Now, maybe you’re the disciplined type of author, with a more-or-less detailed outline, followed carefully until the very very end of the story. Is that you? Really?
Well, then… scuss! Get outta here. This one’s not for you.
Me, I’ve only got two types of story in me. One is the show-off short work, the kind I think of as my homages to the classic SciFi one-trick-pony short stories that they filled the magazines and collections with. I’m pleased that I can do them and mildly happy when I write one, but I don’t care about them, I don’t ruminate about them. At most, they resent a mild opportunity to get something clever-ish off my chest and out of the way.
It’s the other type of story I care about — the “it ain’t ever gonna end — I might have to die first and let the characters go on without me” variety. I think of these as separate from me, as if they were real stories out there in the metaverse, and I’m just transcribing the lives of real characters, one work at a time. Now, I’m not claiming that’s the case — I create them and move them around deliberately (and at times ruthlessly) in the interest of overarching plot and emotion. But I feel strongly that they have a story existence that is separate from me. With that perception comes the semi-serious conviction that I am responsible for them, like a tribal god — it would ill behoove me to be capricious about their fates.
That constrains the sorts of stories I tell, of course — heroes who suffer but are trying to do the right thing, even if the fates are against them, villains who may fail, but may earn a chance at redemption. A person’s character matters more than his luck, even if it doesn’t guarantee success, or even survival.
From a structural planning perspective, certain types of stories appeal to me more than others; the tendency for me is toward long form and characters that persist, and thus series are a natural for me. Of course, none of this means that I am free to ignore the conventional guidance about breaking stories into parts to spread them across multiple entries.
So, I am biased toward certain story forms, and all my fabulation and rumination focuses on carving off book-length tales that are related to each other in particular ways. That’s how I know when my story is “over”, at least in the current-work-in-progress incarnation, if not the last one in the full series (until I get there).
What about you? What guides you regarding story length and structure, to conceptualize overall size, to contemplate multiple book/story forms? How do you know when your story is over, for the current work or the whole potential tale?
Mad Genius Club 
9 responses to “Is the story over? How do you know?”
Even when I think something is over, and I walk away . . . I get an idea about what the characters did after that . . . Might or might not write it down, might or might not publish it . . .
I wrote two novelettes to prevent myself from sticking an epilogue on a work.
For me, units of change (or failure to change) seem to be the base story unit. And there seems to be a fairly fixed rate of change per words too. So a big change has to have a lot of smaller sized changes leading up to the big final shift.
When the moon explodes. That generally counts as an ending in my stories. Or when you find a flower growing inside a geode, which you pulled out of a monster’s guts, which was itself hidden in a pocket dimension only accessible by a particular ritual which was never written down, spoken about, or remembered so stumbling into it was a complete accident which shouldn’t have been even possible let alone probable, which series of events came about because you were running for your life from a botched summoning even (not yours) that may or may not have caused at least two apocalypses (totally not your fault) as a result of you appearing (not on purpose, really) in the middle of a very intricate and delicate technomagical containment system because one of the junior sorcerers sneezed at *just* the wrong moment…
Or a few pages after the Big Bad finally snuffs it for the first time. Or that, even. Maybe.
Or because the author wrote the ending too early and kinda sorta crossed genres just a wee bit and needs a whole other book to get the plot wrassled back on track.
Outliners have to figure out how the story ends in the outline. Not necessarily easier.
About the only time it’s easy is when the ending was the inspiration, and even then I often realize that I made it too easy and the ending is merely the springboard to make the true ending feasible.
Usually, sometime around the beginning of the story (but not always) I discover The Problem the characters must solve. Usually something they don’t want to do, and are essentially forced into.
So then they go along, and among other things, solve the problem. Or they solve it enough that they can go back to ignoring it some more. This may or may not be The End.
Most books, after hanging out with the characters after they’ve conquered whatever it was, I declare victory and throw a party, shopping trip, some form of recreational social event. That’s the end. Not because I want it to be, but more because nobody wants to read about kids eating pizza and playing video games for another chapter or two. There’s got to be some sort of action, or so I have been led to believe. ~:D
Last couple of books were shopping trips, because it gives me a lot of latitude for fun with all sorts of overpowered aliens, a werewolf, some lippy giant spiders and etc. You can generate a pretty fun scene just walking down the street with a giant spider.
Wouldn’t a smart-ass giant spider be considered mandible-y? 😀
A simple story is wrapped up when the conflict introduced in the first chapter (you did introduce a conflict in the first chapter, right?) gets resolved.
In a more complex story, the initial conflict might be resolved, or nearly so, when the characters become aware of a much bigger conflict. Case in point: Babylon 5. The mysteries of Sinclair and the Earth-Minbari War are pretty much wrapped up by the middle of season 2. Then the clues about the Shadow War start to reach critical mass. Events undreamt-of at the beginning unfold with a nightmarish sense of inevitability. Half the galaxy is in chaos before it’s over.
If I wrote for a hundred years I might come up with something half as good.
Sometimes you need bridging conflict to get the character to where he can see the big picture, but it’s generally best when they tie together.