Why is ending your story so dang hard?!

You have them engaged with your FIRST sentence. You go through the obstacles. You have detail, you have thought, you have emotion, you have action, suspense, twists and turns and then….(insert deflated balloon sound). And that’s it…!?

You have the best intentions but you feel this intense pressure to have a OMFG ending. I mean they stayed with you the whole way, the least you could give them is strong finish (unintended innuendo).

I want to help ease your stress and worry by telling you this: you actually only have ONE responsibility when it comes to ending your story - answering the question you posed in your story.

Question?? Yes. If your story doesn’t pose a question, sorry but you don’t actually have a story.

A great story is designed, from beginning to end, to answer a single overarching question. If no question is asked, let alone answered, then the story is so full of things the reader doesn’t need to know that it has no focus, so it isn’t really a story. It’s just a collection of things that happen.

—Wired for Story

I’ll do a whole other blog post on the dramatic question of your story, but for now this question could be as simple as “will she make it?” “will he say yes?” “will they find their happy?”

Anything else is just multicolored sugar droplets on top.

You can always include something you learned, but mostly importantly let us know what new world are you leaving us with - even if it’s a world where you don’t exactly have the all answers yet.

Because isn’t that the world we’re all living in anyway?

Let me know how it goes. Sending you good vibes through the matrix.