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How to Find Your Story’s End
When you’ve lost the plot, character is key.
Today, someone asked a question about how to come up with the end to their novel.
Honestly, this was a new one. I’ve heard people ask questions about how and where to start their book. I’ve heard people worry about a sagging middle. But I’ve never heard complaints about the end.
The end is the downhill part of the story. It’s the release and the relief. It’s the natural resolution of everything that’s happened. It’s finding the new equilibrium and settling into it — as permanently as any human can. (I’m of the opinion that stories and characters do continue on to live lives outside the bounds of the story and not these finite, fixed things.)
The end of the story is a natural consequence of the character’s actions, their desires, their hopes, their beliefs. The only way that you’re going to find a natural ending is to understand your character as best you can.
When I wrote my first book, without a guide or a plan or a hope of knowing what I was doing, I discovered my characters in my drafts. It took miles of prose written on the screen before they settled into their discrete shapes. As I began to understand them better, I started to understand what they wanted and where they needed to go.
