Writing the Ending

When I was nearing what I knew would be the end of Running From Herself, I refused to think about how the story would end. The prospect was too anxiety-inducing. 

For the longest time, the ending didn't even cross my mind. I don't know how long, on average, it takes other writers to write a novel. Maybe they're word spillers who wait 'til the end to clean up their messes, unlike me, who's a meticulous edit-as-I-go fussbudget. Here's a guess. According to the article: "100,000 to 130,000 word novel – 8 to 12 months." Mine is approximately 115,000 words, written in two separate chunks of time, so my estimation is ~ about a year. Unlike the Reddit self-pubbers I've run across, I don't keep track of useless minutiae. 

Redditer: "How many words do you write a day?"

Me (inside my head): "Who cares? Am I supposed to track them on a graph?"

But when I'm interviewed by the media 😆 they might ask, so I'll go with one year.

Back to endings: All I knew was that the novel's ending would be happy. That's how I roll. But it couldn't be cloying or saccharine. That's not how I roll. Plus, no matter what some might claim, readers want, if not a happy ending, at least an optimistic one. Who wants to invest time in a story, only to get to the end and read, "And then she got hit by a truck"? If you want a bunch of bad reviews, do that.

Endings are not as hard to write as the saggy middle, but they carry a lot of psychic weight, and not just for the reader. Think about it. You as the writer have moaned and raged and sometimes cried over your manuscript. You've wondered at times if you should just chuck the whole thing. Then finally, it all comes together. 

"Oh, God, what if I blow the ending?!?!" 

For me, the times I get into trouble is when I overthink an ending; second guess it. With Inn Dreams, I had an ending in mind early on, but I overthought it and wondered if it wouldn't come off as contrived. My idea was to end on a happy coincidence. When Karen first inspected the shuttered motel, she found the registration book that showed the motel's last guest and his hometown. (Apparently that was all the now-deceased owner had asked for.) The ending would have a young man stop in, looking for "The Mon-Tel", which his dad had recommended. Karen had renamed the place, so, satisfied, the man checked in, and when Karen looked at his registration ~ same last name, same hometown. He was the new inn's first guest.

I guess I considered it all too neat, so I played around with other ideas and hated them all. Finally, I thought, "Know what? This is my book. I can end it the way I want." I liked the hokey ending; this was fiction, after all. And I found it to be sweet, but not too sweet.

My key to writing a satisfactory ending is to let it develop naturally. After let's say a year 😉of writing it, I had absolutely no idea how Leah's story would end. Would she go back to Nashville and try to pick up her career? Would one of the supporting characters do something to set her on a certain path? Would she finally become the superstar she was meant to be?

I considered lots of scenarios, but in the end, one thing flowed into another, and I realized I had it. No overthinking this time. This was it. Everything came together and it all made sense.

So, authors, you've lived with your main characters for a year or a half a year or whatever measure fits your circumstance, and you know them. Let them dictate how the story should end.