I struggle with endings for my stories. I'll get ideas all the time, though my initial inspiration is usually about a world or a character rather than a plot. I can go along great guns for awhile, come up with depth and additional characters and conflicts; but my main problem is how to end the stories.
It is harder for novels than short stories, but I struggle with both lengths. About the only time endings are not a problem is when the story springs forth full-formed, as from the head of Zeus.
Do you guys know the ending of your stories when you start, or do they come along later? Can anyone help me by telling me how you come up with the ending?
I know that you pose problems, and the ending comes with the solution of the problem, but I'm still stuck.
For example, in my novel Outleaf, the hero commits patricide, gets banished, then escapes his society and explores the rest of his world. My problem is how to make him face his community again; I don't know if he should become their leader or never return or what. I'm having problems writing the beginning of the novel because of this; I'm not entirely sure where it is going.
On the other hand, no matter how much time I spend note-taking and outlining, I discover much much more about my characters, the world and the plot by simply writing out what I have and seeing where it goes. Does anyone else do that?
Help!
Short stories, I always know the ending before I start. Novels are more of a problem. I kinda know the ending, but I do struggle to put all the pieces in place. Usually it is because something at the beginning of the book just doesn't fit... i.e. things in my head have changed slightly.
I seem to remember hearing that one solution was to just bull through with an ending, and then try to adjust it until you are happy... I think the idea is that in forcing the ending through you will have more appreciation of what is needed, and whether anything is lacking in the main body of your story/chaacter development.
I sometimes find that I write best when I know my ending scene. I'm doing this new thing where I write out a short hand idea of the story, which shows me the main arc. It's not a scene by scene outline, but it gives me an idea of my major plot points and the ending that I'm aiming for.
Which is probably why I've never written anything that amounted to much more than pulp.
I can't do that - I go nowhwere. I have written notes - research, ideas, etc., then done some preliminary writing to figure out where I want to go, then I write an outline. Of course, things change as I write, but if I don't have a clue where I'm going, I stall out.
My stories have gotten better by figuring out an ending. Sometimes the ending changes, but that's ok!
But I can tell you this for certain...when I PLAN out my stories my endings only such about half the time, and then it's usually because I did something wrong in the middle. When I don't plan my stories then I can rely on about a 10% rate of success with endings.
Please not that I am not suggesting to everyone that they should plan and outline...God knows we don't need another one of those debates. But from the POV of onew riter who struggles with the end, figuring out what it is going to be in advance increases my success rate dramatically. In fact, if I plan them out beginning, middle, and end with character sketches (real planning, not just knowing where to start and where to go) then I don't usually fail when it comes to endings.
So, take that for what it's worth to you.
Why don't you read that section of the book, analyze a story or novel that you had difficulty ending, and use his approach? Then when you start your next work, decide early on which of the MICE are nibbling away at your sanity.
Dude, chill out, I was just joking.
I'd say I have ending problems about 50% of the time. Some stories, my initial inspiration is an ending that I want to get to. Others, my inspiration is a beginning. Those are the stories that give me ending problems. (The other stories give me beginning problems.) Here's what I do when I hve ending problems.
Generally, in any given story there are only a handful of possible endings. I find it tends to be around four or five with me, but everybody is different, so that probably wouldn't hold true for everybody. I get to the point in the story where it's time for the ending to happen, write INSERT ENDING HERE in big bold letters, and then write all four or five (or however many) endings. I let it ferment for a while, then go back and read the story with each of the different endings. Almost always with me, there is one ending that feels strong when I read it, and three or four that feel weak.
Works for me.
Another thing you can do is consider what Barry Longyear talks about in his SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS WORKSHOP I book (there is no II, so far as I know). In order to have a satisfactory resolution of the story's problem, your protagonist has to pay a price. (OSC talks about prices, too, by the way.)
He recommends having the protagonist try and fail a few times to solve the problem, finally think it's been solved (he calls this the "bright moment"--my favorite example is near the end of TERMINATOR, when they blow up the semi), then find out that it is far from solved and maybe even worse now (he calls this the "dark moment"--when the robot comes walking out of the semi's inferno in TERMINATOR), and a price must be paid before the problem really can be solved (for those of you who might not have seen TERMINATOR--which I consider a lovely, romantic movie, in all senses of the word "romance"--I won't tell you what the price is, but it's tragic), and once that price is paid, the resolution can come.
The price isn't necessarily someone's life, it may be enough for the character to change his or her way of thinking, but it has to be real and it has to cost an amount that fits what the character gains in the resolution.
In your case, Autumnmuse, if you want to bring your guy back home, you are going to have to come up with a really BIG price for him to pay for that patricide.
Ender had to leave his world and give his life to Speaking for the Dead, and that wasn't really the price he paid. The price he paid was to become a xenocide (worse than genocide) and to live with that, even though he hadn't done it knowingly.