, “Why did you write this up?” The answer I got one time was a shrug. “The boss said to.” I.e., the writer had no idea why he was writing anything.
So for me, the key question going in and all through the story is, “Why write this, what’s the point?” It’s a lot of why I’m so into theme. I have to expect the work to entertain or illuminate the reader (preferably both), and I have to have some idea of what will do so.
I’m sure this approach works for no one but me, and everyone reading this comment will just shake their heads.
But you never know.
Actually, while your approach is probably not something I ought to follow wholesale, the concept of using theme and *why* I’m writing to keep myself on track is something I’ve been discovering I need to learn in the last week and a half.
*Why* am I writing the novel I’m writing right now? Is it because my brain is tired from too much school and this is fun for me, or because I have a commentary to make on some aspect of the world, or because I just want to tell a decent story, dangit!?
You aren’t the only theme-driven writer by any means. Me, I don’t know what my theme is until the book is published and somebody tells me. If I try to figure it out while I’m writing, I give myself a massive case of writer’s block.
Darn, and here I thought I was unique! 😉
But I’m glad if I can help anyone, and I certainly don’t want to harm instead!!
Endings are hard for me. The one WIP that I thought might be almost ready for publishing has taken several startling turns during revision, and now I’ve hit a slump because I don’t know where I’m going anymore and my backbrain is rebelling. I seem to be that one author who pendulum-swings back and forth between the extremes of ending-too-easy or ending-too-hard, and I’ve had a tough time finding the Goldilocks zone of ending-just-right.
I also seem to be the sort of person who over-fixates on the ending I think I’m going for, only to find that something different is in the works after the story is over. In the very first draft of this WIP, my climax came ages before the end of the plot did. In the most recent draft, my climax still came too early, because I then needed 30 pages of denouement to tie up all my various loose ends–in a novella that was only 200 pages long. (Oops) Who knows what this draft will look like, when I finally get back to it.
It sounds a bit as if you also have misjudged your necessary length. I have a good friend who has done this since the start of her career–she sets out to write a short story and ends up with a 150,000 word novel; she sets out to write a novel and ends up with a half-million-word trilogy. And she’s not doing it because she’s overshooting her endings. Unless you have a specific market in mind for this that requires a word limit, it usually works out best to just let it be as long as it needs to be. After checking to make sure you’re not overshooting, or cramming a bunch of not-this-story subplots into this novella because you don’t want to write the novel/trilogy that they actually belong to…
Yeah, that’s about where I’m at. The thing can be a novella if it wants to be, and I’ll just figure out a way to shorten the denouement so it’s not so disproportionate to the rest of the story.
Then again, revisions seem to have changed the face of the novella drastically (again), so who knows what the ending will look like this time?
“The flip side of this…” Yeah, that paragraph is me. Although if I can manage to make too-hard into too-easy three-quarters or four-fifths of the way through the book, I’ll run with it. It can be fun to have the protagonists toboggan down a success cascade where everything breaks right for them and wrong for the antagonists. The difficulty is in setting it up.
If it takes the characters 3/4 of the book to get the right plan in place, it’s fine. Going back and setting it up properly is what the second draft is for. 🙂
I am the kind of writer who has most trouble with endings.
When I thought my WIP was only what is now Part I, it was fairly apparent what the ending was: it’s the main character saying “I intend to live, even if it means surrendering to the hive-bugs; I will fight to remain myself, as much as possible, but I’m not going to throw my life away.”
Then I wrote a few thousand words of Part II because *I wanted to know what happened next.* I figure that’s not a bad reason. But I don’t have much grasp on how that resolves: lots and lots on “what happens next” but where is it eventually going?
I think if Part I is “I am going to live” then Part II is “We are not a pawn, we are a player.” (Change of pronoun deliberate!) So she (they) have to do something that demonstrates she is now a player.
Maybe the sequence goes:
Her colony organizes a daring attack on her controller which results in the controller skipping out to an unassailable location (oops!).
They use the resulting pause to gather resources and sort out her/their internal issues (she doesn’t know how to manage a hive, which is causing all sorts of trouble). They make a dangerous ally, dispute the way forward–all that middle stuff, I’m fine with that.
A confrontation with the controller in which my protagonist says, if you want what I’ve got (i.e. a supply of very long-range telepaths) you can *cut a deal,* because I am your peer now. And forces the controller to go along with that. That might work as an ending. Maybe?
(Gods help me if I then realize that that sets up Part III perfectly.)
That sequence sounds very cool, FWIW. Especially the cut-a-deal confrontation.
“Another problem is that the ending the writer started off aiming for can be totally derailed by things that happen in the middle. This is often a Good Thing, in that it usually means that the writer is having their characters make in-character but unexpected decisions in the middle.”
HAHAHAHAHA: this is what happened to me in a fanfic, when a very minor character (who was at the importance point, in my tale, of Just There Sometimes) decided that what HE wanted meant that he was going to become a very much less minor character as he kicked an interconnected subplot into the story. With great force and stubbornness. And since it was absolutely massively in character, he ended up becoming a force to be reckoned with, and carting the main characters to “Los Angeles”, and it became up to me to make it work!!! Gave me a lot of concept-induced headaches and the story went sideways about six times before I managed to tie the main quest and the subquest together so they fed off each other, but this Very Very Minor Character deciding to take a lead role in the subplot MASSIVELY improved the tale!
I love it when characters do something I don’t expect.
I have somewhat mixed feelings about it, as I usually have to junk several chapters in addition to my plans, but it always makes the book better, so I try not to grumble too much. (Whining is another matter. *Why* couldn’t my characters have figured this out earlier?
Shien is teaching a dangerous magic art to the Emperor’s children, despite the fact that one student in three generally ends up mad, dead, or a monster. Things happen as they usually do and he has to tell the Emperor that his daughter Lisette is dead.
The Emperor then *raises her from the dead* (so now she’s mad and a monster, but at least alive) and leaves Shien to deal with the resulting problems. I was absolutely dumbfounded by this, not least because I never characterized Lisette much (given she was going to die early to make a point and all).
I can’t regret this. She ended up a major character and I like her a lot. But wow, talk about derails.
This is a really clear case of “The writer should always reserve the right to have a better idea.” To which I frequently have to add “Even if it is really inconvenient and blows the planned plot out of the water and into the next book or three.” 😛
I have had characters do this before, and it always really sucks–until I get to the end and realize it was for the best, after all. But I’m not at the end yet, so I haven’t yet made that realization and had it sink deep.
Sometimes the ending is a nuisance to think up.
Sometimes the ending is the original inspiration and you have to be able to “forget” it to get your characters’ ignorance. (Except I have read stories where characters go from one right guess to another because the writer was shepherding them down the path to the right conclusion.)
I once critiqued a superhero story where a superhero team had disbanded after a traumatic defeat that cost them a member and scarred all of them. The story starts with one of them discovering that their teammate is in fact not dead, but in grave peril in another world. That person has to pull the team together–as I recall, at novella length–and overcome their reluctance to go back.
They finally find their resolve, they enter the Gate. And the story *ends there.*
It worked. Brilliantly even. I was struck with admiration because I doubt I would ever have been able to see that this was the end. I’d have written “the rest of it” for sure and I think that would have been a weaker story.
The author carefully spent a lot of time on the team relationships and *not* a lot of time on their thoughts about what might be beyond the Gate, I did notice that. It would have had to be rewritten to be Part I, with more information on what they were going into. Totally not needed, though, at least for me as a reader–and I am generally a novel/series fan; if you’d described this story to me I’d have predicted I wouldn’t like it.