Wrapping it up: ending stories
Ending a story has always been a challenge for me. Some stories were fairly easy; City of the Way, Chains of Honor, and most of the Phantom Badgers series had natural story arcs which lent themselves to logical conclusions.
When I wrote The Zone I was faced with a genre which did not lend itself to tidy conclusions, and I had a desire to push the limits of my ability as a writer; I wanted to do something that was deeper than just action. I wanted to try to explore some on the things I felt as I grew older, the events I had experienced and the friends I had lost. I was not completely satisfied with The Zone’s ending; while it was deeply satisfying to me on a personal level, I think I did not do a sufficient job of explaining why Martin did what he did, or his intent. Still, I learned a great deal and I do not consider the book a failure.
Sunstone is my favorite book to date, in part because I feel like the last chapter did what I had hoped for The Zone: to put larger events and personalities into perspective.
In the Dream series I have been called abrupt in regards to my endings, and I can see the point. In the original Dream I wanted the ending to convey an emotion, a finality to a long series of events. In Dream 2 I had the challenge of where & how to interact with Dream 3, and in the end I chose to make it a clean break.
Writing is a series of choices, value judgments that to me are much harder than the actual crunching of words. Do I throw in a love interest? Can I write a book without a love interest and if so would anyone read it? Did I write too much about weapons (Yes, I am aware that I love weapons a little bit too much)? Did I put in too much detail? Not enough? Is this incident funny or stupid? Is the villain doing too poorly? Are the heroes doing too well? It is a never ending process. So the ending of Dream 2 was a compromise I made, and only after a great deal of pondering.
I am working on improving my endings, but I think part of my problem is that to me, the characters are alive. I see them in my head so clearly, and once I end the story and start the mundane work of proofing and editing, they begin to die. Endings are even tougher on me than killing characters; in that regard I do not understand how GRR Martin lives with himself. I suppose with his skills characters are easy to come by.
I was thinking of closing this entry in mid-sentence to be funny, but I decided that it would just be lame. In writing it is always down to choices.
