Does Your Novel Just…Stop? What Makes a Good Ending

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy
Your novel’s ending will have more impact than everything that came before it.

Some writers have troubles with beginnings, or more commonly, middles, but for me, it’s always been endings.

I tend to rush them once I reach the book’s climax, and summarize what happens instead of dramatizing scenes to the big finish. I always have to rewrite those last three or four chapters several times before I get them right.

There are two reasons for this—impatience and story fatigue.

When I develop a novel, I reach a point where I’m tired of planning and want to move onto the writing. And that typically happens before I’ve fully fleshed out my ending, so I only know a general sense of what happens. And when I’m drafting it, I hit another wall of fatigue, where I’m so ready for it to be over and I can start revising. Then I rush past the ending I didn’t develop enough in the first place.

Continue ReadingWritten by Janice Hardy. Fiction-University.com