Be an Author: Know "The End" · 8:32pm Nov 28th, 2018
As a fellow author, you know that there are many things that can prevent you from starting a new project, let alone completing it. There are many ways to organize your thoughts and to prepare to write. Often it's a balance between procrastination and preparedness. What I am sharing today is what works for me, and it's a simple suggestion: Know how the story ends.
Yep. That's it.
My bare bones process is as follows. Get an idea. Choose a stock character, or create one if the idea doesn't provide it. Decide how the story will end—if the idea itself isn't the end point. That's it. I'm not an outliner. I'm not a relentless researcher, though I'll look things up to ensure the story won't have characters acting stupidly. I may write a treatment for novel- and novella-sized works. Then, with my eye on the prize, I write toward the ending.
Knowing the ending is one of many methods, but for me it provides a tool to test every scene and every line of dialog against a goal. It makes foreshadowing what's going to happen in the first draft easier. It helps prevent distractingly interesting characters or events from hijacking the story on novelistic digressions. (Not that that can't be a good thing as I've had plenty of digressions that have proved a better idea than the original, but let's focus on completing a project here.) And best of all, it helps you pace the story for the final climax because you know when and where and how it ends. You know when to stop writing. Yes, that can be a problem, but where a story actually starts and ends is a topic for different essay.
Examples are called for.
Idea: Time travel is pretty useless. Character: Twilight, because it requires powerful magic and somepony powerful enough to use it. The ending: Twilight travels back in time to tell herself not to worry but learns you can't change the past, only how you'll do things in the future. That's It's About Time but it demonstrates the ease of the technique for generating story. For original characters, you'll have to think about the message you want to pass to the reader and the character's agenda for doing what they do in the story, but if you're like me, you'll enjoy discovering the details as you write.
Idea: Discuss child separation in an FiM context. I connected this with a reference in one of my stories with a failure of the borage harvest (the Irish potato famine) as the reason Songbird Serenade and other Trotters (ponies from Trottingham) had emigrated to Equestria. Characters: Spike, who is very literally separated from his parents, and a runaway filly OC separated from her parents in a less friendly nation who comes to Equestria searching for them. Ending: With the help of Songbird, Spike reconciles the filly with her adopted-father and convinces him to agree to help her search while Spike addresses his feelings about his own missing parents. That was my starting point for Filly, Separated. I wanted to write about child separation, headline news at the time. I searched for characters in my stories (in this case from my Knight of Equestria series, Certainty*) and realized something weird about Spike: the abandoned egg. I wrote the story before the Father Knows Beast was out with no knowledge of what the season 8 episode would be about. I think it stands up after viewing the episode, too.
As an exercise, take some of your ideas, add characters, and draft an ending for the story. See if it helps you start and complete stories faster than before.
* Yes, there are four completed Knight of Equestria stories, but at the time of this posting I am writing lyrics to replace the copyrighted lyrics I briefly quoted in each. Even a few words that make a lyric recognizable are a no-no because quotes aren't allowed for a substantial portion of a published work in the US. In some songs, a word might correspond to a chapter quote from a book. It's legally indefensible and against FimFiction rules in any case, thus the publication delays.
Typo in the title :)
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Arrrrgghhhh! This is another reason to have someone proof your writing. It was Be and Author. Thank you very much.
This is the second post of yours I've stumbled across, whose content, again, is really helpful. After exams, I'll be continuing one of my stories, and thankfully, I do know its end. I like how you present advice. Very accessible and unpretentious. Thanks!
Your blogposts are really useful. Have a follow, kind sir.
May your hands be fruitful!
This is actually pretty useful. Thanks a lot, sir!
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Thanks. BTW, your avatar resembles a character in my story Sunset Shimmer Goes to Hell named Cthony. Just saying...
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It is true that it isn’t sufficient to just know the end, but to get to writing immediately and to complete. I came up with this article (supplanting two currently being written) when I answered a blog post on The Writer’s Group named How to keep motivation to write an idea? Interesting thread, and that is the other part of it. Starting, writing, and completing. My best advice is if that the issue, is to write as short short-stories as possible, and many of them, until it’s a habit. I’ve also written the end of stories first, but that was weird. Very weird. Yup. Weird. Keep coaching your friends!
Roll play fiction sites really got me into a bad habit of not planing beyond a post. In doing roll play I had to contend with people who would completely ignore what I was setting up, wouln't tell me what they were doing, and even actively blocked my attempts to build any coherent plots. As a result, I am now in the habit of taking the grain of an idea, and start typing with very little planing. Often with no end point in mind. I'm hoping to eventually cure myself of this affliction being there is nothing worse then developing a story, along with the characters, and then realizing I have no idea where I'm going with it.
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You may be stuck searching for the real story in the whole and trimming the beginning and your stopping point to find it! I’ve done that. I didn’t like it, but sometimes it is what it is. Lessons learned. The hard way. Always the hard way. One of the reasons why I’m writing these articles...