McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

My writing needs help

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Tork:
I am trying to write a book. And have already tried to write many other books. They all end the same. No ending. I have decided that this is because I spill the entire plot onto one page. How do I slow down?

Shecky:
Outline. Do a skeleton of the story with a particular end in mind. Then flesh out from there.

Blaze:
Shecky is so bright his parents call him Sunny!

That is a good start, and also, take your characters, and make them real...  write about them, how they look, how they move, all the things that make them who they are, and then you can work those things into the story...

Unless, and some people are, you are short story writer.

Kris_W:
I think it is perfectly normal for you, the writer, to have problems with endings. Finding the ending is the most artificial part of writing. The writer knows -
The Happily Ever After married couple end up divorced,
The Science Nerd who gets the girl develops MS and dies by 50 after 10 years in a nursing home,
The Triumphant Warrior has cumulative neurologic deficits from being knocked out resulting in paranoia, anger management issues and family murder / suicide around age 45.
- But the reader never knows these things because you chose where to end the story.

You might try writing time lines and character arcs for each character. Often finding 'the right ending' is really just picking a spot in the story where the lives of various characters resonate with each other.

Shecky:
Yup. That works for a lot of people, too.

One rule of thumb that works in a lot of problematic situations is this: when you're having a problem, turn the problem around. In this case, what that means is that if you're having problems with the ending, START with the ending and work BACK from there. Take the character(s) you've already created and visualize some great victory, loss or combination thereof. Then build a couple of intermediate endpoints: how did the character(s) GET there? Lather, rinse, repeat. In the end, smooth out all these connections with text.

Hell, that's how I did at least half of my grad-school papers.

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