how to finish your story: know the ending
i see so many posts on tumblr about people not being able to finish their stories, so i'm going to make some posts about how to get that thing done.
firstly, do you actually know the end of your story? or did you only think up the premise? a premise asks "wouldn't it be cool if..." and ending says "this was the point of it all."
what is the main theme, what is the story trying to say, what am i trying to show the main character learned? what was the protagonists' core need or goal or objective throughout the story, and did they meet, achieve, or succeed in that?
sometimes the struggle with putting words on the page is that you haven't yet figured out what those words need to be. i know some people prefer to write chronologically and don't want to think ahead about what is going to happen, but if you can't bring the story to the finish line maybe you need to spend some time considering the ending. last scene, last paragraph, last line. there's something extremely motivating about knowing where you want to end. it keeps you propelled through the middle.
knowing the ending means you've sketched out the bounds of the story - you know how long it's going to go on for, so if you start daydreaming about something too far in the future, beyond the scope of that particular story, you can just enjoy those thoughts without putting words to the page. knowing the ending makes it easier to gauge how much more you have to write to get to that point. what scenes will the story need to make that ending resonate? what still has to happen?
knowing the ending turns the story into an enclosed moment in time, and makes it easier to reflect on what matters.
to find the ending, it might be helpful to think about:
how did the story begin? what is the same or different since that point?
what insight has the story conveyed? what has the reader learned?
did the character achieve their goal or get what they wanted? has the character moved or gone stagnant? through the character's actions (or lack of actions) have things got better or worse?
is there any remaining dramatic tension or irony between what the reader knows and what the character understands? is the character being left with clear eyes and a full heart, or will the reader assume that, alas, they actually can lose?
what is the implied future beyond the ending moment? is there a little wink between the author and the reader because we can all infer what's going to happen next?
are there any remaining questions that haven't been answered in the story? is the reader being ask to reflect on the ambiguity?
what was the main theme(s) of the story? how does the ending honour that?
what was the impact of the character's journey? how might the reader have been impacted?
in conclusion... two characters fall asleep together happy. we've all ended a story that way, we'll probably all do it again, but in the same way starting a story by having a character wake up, ending a story by having them fall asleep has to be deftly executed or it will feel overdone.
turnnoffyourmind
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