Hello everyone.
I hope that whatever stage on the self-publishing journey you are on, you’re having a great week.
First some self promotion
A big thank you to ten year old Ayan for reading and reviewing Puzzle Train on his blog, and giving it such a great review. I’m so pleased you enjoyed it, Ayan.
Follow the link to Ayan’s fabulous blog:
https://amyayan.blogspot.com/2021/03/book-review-puzzle-train.html
Endings
I was having a conversation with one of my clients about the ending of her book. She, like many other authors I have spoken to in the past was struggling to reach a satisfactory conclusion to her story. That got me thinking about endings of novels.
“The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it,” – Ernest Hemingway.
I myself have been criticized by my editor and beta readers for rushing an ending, meaning several rewrites. I don’t mind doing this, it’s all too easy to get so caught up in a novel.
So, how do you end a novel? Here’s some tips:
- Be it a love story, good v evil or a story about personal growth, Your novel will have had a theme or a central conflict running through it. A reader wants to see that conflict come to a resolution. Make sure you tie up all you lose ends of your plot and subplots, unless you want to leave some doubt in your readers mind for your sequel.
- Resolve your character’s development. Throughout your story, you main character has probably gone through a development of sorts. Let’s see them act that out at the end.
- Build the tension towards the end. Some people achieve this by writer shorter chapters at the end to quicken the pace. Make sure that resolution to the conflict doesn’t come too easily.
- Throw in a twist. Little or big, what is your twist? What didn’t people see coming? Those seemingly innocuous little facts you put in early in the book suddenly come together in an “oh! That’s why they did that” moment. That direction you’ve been steering the reader in for 200 pages is suddenly wrong.
- Do you know what you want to happen at the end when you start writing? Many people like to write and see how the story develops organically, which is fine, but having some idea of where you want the story to end up will help you with the ending.
- Does your ending make sense? Is it what the main character was trying to achieve?
- If in doubt try multiple endings. You don’t have to write them in full, but map them out. What would happen if the main character does X or Y.
I hope that helps. If you need any advice about anything self-publishing related, contact me.
