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

[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.