The Perfect Ending

When I first think of an idea, I normally think up the following things:

1) The Main Character

2) The Climax

3) The Ending

These are the things that normally come to mind as soon as the idea pops into my head. If one of them is missing, I conjure them up before I start writing. I find that these three things provide a nice, bare skeleton in which to base the story on.

The main character is probably the most vital of these three things; I always have an idea of what a character is like, how they behave, and the development they have to go through during the story, even if I can't put these things in to words. (And I normally can't. Not at first, anyway.)

The climax, despite being second on the list, is probably one of the very very first things I come up with. In most cases, it's actually where the idea stems from in the first place. If not the climax, it's at least a key scene in the story. It's the scene that I spend the entire story anxiously building up to, and the driving force behind all of the time and work I put into it. Sometimes it changes as the story evolves, but most often, it doesn't. If there's one scene that stays the same from draft to draft, it's probably this one.

The ending, however, is a little more tricky. The previous two factors pop into my head instantly, without hesitation, and they rarely change as I continue working on the story. The ending, on the other hand, is probably the thing that changes the most.

I always have an ending in mind as I'm writing. This is mostly so that I can accurately build up to it, insert foreshadowing and whatnot. That becomes really hard, though, when I change my mind on how I want it to end when I'm halfway through the first draft.

I know, I know: this is what first drafts are for, right? I'll revise it later, so I can always go back and change it. But that doesn't make working out the conclusion to my world any easier.

I'm a sucker for happy endings. That's my problem. There's nothing wrong with happy endings, obviously. But I love my characters and care for them so much that I'm often overly eager to make everything work out for them. The ending then comes out too forced or just plain corny. (Not that there's anything wrong with corny. There's just a time and a place for it, and sometimes my story is not it.)

As many of my friends will tell you, I stress about how to end a story for a very long time. I'll often have several different scenarios, which I'll run by most of my writer (and non-writer) friends, asking for opinions; "Which ending do you like best?" "Is this a cop-out?" "How is your knowledge on sphere-shaped magical projectiles?" (I don't think I ever got a proper response on that last one.)

I flip flop between each ending constantly, thinking only in terms of what I want to happen to my characters. It wasn't until recently that I figured out that the best way to determine an ending is to write it.

As you know (because I won't shut up about it), I recently finished the first draft of The Neutral. (Which I have yet to begin revising, but I digress.) Before I reached the epilogue, I had been flopping back and forth between three different possible endings. I won't go into too much detail, but let's just say that one was the perfect, fairy tale "happy ending", and the other two...well, they were not. Very satisfying, but not quite at the happiness and rainbows stage.

And it was almost entirely for that final reason that I wrote the first perfect, happiness-and-rainbows happy ending in my first draft. I wanted to see everything work out. Once I finally wrote it, though, and saw the scene play out before me, it was...

Well, not as good as I envisioned it.

I have yet to read it since then, but given past experience, it'll probably seem even worse when I finally do get back to it. Actually seeing the words form, instead of imagining what the scene might look like, has greatly affected my perspective on the story itself and what it needs. The entire story, in fact, often differs greatly from what I picture in my head at first.

I think the moral of this story is that you shouldn't set your heart on a particular scene, or ending, for a story until you've at least written it out once. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. In the end, you have to do what's best for the story (even if your fangirl heart continues to plead for the happiest of endings).


Until later,

- Justyne