Endings are always tricky things to me. It's so easy to have a premise and follow what actions happen naturally, but when does it end? In a sense, it doesn't. Unless you kill off all your characters or make the world end, they keep going on (and if you kill off your characters, other people's stories go on).
So how do you find an ending? What feels right? The simple answer is that it happens after the primary conflict has been resolved. But you don't finish the story at "And the bad guy was killed." Characters have to process what happened. They have to come down from the rush a bit.
Generally, I see stories end when characters have reclaimed their lives, gotten things back on track, and take their first steps into the next chapter of their lives.
And that's the key right there: it's a chapter in their lives. Stuff happened before and stuff happens afterward. Even if your story followed the life from birth to death of your character, then the same principle applies (the next chapter is other people's lives).
This idea is similar to when I talked about how a story's universe is bigger than any story told within it. A person's life is bigger and more complicated than the portion of it we see in your story.
As a writer, you have to know what happened before and after. This is common advice, but it never stops being crucial. If you don't know what happened to your character in the chapters preceding your story, then your story will be screwed up.
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And that's the key right there: it's a chapter in their lives.
ReplyDeleteI liked this post a lot - very insightful.