Finish What You Started: How To End Your Story

By Dell Smith

Do you struggle to finish your writing projects? You are not alone: many writers have problems finishing what they started. Junot Diaz spent five years on a novel that he eventually scrapped before writing The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In Michael Chabon’s The Wonder Boys, his protagonist, aging author Grady Tripp, continues writing the same novel, page after page, with no end in sight.

Not being able to finish a story, novel, or memoir takes on many different manifestations. Some writers have trouble coming up with a proper ending to a story, constantly reworking the final pages or chapters. There are others who don’t have the stamina, patience, or attention to reach the finish line, leaving rat-eared first draft caskets in desk drawers and hard drives.

Then there are those writers who cannot bring themselves to literally stop writing. Afflicted with a condition called hypergraphia (the compulsion to write), they tally thousands of pages of writing. Finally there are writing conditions so deadly that the scientific community has given them nasty little names: laziness and boredom; these two states are common afflictions, making it doubly hard for writers to sit down to write, or even contemplate the act.

Aside from hypergraphia, (which I admit I wouldn’t mind suffering from, although it is associated with epilepsy and bipolar disorder) I’ve suffered from all of these conditions at one time and to one degree or another.

When I first started writing seriously, I wrote hundreds of first draft pages across a number of different novels. I wrote on an electric typewriter; as easy as it was to type page after page of these drafts, I very seldom went back and revised them. I thought first drafts were all there was to this writing thing. I was too impatient to move on to the next story to revise my current project. This attention deficit was a form of laziness and boredom.

Plus, I didn’t know enough about writing to know how to revise. It turns out my idea of revising a novel was to start over. I have three drafts of what eventually became my first novel—each has different characters, situations, and plot.

So what did I do to snap out of it? I joined a writing group. This gave me immediate and diverse feedback for the short stories and chapters I handed out. Deadlines worked wonders for me. Every two weeks I cranked out another story for my group. It was a wildly productive time—I had a form of hypergraphia where every time I sat before a new word processor file I started another story. But I was still lazy about revising; it just sounded like a drag—like I was moving backward instead of continuing ahead, where, apparently, I was a better writer.

I knew I had a problem. I was getting pretty tired of myself and my writing ways. What kind of writer doesn’t finish anything? Maybe that was part of my problem: I still didn’t consider myself a writer. Because I didn’t think I could get published. Because I hadn’t finished anything. When my writing group disbanded, I had a couple dozen short stories, some better than others. I revised a few of the ones I thought were decent and started sending them out.

Then I finished my first novel, revising with the speed and efficiency of a human word processor, and sent it to an agent. The agent’s assistant gave it a thorough read, and sent back a two page letter talking more about my typos, bad grammar, and malapropisms than whether the story was successful (it wasn’t). But this letter was good—made me see that I still had to embrace revision as a necessary part to writing.

Cut to a couple novels later. I still have a major problem with endings—I can write to the end, but don’t always know how to wrap up my story. So what have I done to snap out of it? I recently took a great  Novel in Progress class at Grub Street with Tova Mirvis where she covered some of the fundamentals of how to start my novel, incorporate flashbacks and character history, and outline my story to help as a guide to write the novel (including the ending) that I envision. Having learned these basics will help me lay a solid first draft foundation on which to build my future drafts. I want to finish my novel in a way that honors the rest of the story and won’t short change the reader.

And hopefully she won’t get bored and lazy, and stop reading before she finishes.

Have you struggled with ending/finishing your writing? Have you spent years on a project that you just couldn’t finish the way you envisioned?

Originally appeared on Beyond the Margins September 9, 2010