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All’s Well that Ends Well? Oh, I don’t know…

Karen Myers
2–3 minutes

You know all of those loose ends you’ve been carefully shunting to one side in your memory so as not to forget about tying them up? You look around the walls of your last chapter, and you try to make sure you’ve accounted for everything.

I think of it like a block of transparent acrylic, with all the important bits and pieces gleaming inside somewhere. I look them over, trying to call them to mind as I identify them, wondering about that dimly lit bit near the bottom, and prepare to write the final words.

But then I pause… Have I accounted for everything and everyone? Are all the motives plausible and all the supporting bits in place?

But there are other considerations. One of the ones I think about is how to elevate the impact of my writing at the end, to leave an admiring taste in the reader’s mouth. I polish that bit of writing especially seriously, hoping the rider will want another taste from my pen.

On the flip side, as I ponder how well the structure holds (at this final decision point), I dread the “oh shit” discovery as I look back. The “that’s not how that works, is it, now that I think about it? I better look that up.” The “But what ever happened to the guy who got away?” for a loose end still dripping ink in there somewhere that makes you contemplate a big rip-out and re-think.

Although the story supports itself in many and various ways, there’s also a sense in which the ending (done well) is like a glass ball with the responsibility of balancing the entire story on it’s back, swaying gently. There’s a temptation not to disturb it, not to rethink the elements that got it there. What if you disturb that balance?

But if you can think of a legitimate issue, now that you’re looking hard, you can’t leave it unaddressed — if you’re like me, it will irritate you forever. So take a big breath and really finish the job.

Or do you have other reactions? What’s the worst “unexpected rewrite” you’ve had to accommodate? Or your worst disappointment from someone else’s insufficient ending polish?

4 responses to “All’s Well that Ends Well? Oh, I don’t know…”

  1. TXRed Avatar
    TXRed

    Worst ending: The book that had two endings, because apparently the editor or review reader said, “Um, yeah, ya know, having a happy ending for some readers might be a nice idea, and you left this enormous dangling plot thread.” So there’s a tacked on “however, there are stories that this other thing is what actually happened.”

    Worst rewrite to date: Miners and Empire. The basic ending was OK, but a lot of things leading up to it had to be redone, a plot thread totally rewritten, and then a chunk of the ending needed changes to make it fit the rest of the book. [In my defense, it was my first NaNoWriMo book, and I was locked onto throwing words onto the screen, and working in all the research material.]

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  2. Celia Hayes Avatar
    Celia Hayes

    Hairiest rewrite ever? For my own books, that would be when I had “Daughter of Texas” 3/4ths complete, and was dreading having to write the chapters where the husband of my heroine was going to die of tuberculosis. (Which fate had already been set and mentioned several times in the previous books in my historical Texas series.) I would have to go all graphic about it all, and the terrible grief this would be for the heroine … and then I had a scathingly brilliant notion of how – and why that could all happen off-stage as it were! And not only that – but work out some of my own residual disappointment and resentment over a personal romantic betrayal AND set up a dramatic situation for a future book! So I had to go back through what I had written already and drop the various subtle hints … to the disappointment of my editor, who had really liked that one character.

    Plot ending fail in a book by someone else? Definitely Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book. Here we have a dedicated, detail-oriented book restorer going through a treasured medieval manuscript with a fine-toothed comb, looking at every microscopic element in the process of restoring it … and never notices the tiny writing in one of the illustrations … until the last chapter, and with someone elses’ borrowed reading glasses? Whoopsie.

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    1. TXRed Avatar
      TXRed

      Geraldine Brooks seems to have a great deal of trouble ending stories. Year of Wonders feels as if she wrote the character into a corner, so “and then this improbable thing happens and happily ever after!”

      Reply
  3. Michael Morley Avatar
    Michael Morley

    I’ve had something of the opposite problem. I’ve got things in my later chapters that needed to be set up beforehand, so I’m going back through the earlier chapters and backfilling the necessary details.

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