Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Mimi Drop's avatar

Please don't shorten your answers on our account; I learn so much from them. I particularly liked the story about the anthology, how the set up makes the ending feel inevitable. That's the way I think about it in my stories. The ending is right when it feels like it answers the question the story is asking.

Expand full comment
mary g.'s avatar

George, thank you for this, especially for generously letting us in on how you ended Victory Lap. It’s always nice to know that our writing gurus struggle, too. That none of this comes easily for anyone. As far as writing shorter Thursday posts—I just hope you don’t burn out on all of this. We, your biggest fans, love your posts and always (selfishly) hope for more. But if it gets to be too much, that makes perfect sense, too.

Here are my own rambling thoughts on endings. Maybe off base…? But here you go:

I don’t know—is it considered old fashioned to talk about plot when talking about endings? I’m obviously not an expert, but I think sometimes the problem with an ending has to do with plotting. Also with understanding what your story is about—what you’re trying to tell yourself when writing your story. If your story arc isn’t working properly (and I mean more than escalation here—I mean escalation that leads to something happening, something crucial—all of George’s stories that I’ve read have this, usually a character must make a character-defining decision after all the escalation) and if you don’t know what your story is about (on both surface and deeper levels), then your ending is probably going to fail. As George says, a third act problem is a first act problem, and I know from experience just how true that is. The seed for your ending appears in your beginning (because, well, it has to!), so if you get to the end and you can’t bring things to a satisfactory close—if you can’t reach a new equilibrium after all the commotion of your plot—then you have to go back to the start and see where you went wrong. Maybe your ending is the ending to a different story—the one you didn’t write! It’s kind of a technical thing, even though writers like to write in that dreamy state, that half-conscious place, words funneling through the mind’s ether and onto the page. At a certain point, you’ve got to get real. Does this ending satisfy? Does it bring everything to a close? Does it point back to the beginning? Does it point to the heart of the story—the question the story has been asking the whole time? A story only asks one question. If your ending isn’t somehow related to that one question, then you have to go back in and see where you went wrong. If everything DOES point to the heart of things, then you’ve painted your floor, as George says, and you can step outside.

That's my take, anyway.

Expand full comment
171 more comments...

No posts