Sometimes writing feels like running a marathon. You write, write, write, lather, rinse, and repeat. You develop your plot, you explore characters, you get in your 1000 words or x-number of pages per day, and the end feels so very far away. In fact, it feels like you might never reach it. My current WIP has felt like a particularly long marathon. I’ve been going to school, so the normal “get to the end” trajectory has been peppered with revisions, feedback, and more revisions. All of which has made me a better writer. But part of me was starting to believe I would never finish anything again.
Don’t get too excited, I haven’t finished this book — YET. But the end is in sight. I can see it. Finally!
My lack of blog-posts have therefore been in pursuit of the ever elusive ending. So please bear with me as I find my final wind and race to “The End!”
In honor of this final sprint, I offer these lovely words of wisdom on endings:
“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.” – Frank Herbert
“Let your characters actions and situations reveal the significance of your ending. Don’t explain what your story means or what your characters have learned.” – Scott Eddleston
“What rings and resounds at the end of a novel is not just physical. What moves us is not just characters, images and events…we are moved by the increasing connectedness of things, ultimately a connectedness of values.” – John Gardner
“When a symphony is over we feel the notes and tunes composing it have been liberated, they have found in the rhythm of the whole their individual freedom. Cannot the novel be like that?…Music, though it does not employ human beings, though it is governed by intricate laws, nevertheless does offer in its final expression a type of beauty which fiction might achieve in its own way. Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion.” – E.M. Forster
As you all run your marathons and reach for the end, may your journey (and your protagonist’s journey) find expansion in the space of reaching your goals! Happy writing everyone. I’ll be back when I’ve finished this draft.
