Writing Endings

[inevitableentresol]

I have a real trouble writing endings. I plan my ending, I can see it, and then just a little from the final push I often grind to a halt.

This has happened to me many times. It always seems to be for a different reason. So far these have included:

> I hit a plot point I hadn't worked out yet, or forget what I'd decided to do about it.
> There are so many threads to tie up and my brain busts something trying to hold onto them all.
> I get worried readers won't like how the story is going to end.
> I get sucked into research instead and never come out.
> I get crippling embarrassment that my story is rubbish, and if I don't finish it, I never have to show it to anyone.
> I get distracted by other ideas for stories and lose momentum.
> Story fatigue. My brain just wants a break from these characters or the setting.
> Or conversely, I'm enjoying the story so much I don't want it to end.

Does anyone else have trouble with endings? How did you solve it? Or are some stories just better off staying unfinished?

About half the time, I breeze right through to the end of a story no problem. I don't know what makes these any different than the ones that I have trouble with.

Any thoughts? What works for you?

Comments

[splinteredstar]

"> There are so many threads to tie up and my brain busts something trying to hold onto them all."

Gah, that's the one I struggle with. Everything is great until I have to resolve things - shit, I have to have a satisfying conclusion to this character arc! honestly, sometimes I just throw drafts at it until it works... (or I get tired of it.)

The research one is more likely to happen in the beginning, for me. I can't start this novel until I have a scientifically rigorous definition of consciousness! (...I've nerd-sniped myself several times lately.)

(as for the "never having to show anyone" - you /never/ have to show anyone anything. It's your story - do what you want with it.)

[inevitableentresol]

It's true that I never have to show anyone it anyway, but there is a certain nagging feeling that it's what I should be doing. Especially if you talk to people who read but don't write themselves. They don't tend to see the point of writing something, finishing it and being pleased with it, then putting it away in a drawer.

The tying up threads one is the one I'm struggling with most often recently. The more I grow to like my characters, the more I want to do them justice and I let it overwhelm me.

I've tried making bullet points of all the beats I want to hit, but that only helps a little. I think I need to find a different way of laying it out, like a chart or something.

Only then I'd probably get stuck on filling in the chart.

One thing I have learned is to not use a timeline of events for the last few chapters. That really doesn't work for me as it's too rigid. I prefer to concentrate on the emotions I want to cover.

[sarillia]

I really wish I had some useful advice on this but I'm not sure how this works for me. I always plan my stories about 3/4 of the way through and then leave the ending open as I'm writing. Somehow it always just sort of comes together by the time I get there, though I'm constantly surprised by it. I guess maybe it helps that I don't put too much pressure on it. I just let all the details simmer in the back of my mind until some ideas come up that just seem to naturally flow out of the story. Of course they need to be fixed up later and then I deal with the same problems and insecurities as you but I find them easier to deal with when I have something concrete down that I can tinker with rather than when I'm trying to make myself do the initial work.

[inevitableentresol]

I've also found that over-planning the ending does not work for me. Not putting too much pressure on myself is key.

My approach at the moment is to start many, many stories and not necessarily worry about finishing them. The more I start, the more will get eventually completed, just by accident if nothing else. It seems like backwards logic but nothing else has yet worked for me so well.

Perhaps I should just stop worrying. We're all different. Yet it's hard not to feel like I'm doing something wrong when other writers seem to have a much higher finish rate. Or is this way of working normal and nobody really talks about it?

I reckon I finish a little less than half the stories I start. And I'm talking about ones I've put at least weeks of work into. There are countless others where it's just plot ideas and a couple of pages of the first chapter or dialogue.

Your comment was really useful, thanks. Though my trouble seems to increase the more I've already written. Having something concrete already down makes things more difficult.

[sarillia]

I have no idea what's normal. Writing is one of those things where it seems like no matter what your method is, you're probably worried you're doing it wrong because there's so much conflicting information and advice. As far as I can tell, you just have to figure out what works for you and try to ignore the people insisting there's a Right Way.

[inevitableentresol]

Great advice, thank you. :)

Sometimes people try to give me how-to-write books as presents. I pass them all on unread for exactly this reason. Even if there was good stuff in them, it's just not worth it on the offchance they'll make me feel like I'm doing it all wrong and tense up.

Every time I read writing advice online, even from writers I admire, I disagree with most of what they say. The only exception, for some reason, is Graham Linehan. I get a lot from his commentaries.

[splinteredstar]

Yeah, seriously. I have read a dozen "advice for writers" books and maybe gotten three useful bits of information, and a great deal of "well you're clearly doing that wrong".

[wordstitch]

I've experienced all these problems before!!

XD I don't have any real answers, though. I tend to be really bad at finishing stuff unless it's a gift or an exchange/fest fic. But for those, I find that keeping bits of information about the fic as they occur to me in bite-sized pieces and then looking at them once I get halfway through or almost to the end can help me see the full view of things. You can do index cards, or an index card app--I know there's one of those around somewhere. I use Evernote, which I highly recommend if you're looking for something free and mobile-friendly. I create a tag for a story in my writing notebook, and then when I feel I need to check on all the things I had thought of while researching or whatever, I pull up that tag, then delete all the bits I've already used (or de-tag them). That way I have only the bits that I haven't used yet remaining, and decide whether they fit anywhere or not.

*laugh* Not sure that was a help at all, sorry! I'm just rambling away.

[inevitableentresol]

I had a look at Evernote. Thanks for the rec.

I don't have a smartphone at the moment but I can see something like that being really useful in the future, especially the ability to add photos and linked information to the rest of my notes.

At the moment I use a combination of paper notes, filed in ring binders, and Word documents, and I can never remember in which place the note I'm looking for is. I often end making duplicate notes with contradicting information. It gets really confusing and disheartening when I realise I have to change whole chapters because they're totally wrong.

I tried to used index cards once but it turned out to be just one more place where I could write information that contradicted everything else.

I think I'll see if there's something for Windows that is like Evernote. I'd particularly like the ability to add charts to my laptop notes, as that's how I plan my plots best.

For my fanfics, I definitely do tend be more likely to finish the ones for exchanges/fic fests. But not always, and for original fic, deadlines don't seem to help me at all. If anything, they just make me all the more unlikely to finish. Then I become so disappointed in myself that I give up writing entirely for at months.

Deadlines themselves seem to do the opposite of motivating me. So I think it might not be so much the deadlines themselves in fanfic fests as the sense of community. I really love the feeling of writing with and for other people. I write a lot of gift fics, even when I'm not doing fanfic fests. Probably 4 out of 5 of my fanfics are giftfics.

Come to think of it, the original fics I've finished have mostly been for charity publications, or else they were tailored to what I thought my friends list would like to read. So they were a little like giftfics as well.

Thanks very much for your suggestions. That was really useful in helping me think about this.

[ljwrites]

I use Evernote for all my notetaking needs, too. I like the index card view in Scrivener, too. OTOH Scrivener is definitely meant for a desktop environment and has adapted poorly to the mobile age, where Evernote excels.

You're in good company with the index-cards approach: No less a master than Vladimir Nabokov used them, in analogue form obviously.