Endings suck
I finished a story today while I ate breakfast at Atlanta Bread. It was something I’d started months ago – in October, when I was taking a writing class – but had been sitting in a perpetual state of almost-done ever since. I cleaned it up a little shortly before Christmas, intending to finish it when I was home for the holiday, but it didn’t happen. Then I changed jobs at the beginning of January, so it still didn’t happen.
Mostly, though, it wasn’t done because endings suck, and I can never find a satisfactory conclusion for a story. I’m not even entirely sure the one I ended up with is really a satisfactory ending, though its definitely better than what I had. This is the story of my (writing) life: I have a precise picture in my head of the beginning, and I breeze through the middle, but when it comes to the end I have no idea what to do. It’s frustrating, and easily the worst part of writing for me, followed closely by coming up with titles.
I think the problem is that I’m not really a plot-driven writer. I mean, this particular story is kind of plot-driven, it’s a spy short story sort of in the style of either James Bond or Alias, but I invented the plot for a character I already had in my head, Alex Woo (fun fact: Alex Woo’s original name was Kermit Woo, an awesome name I came across when deleting spam out of my email, but my beta reader found it jarring so I renamed him the more conventional Alexander).
That’s how I write – a character starts to develop in my head, and after I’ve daydreamed them into full realization, I build a story for them. The beginning and middle is easy for me because it’s partially about building the relationships between the characters, but the endings are hell because I don’t know where to leave these relationships. Often the story is left hanging. It’s definitely my weak point as a writer, and I’m not entirely sure how to fix it. It’s probably something I’ll always struggle with.
Randomly, the comment box for this layout was inexplicably in Italian. Since I don’t read Italian and I doubt the rest of you do either, I’ve fixed that now.