Fear of completion

When you just can't end things

This month’s Writer Therapy is dedicated to the late Darrel J. McLeod, an award-winning Cree writer, and one of the warmest human beings I’ve known. He will be so missed by so many.

Darrel was a fighter for Indigenous rights and justice. In that spirit, and if you are moved to do so, please consider donating to Toronto Indigenous Harm Reduction.

---

Dear Sonal,

I love your Instagram too!

My question is: why are endings so hard to write? I must change the endings to my stories ten times and still, I'm not always happy.

Also, I have no desire to finish this collection of short stories. I've been kind of coasting for four months now.

Any words of advice?

Sincerely,
Coastal Coaster

Dear Coastal Coaster,

Thanks for the Instagram love! For those readers who don’t follow me there, my Instagram is largely a collection of writing jokes and the various ways in which I avoid writing, and believe me, I am exceptionally creative at finding ways to avoid writing.

Your question is really two questions, which may or may not be related. The first question is, how do I find a good ending to a short story, and the second, why can’t I declare something finished and walk away?

But of course, maybe you can’t finish the short story collection because you aren’t happy with any of the endings to your short stories, and maybe you aren’t happy with any of the endings to your short stories because you can’t call any of them finished and walk away. Dear chicken and egg, which one of you came first?

So we’re going to take this from two places, the craft problem of writing an ending you’re happy with, and the process problem of finishing the collection.

Writing An Ending You Like

There’s no formula for this. Endings are tricky.

Beginnings are less tricky because you have a certain number of jobs to do at the beginning of the story: establishing the situation and the characters, hooking the reader to keep reading, getting the action in the story kicked off somehow. But endings? Endings you have to bring everything to a close in a way that is somehow resonant.

That’s something that is more felt or intuited than it is taught or intellect-ed.

You can start a story from just about anything. Someone can give you a situation and a character and you can run from there. It can be very random. But the ending of the story? You can’t just stick on anything. I mean, you can, but it will mostly be bizarre nonsense.

To figure out the right ending, you have to know what the heart of this story is for you. Where is your particular interest in the story? What drew you to writing this? What surprised you as you wrote it? What images or metaphors or patterns have unexpectedly come through? Contemplating this will give you a better sense of where the magic in this story is for you.

I think there’s a point in the development of all writers where we have to stop making our decisions based on what we think is ‘correct’ or what other people are telling us or what we think people will want, and turn to our own feelings, our own intuition, our own sense of the story.

This can be scary, because it means you have to trust yourself and not know if the story is good or if you’re doing it right or have any external validation. Sure, you can get feedback and advice, but you’re going to filter all of it through your own intuition, and ignore anything that doesn’t fit—no matter how intelligent or well-meant. Whomever gave this advice ill-fitting advice doesn’t quite get your story, and while you can examine it to see if it points to anything useful, it’s not helpful to you on its face, and following it will lead you to a story, at best, is technically improved, but still feels frustratingly not quite right.

All of this sounds more like touchy-feely process stuff, but that’s why this place is called Writer Therapy, even though I am not a therapist (and some would argue not a writer given how much time I spend avoiding writing, but in my view, real writers avoid writing all the time.)

Still, here is some more practical craft stuff:

1. Sometimes, the ending feels wrong because the rest of the story isn’t quite right. It may be a technically well-crafted story, but is it your story? Go through the story listening to your intuition. What parts feel right to you? For the parts that feel wrong, or at least, not exactly right, what would feel more right? Cut or re-write those bits, making adjustments as you go.

2. Sometimes, the ending feels wrong because we haven’t set it up structurally. Go through the story and write a beat sheet for it…. essentially, re-writing the story the way a 5 year old would. (“We started here, and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened…”) I often find the act of writing the beat sheet reveals the story problem to me, but otherwise, look at the beats, look at how the story is moving, and see what your intuition suggests.

3. Most stories in Western culture are predicated on the notion of change. In a short story, some of this change might be implicit, or even subtle, but there should be some significance to it. Look at your story. What has changed between the beginning and the end? Is it significant? Does it feel like the right change to you? Do the events in the story lead to the ending? Perhaps it’s not the ending that needs to change, as it is how you get there.

4. A good ending is said to be both surprising and inevitable. The inevitability part of it comes from structure, character choices, detail, etc. The surprise part of it is an intuitive leap for the writer. Did you consider an ending idea but dismissed it because “Nah, that’s too bizarre, that’s too weird, that’s too unbelievable.” Try it out. At this point, what have you got to lose?

5. Maybe the ending is not the ending. Many writers, myself included, started off writing short fiction that ends on a tiny moment. A small shift, a significant glance, a single realization. A half-step. It seems to feel more short fiction-y that way, perhaps because short fiction sometimes feels unresolved on its surface. But take it further. Write the scene that comes after that half step, after that small shift, after that glance and realization. Take a full step. See what happens.

6. Maybe you need to make a radical shift in the story. Even if every part the story except the ending feels just right to you, a radical shift has a way of breaking things open and revealing the parts you still cannot quite see or feel. There’s many ways to do this, but choose the one that sparks energy with your intuition, even if you think it’s the worst idea ever. Re-write the whole thing in a different point of view, or in the form of a multiple choice test, or under the influence of the first writer you can think of when I say now. Now.

7. Overall, remember to be brave. Often our stories don’t work because we weren’t brave enough to trust ourselves and go for the jugular.

Fear of Finishing the Collection

Somehow I think, not being able to find the right ending for your stories is linked to not wanting to finish the short story collection. After all, if none of the endings are right, how can you possibly finish the collection?

