All Good Things

                   There’s nothing like having a goal, something to achieve – and knowing what you want to achieve as well. It gives you purpose, a dream, a drive! It lets you plan your journey to it, predict obstacles and prepare for everything that might come your way while you quest after it. You set yourself targets or goals in nearly every aspect of your life, or have them set for you – so why shouldn’t you do it with your writing?

                Today I’ll be talking about endings; very specifically about how to reach them and why they’re important. My last post talked about having a story board prepared for when you wrote short stories. Logically there must be a final panel; this is your goal. The others lead up to it – a charge or a creep towards an incredible crescendo (or a credible one, if you prefer) – and you might find you can almost write the story backwards. 

                I don’t mean to be awkward with that statement – I have always found it difficult to write a short story if I didn’t know where I wanted it to go, so much so that I’ve often abandoned pieces I’ve started or let the fall by the desk-side until I have more inspiration for them. My normal technique is to envision how I want something to progress – usually in the form of a story board – and then connect the panels I created in my mind. I usually do this backwards, working from the last panel back to the one before and figuring out how that journey forms before going back to the step before and doing the same again.

               Some people call this a ‘bad way to write’. Maybe for them it is; it works for me. Sometimes I just make a few notes to describe how these panels link – the tendons that bind the skeleton together, if I continue using last post’s analogy – before moving back. I can then build one these notes to literally flesh out the story, adding the characters in and around the rest of it to give it life and power it through its own story line. This is not to say, of course, things cannot be edited and changed later – this is always, always, always and option, as is a total rewrite or even abandonment if you actually think you can’t finish a piece. 

                As you can tell for me to make this process work the ending is very important to keep in my mind, to know where and what everything is building up to. It means I can drop in hints and twists that stay consistent with the rest of the story, or sometimes it’s vital I include them to maintain that consistency. Imagine a story where there can be next to zero risk of inconsistency, or risk of it, in the early chapters; this is achievable for me (or perhaps just in my mind) because you’ve already written the ending and you can tie in the beginning and middle straight away because you know what will happen. You can plan the twists and their results, you can choose ahead of time which characters will die/betray the heroes, and you can embroil the reader in mysteries knowing full well how they are resolved all with the confidence of knowing how it ends. 

                A story is certainly all about the journey, but without a target or goal it’s not journeying too anywhere – this will come across in your writing. If people finish it and say things like, “It’s good, I like it, but I don’t know where it’s going,” take a step back and ask yourself, “Do I know where it’s going?” Stories need to be going somewhere, they need to have a point they’re driving at or towards, otherwise they wander and meander and lose focus (much like some of my blog entries). So make sure where you’re going somewhere with your story, else you might find it goes nowhere.

                This doesn’t mean you have to know everything about the story to begin with, not by a long way. Imagine you’re making a puzzle; it has irregular sides and it’s got a lot of repeating patterns. Not having an ending in mind is the same as not having a picture to refer to while making a puzzle – you don’t know what your building up to, it’s difficult to make a start and even if you do you are not always sure what you’re doing is going to make sense later on. You might even have to start again and after doing that several times the idea of giving up seems like a really good one.

                Giving up will not get your piece finished. Just think about that for a little bit; it might be easier, but what does it achieve if you take the ‘easier’ route? It will not finish your short story. It will not finish your play or script. It will not finish your novel. Is it really the easier route to your goal or is it just less effort for you in the immediate future? Less effort, by its very nature as a practice, is unlikely to be more efficient in achieving your goal than putting more effort in – I think it is in fact a more difficult endeavour to finish a piece by not writing it than by actually getting on with it. By that token, the easier route or method to finishing your script/story/novel/masterpiece is definitely to sit down and write it. Not all in one sitting, but bit by bit, and never forgetting where you want it to end up.

                This doesn’t mean you have to know everything about the story from the start. It doesn’t mean the ending is set in stone. You can change the ending, sculpt it as your story evolves, make it the most perfect and dramatically appropriate ending you can as you find out more and more about your characters. But have an ending in mind. Remember, you can’t complete a quest without being told where to go and what to do. So set your goal and bring on The End.