All’s Well That Ends Well—L. Kappel

No pressure: as we work through the maze of people’s lives and deaths in our story telling and story writing, we realize this must end.

But how do we end a story in a satisfying way?

We have all experienced that book, the one we didn’t want to climb out of. Did we find relief from the ending, all the scores settled and solutions found?

At the end of a feast or famine of characters, how can we be sure as writers that we have left our readers so emotive they will continue to wrangle with the ending?

We have no evidence one way or the other until we make a competition’s short list, or we receive an agent’s “sorry but” letter. Perhaps the most traumatizing for the writer are stories that sit on the reader’s shelves unconsumed.

So we continue to try to end things in a satisfying way, to bend the curve—no, not a racing term, although all the analogies are there: They’re off! What a great start! The skills on those corners, years of writing—oops, I mean driving. Here comes that curve … No! She crashes just at the bend! Will she be able to recover?

As writers, we might like to tell ourselves that the art of story telling hasn’t changed, but in the past few decades, it has evolved—with the advent of social media and the consumption preferences of its users.

In the current world, where entire stories are often told in thirty-second clips, an ending may be a series of powerful images, leaving us wanting more: so we hit “follow”.

Mystery writing, at least for me, comes from puzzle pieces of my life, triggered by a real-life event, not mine. Those puzzle pieces remain just that: puzzle pieces. There are clues as to where they belong, but it’s an ongoing process to get them to fit.

Do they all need to fit? Do all our stories need an ending that completes the puzzle?

Perhaps the series author has the luxury of not telling it all; the last few pages are the breadcrumbs that lead us to the next instalment.

We should leave clues, whether we write short stories or long, giving our readers joy in spotting the breadcrumbs even in the most awful events.

Not just any old breadcrumbs; they must have purpose.

Author of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train, Patricia Highsmith offers this advice in her handy little book Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction:

Early in development, the writer must ask these crucial questions:“Is the hero going to emerge from this victor or vanquished?” And “is the atmosphere one of comedy, tragedy, or both mixed? Or is it a kind of flat reporting of events and cruel fate for the reader to make of what [she] wishes?”

For the reader to make of what she wishes!

I struggle with this, but this is my Everest. For these writing struggles, we all need our “sherpas”—our writing friends—around us.