Until the End
Don't mistake a good set-up for a satisfying conclusion — many beginning writers end their stories when the real story is about to begin. — Stanley Schmidt
How do you decide when the story's finished? Does your hero get the girl? Does the monster kill all the teenagers and then go back to sleep at the bottom of the lake? Maybe the ship sails off into the sunset?
Writing fantasy and horror makes for some very unusual endings. Neverend was fairly easy to finish — David tries to take back his kingdom, falls in love with the girl he left behind, and then the door closes. Everything hopefully comes together, and say goodbye to each other, and to the reader who shared the experience with them.
Horror is … a little different. Horror is about scares, about terror and usually about death — either the protagonist's or someone close to them. I won't ruin my own shorts because they're so, well, short (see what I did there?), but the ending hopefully isn't what the reader was expecting. Horror has to shock or startle the reader somehow so that it sticks with them, and makes an impression that lasts longer than the text.
I think the ending could be the most important part of your story — not how it starts (although that IS important), and certainly not the downtime that always comes during the telling of the story. A friend of mine confessed the other day that most books are usually a source of frustration for her because their endings are rarely as satisfying as what she's hoping for. I highly doubt that she's the only person who feels this way, too.
I'm less of a reader than I am a writer these days, but I'll admit that endings have frustrated me as well. I have at least one novelette that's hanging around in Literary Limbo because I don't have a satisfactory ending. It sat for months because I didn't even have an ending, and now the one it does have right now seems so divisive to the people who've read it for me already. So I've tucked it away in the hopes that an ending will come to me someday. At least one or two novels are in the same state, although I do intend on finishing them — by force, if necessary.
Do you know how your stories end? Does it come in a flash, or as a slow burn that builds as the story progresses?