I don’t know how much time you’ve put into this collection, but I do want to say that there is no timeline in writing. You might think that you’ll write this short story collection in a year; your short story collection may have other ideas about that. It’s possible that the coasting is necessary.

In that case, it sounds like this collection, these stories, need to be put away in a drawer for a while. Not in the “I am so useless” drawer or the “I’m so embarrassed by my failure to finish” drawer, but in the “I am actively choosing rest and refreshment” drawer.

And then choose rest. Don’t worry about accomplishing anything for a while. Take a break. Hang out in nature. Watch videos on YouTube. Read fun books for fun. If you must write, do fun writing that is not going anywhere nor has any real purpose to it. Alternatively, keep in touch with your creative self by doing something that is not writing and where you aren’t worried about being good. Perhaps it’s something that you’re so good at that you can do it without thinking, like knitting. Perhaps it’s something you know you are terrible at but enjoy anyway because what the hell.

Set a deadline for a couple of months from now, and keep with the rest until then, or until your intuition (and not your guilt) starts wondering about the short story collection again. Pull it out of the drawer and take a look. Maybe it will be easier to declare it finished.

Or maybe, you’ll simply decide that this isn’t a collection you have any interest in. Maybe the idea for writing a collection has lost its energy for you, and doesn’t revive even after taking a rest from it.

Of maybe something in the collection has evolved into something else, like a novel, and it’s intimidating to take that on when you haven’t even finished a short story collection.

Or maybe there’s a story or two that still has energy for you, but the rest you just want to let go.

If it’s any of these, let the collection go. There’s no rule that says you absolutely must finish what you start. You wrote, you learned, you don’t have to force yourself to do something with it unless you really want to. Work with anything that still has energy for you, even if you are completely intimidated by it; the story has decided that you must be brave and explore this, so you may as well listen to the story. It will not go away otherwise.

But all that said… I wonder if something else is going on.

You don’t mention this, but once the short story collection is done, what are you going to do with it? Look for an agent or publisher? That sounds a lot like trying to summarize everything you’ve been working so hard on in just a few sentences so you can send it out to strangers who will take months and months to get back to you with a “Fuck Off And Die” form letter rejection.

Or worse, you’re going to have to come up with something else to write, and you’ve got nothing left in you for that. And then, you’ll have to go through this whole stupid thing again, writing stories or a novel and then writing a dozen endings and hating them all.

Neither of these sounds particularly pleasant, so yeah, I’d be avoiding finishing the short story collection too.

Honestly, I did something of the same with my novel, making small revisions when the work would have benefitted by making bigger and braver ones. I’d tell myself that I’d take a break between drafts to try something new, and then I’d dive right back into the draft because I was not ready for something new. Correction: I have afraid of something new. I had nothing new in my brain. I didn’t want to sit down at a blank page and feel like some fumbling unwriter. What if this was it? The only thing I’d ever be able to write? Wouldn’t that make me a huge, huge fraud?

In some ways, having a project in the works is something of a security blanket. I am a Real Writer because I am working on this project. I can do things like saying, “This weekend? Oh, I’m planning to work on my short story collection” even if the reality is more like this weekend I’m going to find full episodes of Tabatha Takes Over on YouTube and watch them all, because damn, she’s good.

But once that collection is finished, then what? How are you going to convince everyone that you’re a Real Writer now? What happens when you send your collection out to agents and publishers and they discover that you have been pretending all this time?

And since you have nothing else to write right now, well damn. Seems like you’ll never convincingly be a Real Writer again, because you have no more ideas, no one will publish this collection and you’ve finished working on it.

Seems like a good reason to keep coasting, hmm?

The thing is, keeping yourself stuck like this also keeps you stuck as a writer. There will be other ideas, but they aren’t going to reveal themselves to you until you’re ready to let this one go.

And yes, publishing can be intimidating. We have to be brave enough to put our most real and vulnerable selves on the page to make the work feel right, and then the thought of exposing that to a bunch of strangers to make judgements on our vulnerabilities isn’t easy.

Fortunately, someone else asked a question about publishing a short story collection a while back, that might give you some sense of how to approach this, and also, someone else asked about rejection, which will hopefully calm some fears.

Strictly speaking, though, you don’t have to publish at all. There’s nothing that stops you from saying nope, not gonna do it, you can’t make me. And that is totally fine. You have my permission. My TBR pile is too big anyway.

But there’s something deeply validating about sending your work out for publication, even if it isn’t accepted. Simply the act of sending it out is a way of standing behind your own work, and saying “hey world, this is me.”

Of course it’s never fun when the world replies with “fuck off, loser” but then you send it out again. And again. And in doing so, you keep saying, “no, you fuck off, because this is me.”

These stories, the collection, the beginnings and middles and the endings you’re still searching for… all of this is you on the page. And all of this needs you to remember that you deserve to trust in your own voice, and your own creative sensibilities, and all of this means that you deserve to have faith in yourself. Faith that whatever intuitive voice spoke this story into existence will tell you when you’ve reach the right ending, faith that you can dismiss any feedback that doesn’t speak to that voice, faith that you can put this collection out in the world and eventually it will find its place, and most of all, faith that the well from whence your ideas spring never stops flowing.

Be brave and trust yourself, Coastal Coaster. You can do this.

---

Readers, are endings hard for you? Do you have your own tips or tricks for finding the right ending for your story? Do you know when you’re ready to call a project finished? Please comment below.