Where the story ends

Well, I’m back, wedded and rested and ready to blog. (Okay, so the last one doesn’t necessarily follow from the first two, but you get the idea.) And now that I’ve recovered some fraction of my brain — I don’t have to plan anything any more! woooo! — I’m going to ignore the wedding clichés from my last post and concentrate on something else entirely: the end of a story.

This is actually vaguely relevant to the last couple of weeks: because we didn’t go immediately on a honeymoon afterwards, we still each had a few obligations. One of mine was the monthly BRAWL meeting, for which I’d promised to have a story ready. And I did have one that I’d worked on as a distraction in the week before the wedding. All it needed was revision.

However, as I was revising it, two days late and muddying through the bits that had once been so clear in my head, I got a page and a half from the end and realized something: the end of this particular story was terrible. Embarrassingly so. Bad enough that I decided I could not in good conscience submit it to the group.

Now, I’ve submitted stories with major flaws to BRAWL before, and I undoubtedly will do so again. I suspect members of BRAWL can think of several I submitted that had lousy endings as well. But for some reason this one just seemed too bad to send out, and while some of that may be due to post-nuptial brain, I think it’s more that I consider the end of a story incredibly important. If it doesn’t work, the story as a whole fails.

Endings are, for me, much more important than beginnings. I’ve read one too many books and seen one too many series where I enjoyed it all the way up to just before the end — and then had all those expectations shredded. (This is one of the reasons I’m reluctant to watch the fourth season of Doctor Who, since the last episode of the third season pissed me off so very much. Great buildup and then pffft! all that wasted. Gah.) This is why I’m a little wary of recommending series that aren’t finished, since a bad ending can sour me on the rest. Although it doesn’t really keep me from starting new series. You’d think I’d know better.

It shows in my writing process as well: I tend to think up the endings to stories first. (The failed story was a rare exception.) I knew the end to Spiral Hunt even back in the first, unrecognizable draft; I even had the same basic shape of the climax of the story, even though the people and setting and motivations all changed. I knew the end of Wild Hunt before I started writing it, and I knew what the end to the third book would be as well. Even as I’m working on it right now and changing things mid-draft (let’s toss a character in! Oh crap, that means I’ll have to redo the rest — oh well! Works better this way!), I know where I’m headed. Hell, if I ever write a fourth Evie book, I know what its end would have to involve, even though I know nothing else about the plot. It’s as if I can see a few shapes in the fog, and the beacon that guides me on is the endpoint of the story. So the end is overly important to me, sometimes to the detriment of the writing process, as is the case with the failed story that may, at some point, make its way to BRAWL.

What endings spoiled the rest of the story for you — or just made you reluctant to read the story again? Conversely, are there endings that saved stories? Writers, do you know the ending first, and if not, how do you know if the ending you get to is the right one?