Finishing the Book

So, you are about to finish your first draft, congratulations! You have gotten further than most wannabe writers.

But you are at the most critical moment, the ending! How do you wrap up most (if all) the loose ends? What sort of story is it? Does it make sense? Does it work with the themes??

These are some of the many questions writers of every caliber, me included deal with. The ending is possibly the most important part of the story, after all, it’s what you are rewarding the reader for. It is the part of the book that is most likely to be remembered by the reader after they have put it down.

You can imagine how it goes with me; I normally must tweak or alter the ending multiple times over the course of the development process. Either because the ending doesn’t make sense, is too rushed or too bleak or sometimes to happy.

As per my normal take, the theme is everything. So, depending on the types of themes you want to explore within the story, you will have a limited selection of good, bad and bittersweet endings among many others to choose from.

So, if you are writing a post-modernist text, you are more likely to have an open ended or unsatisfactory ending. If you are writing cosmic horror, you are very likely to have a bad ending.

Now what if you are writing something outside these genres? Well, it can be tricky. Your options are more flexible so you could try to shape it over the natural course of the narrative. Not all stories have happy endings and sometimes it’s impossible to escape.

I always try to find a good ending in my stories, as it can feel good for the reader to see my characters overcome seemingly impossible odds. Only to come out the other side mostly okay.

But sometimes that is impossible, such as in Our Broken World, I had to accept that there was no happy way to end that story.

But the important thing is that the reader needs to feel satisfied, which can be a difficult needle to thread when you are writing fiction. How do you know if the ending will be satisfying to read?

This can be rather difficult, as you need to measure the amount of buildup for the climax, you need to measure how much closure you want to give and if that will still fit within the themes of the story.

I don’t want to give a formula to solve this problem as I don’t have one. Often for me it’s about fine tuning what doesn’t work and keeping what does. I have a good idea for what the ending is going to be. But I often have two endings to experiment with, often a good or a bad one.

Sometimes endings don’t work, Black Masquerade was particularly difficult to end due to the ultimately unsatisfying feel of it. I want to keep this vague because I want you to buy my shit, but I had to thread the needle of inevitability with the possibility of changing the course of Barbara’s story and her friends.

Never be afraid to change the ending to something that better suits the story you wish to tell. But also have the courage to stick to your guns when it’s called for. It is your story; it is the expression of art that you poured your soul into. If you can convincingly articulate how your ending works thematically and narratively, then you should keep it. But also listen to what people have to say, if something is wrong with the ending you need to fix it.

It is your responsibility as the artist to meet the reader halfway, do not treat your audience like idiots. They need to engage, but you need to give them the tools to understand what you are saying.

Ending a story is tricky, I am currently working on The Fang and the Claw, and I have no idea how to fix the ending now. Shall we say feedback has been rather negative.

Complaints towards the ending seem to be how it veers the genre away from folk horror to faith-based horror. Which is a problem as I failed to balance the faith-based elements of the story and setting with the folk horror stuff that should have been the focus. 

So, I will be readjusting the ending in accordance with the focus, as it deviates from the intended story I want to write.

When finishing a story, you need to make sure that it aligns with what sort of story you want. If that means it ends with a cut to black, then it should work provided you have the thematic/ plot groundwork.

Even if it upsets people, case and point see the reaction to The Sopranos ending.

You need to be confident in the story you are telling and work towards aligning your story with the ending that works the best. If there is no way out for your characters, then you need to be happy with the bad ending. Maybe there is a way out, but at what cost?

Not all dystopias have happy endings, but sometimes they do. Perhaps you are writing a YA dystopia where the rebels overthrow the government and set up a new state that treats everyone more equally. Sometimes the realistic horror of trying to establish a democracy out of whole cloth isn’t as important as the hope towards a better tomorrow.

But if you want to show the consequences of failure, such as in 1984 or Brave New World, then you must accept the dark ending. Sometimes the state is too powerful to be defeated. Sometimes the rebels don’t win.

And both of those scenarios are fine, if you don’t mix and match without planning. You can’t get a YA dystopia and get the downer ending.  Not unless you want to be subversive with the formula, but then you would need to set it up beforehand. Same with the other scenario, traditional dystopia but with a hopeful ending.

Set up and pay off are all important when making your ending, you will need to make sure that your subversion of expectations doesn’t mirror later seasons of Game of Thrones.

Perhaps Martin will prove us all wrong when he eventually gets around to it.

Maybe.

But I think that is it for now. I hope that I have given you something to think about if you are considering writing your own story or when you are planning your next read.

Cheers and see you next month!