How do I end this? Wrapping your story up when you don't have an ending

I'm not a pantser, but if you are, here's a tip from an extreme outliner to help you figure out how to end your story. (By the way, my favorite ending type is 3. 1 is too linear, and the kind of thing I wrote when I was 10. I can do way better than that. 2 is sad, and I hate sad endings. 3 is just right.)

Okay, here's your basic plot with your three basic options for ending a story: character wants something. Character encounters obstacles to achieving goal. Obstacles, obstacles, obstacles. Conflict comes to a peak. 

Now your ending options: 

1) Character overcomes obstacles and gets what they want. 

2) Obstacles prove to be too overwhelming. Character either gives up, accepting the status quo, or dies. 

3) Character gives up original goal after discovering something else matters more to them. Character gets new goal, and very often the original goal also comes to the character as a side effect of switching goals. 

Hope this helps.

Writing Words for Nerds #AtoZChallenge—O is for Outline. Do you need one?

Do you need an outline? The answer is...it depends. 

Those who write outlines are called outliners (duh!), and those who don’t are called “pantsers,” which refers to how they write by the proverbial seat of their pants.

I recently ran a survey in a Facebook writer’s group I belong to, and what I discovered surprised me. While there are more pantsers than people who consider themselves outliners, the biggest group was made up of people who consider themselves both! Sometimes they outline, and sometimes they don’t. Some will outline the beginning and then let the story work itself out from there. Others outline certain kinds of projects but not others.

Me? I’m an outliner. Not only do I need to outline the entire book before I sit down to write it, I also need to outline individual chapters before I write them. I like to outline the next thing I have to write when I finish writing for the day. It gives me something to work toward when I return to the manuscript. I have a terrible sense of direction, and the outline is my road map. I need one, so I don’t get lost. For me, being a pantser just isn’t an option.

But I don’t just need to have an outline; I LIKE having one. It means that I can always “start with dessert.” I know what all the scenes are and where they go, so I can start with the scene or conversation I’m most excited about. And I do. My full outlines have bits of dialogue and some fully fleshed out scenes in it, because those are the desserts I’ve already eaten. I only move onto the things that aren’t dessert when I’ve eaten all the desserts I can. And you know what? Very often I find the things that I’m not really excited about writing don’t need to be written at all. It’s cool how that works out.

I know that many outliners feel that pantsers should be outliners too, but I’m not one of them. I believe you should do what works for you, and if that’s writing without an outline, then you should definitely do that.

Some pantsers think that outliners should be pantser, too. Very often it’s because they see an outline as something that restricts creativity. Being a pantser gives them freedom to take their story anywhere at any time. I don’t like getting lost, but for many pantsers, that’s a part of the joy of writing. They love getting lost in their story, discovering it as they go along, and seeing where it leads. They love discovering the characters and being surprised, just like a reader would.

Again, that’s not me. I don’t enjoy getting lost. I’d rather fly straight to Orlando, check into a hotel I’ve researched well so I know what to expect, and take Disney transportation into Disney World, a detailed schedule of what I’m going to do in each of the parks tucked away in my bag. Have a great time getting lost and wrestling alligators in a Florida swamp, pantsers. It sounds exciting. It’s just not my idea of fun.

And outlines really aren’t as restrictive as many pantsers seem to think. Who says that just because you have a detailed schedule in your hand you have to pass up a better opportunity if one comes along? Outlines are flexible. They can be rewritten. And it’s a lot easier to rewrite a five page outline than it is to rewrite a 250-page book, which is what most pantsers who write novels end up having to do.

Some strict outliners and pantsers don’t see it as a choice.

Some outliners say, “I can’t write without knowing where I’m going.” Are you sure? Have you ever tried it? Who knows, it might be fun.

And some pantsers say, “How can I write an outline if I don’t know where my story is going? I don’t have a plot. I just have these characters. I don’t know what they’re going to do until they do it.” Then how do you know they’re good characters? How do you know they have a story worth telling? Of course, if it turns out they aren’t and they don’t, you can always rewrite the whole thing. Me? I have too many great characters with stories that I’ve already fully outlined in my head, and not enough time to follow around characters who may or may not get anywhere. Of course, it’s the finished result that matters, not how you get there.

The answer to what you can do if you’re an outliner who wants to be a pantser is easy: just do it! 

It may be scary, but maybe that’s a good thing. And if you find yourself stuck, just give yourself a timer and a goal. How does 500 words in an hour sound? Don’t be surprised if after the hour is up, you feel the urge to write more.  

The answer for the pantser who wants to be an outliner is a little more complicated: instead of being a long-form pantser, writing every little detail as you go along, try being a pantser of a short story.

You can write on paper, but you can also write it in your head. Just go and get lost in your story, but try not to do it for more than a page. If you need to, add another page. And another. It could be a series of short stories with the same characters and a single character arc. You can keep writing those short stories until you find a satisfying end to that character arc. And then you’re done. You’ve just pretty much pantsed your way to an outline.

I hope this helps, or at least gives you some food for thought. Again, there’s no right or wrong way. There’s only what works for you, and you won’t know what that is until you’ve tried both options.   

