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Why Conclusions Are So Darn Hard
23 August 2010 | Filed Under Tools of the Trade
Beginnings are easy. Conclusions are hard. Simple, yet true.
At the beginning of a story, anything and everything can happen. Time travel, the apocalypse, start of school, you name it.
The end of a story is a bit more restrictive. You have to wrap up loose ends and write an ending that makes sense.
One of my fiction writing professors likes to say, “Conclusions should be inevitable, but surprising.” If that sounds like an easy thing to write, more power to you.
The Narrator could go ten different ways at this point. I’m not sure which one is both inevitable and surprising. Hopefully my critique group can help point me in the right direction if they don’t like Option B (Option A being the end from the November draft).
Too many novels end disappointingly. And not all of them are obvious cop outs like “it was all a dream” or “the bad guy redeems himself and the world rejoices forever.” I don’t want The Narrator to be one of them.
Do you have trouble writing endings to your novels? How do you deal with the difficulties?
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End with an ellipsis in the middle of the sentence, and pick it up later with “The Narrator’s Wife.”
That was probably funnier in my head.
I’ve never felt like I had a particularly good or strong ending for any of the short stories I’ve written. Just a weak denouemont with an attempt to leave it open for future stories with the same characters. I never got a novel far enough to worry about ending it :p (Coincidentally, I’m not much better at writing strong endings for my CS research papers.)
You know, if they kill the narrator, there won’t be any falling action to explain how they live without him.
Research paper conclusions are also difficult to end, but at least you could just repeat what you’ve already said. If you did that with a story, your readers would hate you forever.
[...] Shannon Hale’s Austenland was a quick, fluffy read, but the ending was unsurprising, and therefore disappointing. (Remember, endings should be inevitable, but surprising.) [...]