Currently Uninterested ~ The Dreaded Last Scene

A weird thing happened to me as I began mapping out the final scene of my novel: I no longer care.

I should be excited to finally reach this point. I should be salivating to end the story with a knockout last scene. Instead I don't even want to write.

Yes, final scenes are hard. I've rarely written a good one, or at least one that I considered good. I can't vouch for readers of my books, but I tend to view my endings as hokey. I've browsed a few articles about writing good endings, but let's put it this way; advice is easy to give but hard to execute. At this point in my story, almost everything that's going to happen has already happened. There's one major plot point yet to resolve, which essentially means that the reader is going to be expecting it. (And no, I'm not writing a mystery or a thriller.)

Maybe what I think is a lack of interest is actually fear. I don't think I can pull it off. I'm pretty sure I can't pull it off. With my novellas, my final scenes were more like a period at the end of a sentence than something memorable. In Shadow Song, the main character visited the spot where she'd found her boss's dead body, then said something like, "Now my life begins." Pretty bad.  

One article I found lists eight mistakes to avoid when writing an ending (there are plenty of other articles that offer different points):

• Don't close with your first idea (in other words, try different endings)
• Don't end with a cliffhanger (duh)
• Don't resolve everything in the last three pages (oops!)
• Don't spell it out ("be subtle in the conclusions you want...to draw")
  
• Don't make it too improbable
• Don't let your story fizzle out (this apparently references tying up loose ends)
  
• Don't think about the end only at the end
• Don't neglect the beginning (I guess that means, don't forget your theme)

As I noted earlier, great! Now how do I avoid all those things? To be honest, this bullet point list doesn't help me at all. Much of it is common sense. Maybe I should have Googled, "writing a memorable ending". I, of course, want to tie up loose ends, and I want the ending to reinforce the novel's theme. The "subtlety" point needs more explanation or an example. 

I suppose I can experiment with alternate endings, except I know how I want the story to go. It's just that getting there is a problem.

I try to comfort myself with the knowledge that it doesn't matter. I'm likely the only person who'll read the novel, but I count! It matters to me.

All that being said, I'm in no hurry to resume writing. Avoidance has worked for me in the past, so that's what I'm going with for now. Perhaps some time apart will be good for our relationship.   

I've published eleven works to date, and only one of them has an ending I like. That's a 9% success rate. I really am awesome.