How to Finish a Story

[Trom DeGrey]

How many times have you gotten into a fan fiction story and found it’s never been finished? This thread is a discussion for the hardest part of a story to write – The End. Advice for easing into it and encouragement for blasting your way through, here we will cut through the excuses and start filling the Completed Fics Archive.

[Trom DeGrey]

Guess I'll fire this one up too...

I finish nothing! I'm horrible for it!! I make up every excuse in the world to not write. I've scheduled time for myself in my appointment book, done writing exercises, berated myself, you name it!

How do you get your fic finished?

[umgaynow]

The trouble I have is that my stories tend to take on a life of their own...they get longer and longer than I intended and in doing so, make the line to the intended ending much more meandering and indirect than I ever imagined...case in point "A Woman in Uniform"...I have known exactly how this story was going to end since day one...but as I said it took on its own life...in particular, the Willow and Tara in this AU turned out to be some serious little sex bunnies

While I have tried to keep the plot alive throughout their sometimes extensive boinkfests...I am now at a loss as to how to get back to the intended ending from the extended sex scene I left them in, without it being a clunky non-sequitur...a story shouldn't lose flow just because the characters got a happy (or several)...so what do you do when you know exactly where you need to end up but as they say around these parts ya can't get there from heah? Any suggestions?

Sandi

[Katharyn]

I've just had to conduct what I call a gap analysis on my current fic. It's massive at 75 parts and over 3/4 million words so far and just contained so much information I'd long since forgotten what had happened and what I set up. Oh, I knew the general direction I had to go, but how to get there was missing.

I also had a large number of parts written to enjoy myself from different parts of the future of the fic. In between are great big, gaping holes.

What I did was take a week and scan the old parts, find out interesting plot points from them and how they could help. I placed pre-existing future parts in correct sequence and then looked at where the gaps were. Idea's from the past that would fit in the gaps have been put there - in idea form. Other parts I've generated ideas for from scratch all to move the story forwards.

Turns out that after 75 parts of the sequel to the original 103 parts I need fifty or so more to finish it as I want to, of which 30 don't exist in any form but an idea. But now I know the structure and I've stopped messing around, I can work in order on each part that needs to be done. I know where and what it is.

I guess what I'm saying is if you know where you have to get to and what you have (idea's, future parts) then join the dots. Plot what has to happen, what you'd like to see happen and how that affects the journey. Lay it out and make a plan you can work to and perhaps stop indulging yourself outside the plan.

I have to say that now I know this, now it's not endless, I'm so much more motivated and am turning over new parts much faster than I have for years. To the extent it's stopping me posting as I don't want to stop writing to redraft! Strangely structure has liberated me from the shackles of uncertainty.

If you have no idea what the ending is... well, I've never been there exactly. Close, but not quite. The worst I've ever been was that I didn't know the mechanism that was going to allow the necessary change in the characters. Without the mechanism all the work I'd done would be wasted. Brainstorming, writing the progression up to that point, helped me there. I found the way to that point and the blockage gave way under the torrent of ideas. It was a 'slap the head' moment - how could I have been so dumb not to see it before?

Katharyn.

[The_Lord_J]

I read somewhere something about writing novels...a method of doing it, if you will, that I'm trying on my next fic. The gist of it is, sketch a VERY brief outline of the plot. Add a few details. Check through it and edit it a bit, adding more details as you go. Add some new ideas in. Add some pointers as to the setting of certain scenes. Fill it out a bit...you can see where this is going. Get everything laid out first, then shove all the dialogue in at the end. I have no idea if this works, and I guess it depends on your style of writing (I much prefer editing and adding bits to the middle of the story rather than trying to it all linear), but it seems to make sense to get the plot and all the details of HOW you're getting from one place to the next worked out first BEFORE you invest a massive amount of time in the characterization and dialogue...I dunno, this is just an idea. Hope someone finds it useful.

[umgaynow]

I've been writing on and off for a lot of years and in that time I have tried every method there is in all those books on how to write...outlines never worked for me...mainly because my mind works in a very tangential fashion...I make random associations like crazy and while the basic story idea stays the same, I never seem to get from beginning to end quite the way I planned...I have found that what works best for me is to only write when the muse grabs me by the throat and makes me do it...I can't just sit down and write unless I am feeling really inspired...although I usually know when it's coming as I will have ideas and plot points and lines of dialogue kind of kicking around in my head for days...then when I do sit down to write, it pretty much flows out like stream of consciousness...only with punctuation and dialogue and all...very naturally...then I go back and re-read and re-write several times to do all the trimming and polishing...not quite the method they tend to recommend in creative writing class...in fact I got all kinds of crap for my method in college...but the prof still had to give me B's and A's cuz the end product was good...

They always say "write what you know"...I say "the way you write is the way you write"...whatever works best for you is the way you ought to do it...I am the same way about my painting...I have never taken an art class in my life...unless you count once a week arts and crafts in grade school...and I would never take one because if someone critiqued my method and tried to get me to work in another way, I probably couldn't do it at all...it's the end product that counts...so long as the result is good, what does it matter how ugly your process is?

Now if I could only figure out how to get from the sex back to the plot without a huge non sequitur or obvious and clunky segue

Sandi