Writing The End

I've been struggling with an ending for months now. I hate writing endings!

Beginnings always write themselves. I feel like I've just started a journey: flushed with excitement, not yet footsore or weary, not yet dreading the weight of my backpack or tired of the same old clothes packed inside. Later on, my beginnings tend to unravel a bit and need reworking, but they generally stay the same. They take off at a good gallop, pulling the plot merrily behind them.

They pull me right along too, panting in their wake, huffing and puffing as I plan the rest of the story. As I work my way toward the middle, all the major sign posts are there and I can see them clearly ahead, but carving the way to them is everything. Just as in real life, a straight line will seldom get you from point A to point B, in fiction, the way is circuitous and there are rocks and dips and barbwire fences. But I enjoy figuring these out and working my way around them. Yes, beginnings and middles are the part of writing I relish the most: that first heady, dizzying rush, then working my way from signpost to signpost, over all the hurdles and obstacles.

Following a basic formula helps. First of all, what happens has to be at least a little bit funny. Because for pity's sake, what is life -- or fiction -- without humor? Then you have to give your protagonist loads of problems, providing plenty of tension to keep readers from looking at their watches and thinking about what's for lunch, but you also have to let your suffering protagonist have the occasional bit of fun so they don't end up so miserable and overstressed that you hate yourself for causing so much torment.

And then slowly but surely, you pave the way to a satisfying denouement, making sure not to forget the clues, the details that have to be there from the very beginning, woven deftly through your story so that the reader isn't left wondering what the hell just happened and how did that get there? This takes an incredible amount of fine-tuning, as the clues and contextual details have to be significant, but in an unobtrusive way, so that later on, your reader can go back and think to herself, "Ah, so that really WAS a dream, it was her all along!" and marvel that even with such great clues, they never guessed.

Beginnings and middles, I flatter myself, I can do. To be sure, there are many adjustments, hundreds of reworkings, characters dropped, plots restructured, beta readers consulted, and a whole teetering crap-load of angst, but I manage, all the same. But endings are my Waterloo, and this one is driving me wild. I know the outcome, I just don't know how to achieve it in the most incredible-but-believable, satisfying-but-not-predictable way.

Not so long ago, I had an epiphany: endings are hard for me because I don't like getting rid of things. I am a pack-rat by nature: I yearn to hoard and treasure the things I prize. I don't like saying goodbye, leaving places, finishing anything. I was always the kid who ate all the way around the blueberries on my danish, saving them until the very end, the one who made a bar of chocolate last until it had started to melt down my fingers. And once I finish writing something, the story is gone -- over! -- and all other chances for how the story might have ended are gone too. That goes against my grain, and that is why endings cause me so much difficulty.

So I am going to leave this ending for a day or two. I am going to clean out my drawers right now and sort through a few boxes of old shoes. It may not work, and it will be agony to throw out all those old shoes, but I can still use the cupboard space.

Wish me luck!