Want to Craft the Perfect Ending?

Sure, we’ve all heard how important beginnings of novels are, but what about the endings? Check out my guest article for SilverWood Books for lots of tips on how to plan, craft and pull-off the perfect ending.

On Finishing

I’m celebrating a milestone in my young writing life.  After three years of writing fiction, I did something today I’ve never done before.  I finished a short story.

I don’t know much about the psychology of persevering through a project — I only know it stinks when you’re working at it, but feels oh so good once it’s completed.  Kind of like exercise.  And I don’t have a ton of advice for motivating writers to finish their projects.  I’m learning myself!  Though, I will say, I’m sure there’s a healthy amount of hard work involved with just the tiniest bit of luck.

I guess what I did this time that was different from others was that I wrote, kept writing and didn’t go back and scuba-edit everything I wrote as I wrote it.  Which means, my next task is rewriting.  But there’s something to separating out the writing stage from the rewriting… if only a psychological something.  You feel accomplished when you finish; you feel discouraged when you murder every sentence baby before it’s even born.

So  I’m  properly chuffed.

I began working at 9:45 am and finished at 4:05 and celebrated with a brain-exploding run.  It was a long haul of self-doubt, with my inner editor telling me to take a break after every sentence.  But I didn’t!  How many great stories have been lost because their authors took a break and never had the courage to come back?

It’s a rough story and will need a ton of rewriting, but today I persevered and I finished it.  Hurray!

“Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
E.L. Doctorow