My Writing Process Blog Hop

I was tagged by Ella (the enchanting, the talented, the hilarious, and the modest) Schwartz in the My Writing Process Blog Hop, so here are my answers to four very simple questions . . . or at least they would be simple if I were the kind of writer who wrote just one kind of thing in one kind of way.

Ah, the weird and wonderful life of the eclectic writer. But let’s see what I can do. 

If you like to glimpse behind the curtain, read on.

What am I working on?

A lot. A series of blog posts about my mother, her mother, her grandmother, and their lives in Jerusalem; Why It Still Mega Bites, the second book in my funny science-fiction series, The Legend of Gilbert the Fixer; trying to figure out how to market my new picture book, Fay Fairy’s Very Big Problem; a blog post about how to publish a picture book with CreateSpace (in part to help others, but mostly so I’ll have a better idea of what I’m doing the next time around); illustrating and coloring my next picture book, Click the Dog;  assembling the parts of a book of photos, entitled Seasons in the Park, which I intend to sell at the next local art fair; catching up with the reviews I have to write for Amazon; trying to cram more things into a day than there are hours in a day; and this blog post.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

My books aren’t just different from other books in their genres; they’re different from each other. Until I started working on the second book in The Legend of Gilbert the Fixer, I didn’t even write in the same subgenre twice!

My mind is like a library. I don’t know about you, but I would find it very boring to be stuck in a library that only had one shelf of books, all from the same genre. I don’t like to limit my reading that way, so why would I limit the stories in my head to one genre? I want to write what I want to read; and I want to read, well, everything.  

I am a funny girl, though, and I do try to put at least some humor in everything I write. I like that in the books I read, too. Humor is like salt. It makes everything taste better. Or maybe that’s chocolate. Now I’m thinking about salt with chocolate. Mmm, so good . . . Wait, what was the question?

Why do I write what I do?

There’s a different story behind each story, a different reason why I wrote it.

Most of my stories, though, start with a desperate desire to read something that hasn’t been written yet. I write to fill those holes on my bookshelf.

I wrote Toren the Teller’s Tale for the girls who believe in the magic of stories and want to read a book about a girl like them, a girl who glows with the magic of the storyteller. I wrote it because, when I was a teenager, that was a book I needed to read.

I wrote Why My Love Life Sucks (The Legend of Gilbert the Fixer, book one) for geeks like me who understand that they are the true heroes of this world and who deserve to see a hero who represents us geeks in the kinds of books we love.

I write because these are stories that I need, and I’m guessing there are others that need them, too, whether it’s to give them hope or encouragement or a good cry or a good laugh—or even all of that combined.   

How does my writing process work?

Again, that depends on the book.

Two of them—Toren the Teller’s Tale and Ride of Your Life—started as stories I wrote in my head when I was just a teenager.

Two others started with simple concepts. Dan Quixote started with the idea of putting the story of Don Quixote by Cervantes into a modern middle-grade classroom in New Jersey; and Why My Love Life Sucks started with the idea of a comedy based on the ultimate teenage geek hero’s ultimate nightmare.

In every case, the story is complete, or almost complete, in my head before I even write the outline. I’ll also outline chapters and scenes before I write them to give me a kind of roadmap to my story, a clear guide of where the story is going and how I intend to get there step by step.

Having a detailed outline also lets me start with dessert: the scene I’m most excited about writing. I try to go from dessert to dessert. And all those scenes that aren’t dessert? I can skip them until I can figure out a way to turn them into dessert, and sometimes I find they can be left out entirely. After all, the scenes I’m less excited about writing will probably be the scenes the reader is less excited about reading, too.

Toren the Teller’s Tale took me the longest to write, in part because it’s an epic, and in part because I edited it as I was writing the first draft. I wrote the first draft of Dan Quixote: Boy of Nuevo Jersey in under three weeks, and I’ve written the first drafts of several novels—including Why My Love Life Sucks—in under a month during NaNoWriMo. Of course, once the first draft is finished, that’s when the real work begins.

The editing stage of Why My Love Life Sucks took almost an entire year. I wrote several drafts of many of the scenes so I could choose the best one. Sometimes my favorite version of a scene meant I had to rewrite other sections of the novel. A famous actor once said, “Dying is easy; comedy is hard,” and that’s true. Comedy is very precise. You have to get it exactly right, and brevity is the soul of wit, so you can’t have anything extra. I probably ended up throwing out a hundred or more pages of material with Why My Love Life Sucks, but I think all that extra work was worth it.

I know all this editing probably sounds tedious, but imagining the story in my head and editing it until it shines are my two favorite stages of writing. In fact, I enjoy editing so much, I often find it difficult to say, “It’s done now. I have to let it go.”

And now I'll let this blog post go and pass the baton to a couple of truly wonderful writers. 

~*~

No matter what you write, you absolutely have to check out Judith Van Praag's, Write Day-In Day-Out blog. You'll see, she is an amazing writer with a fascinating voice: http://www.writedayindayout.blogspot.com/

I'm also excited to pass the baton to my fellow fantasy writer and indie author, A.R. Silverberry, the writer of the YA fantasy Wyndano's Cloak and his latest work, The Stream. Check out his blog at http://www.arsilverberry.com/blog