Endings

As I'm nearing the end of my story with a measly 5,000 words to go I figured I'd do a little something about endings.

One of the most important parts of your story is the ending. You could have the best opening, a brilliant series of action scenes, fantastic dialogue, but if you don't have that stellar ending that knits it all together, then you've let your story down.

A reader who gets to the end and finds it... lacking compared to the rest of the story will feel cheated and disappointed. It may be a case that when you come to planning your story you already have the ending all figured out. But what if your story takes a different direction between the start and then? What if after you've written the story it doesn't fit in?

Rewrite it obviously.

But what if, like me, you don't have an ending. Just a starting point and a general direction of your story. But no ending? What do you do then?

You could sit at a wall for hours, days, just staring, thinking, wondering, shaking your head, cursing, starting to write that ending before realising you don't like it.

Just write it. For the first draft, just have an ending so that you can put the ever tastefully fulfilling words "THE END" at the end. Get those two words on the page first. Worry about the ending later. I know for a fact that there have been cases where the ending has been changed in the last and final edit to be ten times better. And if after three edits you still don't have a quite right ending, change it, tweak it, delete it, rewrite it.

Remember, you can always change it later. Just get an ending down, get to the editing stage and read your story as a whole. See what you think then and decided then what should be left and what should be deleted. It doesn't have to be an award winning finish with everybody dying or everybody having a happily ever after. But as long as you get an ending down that will tie up the loose ends in your story, then that is all that matters.

Editing is where everything gets better.

Even now, I don't have an ending. Well, I have a couple of ideas and I'm just going to get one down. When I do, I'll post it up and you can see how strange, natural or out of place it seems.

Keep writing.