Endings

How do you people approach/handle endings? Any problems you've encountered? I ask this because I managed to see how the first novel I'm actually likely to finish has to end. My concern with it is that while the ending is, in one sense, inevitable, it is also not really an ending at all. I also asked this because it strikes me as an interesting conversation.

Endings should resolve the main conflict of your story. Figure out what the main conflict is, and if that's not resolved, your story does not have a good ending.

That doesn't mean you have to tie up all loose ends, or you must have a happy ending, or that you can't write an overreaching arc. You're resolving that story's main conflict.

For example, in Harry Potter 1, the main conflict is to save the philosopher's stone from Voldemort. In the end, he saves the stone from Voldemort's clutches, but Voldemort escapes to fight another day. The main conflict, the story of the philosopher stone, is resolved, but the overreaching arc goes on, and there are still lots of plot threads left open.

Book 3 does it even better— the main conflict is Sirius Black's escape from prison, and in the end we learn he's not the villain, Peter Pettigrew is. But the story doesn't end with Harry being reunited with a lost loved one— instead, Sirius ends up on the run again because the Ministry won't believe he's innocent. That's not a happy ending, or an expected one, but it's still satisfying because the main conflict is resolved.

If you look at your story and you think, "Nothing has been achieved," you need to keep writing until something has.

edited 30th Apr '11 7:47:01 AM by Ronka87

Well, it deals with what, if you keep the title and opening paragraph, has always been the conflict. But the conflict is very much the internal one of a character who doesn't really appear very much, and is first described as "The Witness". It's externalised through a series of serial killings within the city, with the killer never caught, and many other depraved and cruel things beside happening within its plot. The actual ending passage is all written up. It's bleak, hopeless, and somewhat existential. The killer remains uncaught, with none of the protagonists ever actually having any direct interaction with him at all, all just stuck in the wake of his killing. So nothing about the killer is ever resolved. He continues never to even have a name.

So it doesn't deal with what appears to be the story. No external conflict is resolved. Instead the internal conflict of a character who gets very little 'screen time' is resolved.

edited 30th Apr '11 8:21:06 AM by RPGenius

Even in stories where The Bad Guy Wins, you still have to have something achieved. It doesn't have to be positive, though— an internal conflict about a change in belief from hope to despair would count.

If your main conflict is internal, and it's resolved, even in a dark way, that's still a good ending. Obviously I don't know much about your story, but from what I gather it sounds like the main conflict is internal, and the external conflict (the serial killer) is a Plot Parallel of the internal conflict. If the resolution to the internal conflict is bleak, it makes sense the killer would never be discovered.

I'm usually pretty good with endings, it's just beginnings I have a hard time with.

Me, too. For me, the problem is writing a beginning that I can link to the rest of the story. What I keep trying to do is I take an ending, then work backwards to see how stuff could've led up to it.