hello everyone and welcome to today's video my name is KM wiland and I run the writing website helping writers become authors and today we're going to be talking about how to troubleshoot your ending so this is in response to a couple of questions that I received about endings um one is from Aisha Ali how about some posts about crafting endings I just reached the end of a manuscript and I realized that my character Arc and themes weren't strong enough to craft a compelling ending I wrote as much as I could and jotted the last few
lines I've been holding on to but filed it away to look at in another few months so how do you know if you have a strong enough Arc or not how do you decide which bits go in the climax how do you structure on a smaller level those beats and how do you avoid the climax being a string of sequel scenes and explanation and then another question was from Esther Gonzalez bertran uh I would like to know more about how to outline a good ending and how to write a beginning that is reflected in the
ending or is it the other way around so over the last couple months in the last few videos um we've talked about beginnings and the importance of um setting up character and plot in the beginnings and we touched a little bit on how setting up the beginning is always something that you're kind of thinking about as you're building into the ending if you know the ending that can help you set up the beginning and vice versa if you've done a really good job in the beginning you can then bring that full circle by the time
you get to your story's finale so so the most important thing to understand about troubleshooting your story's ending is that if the ending doesn't work the ending probably is not the problem the problem is probably that things weren't set up in the right way in previous scenes and this could be just maybe the third act isn't working but it could also be something that goes all the way back to the First Act and to the beginning so you really have to kind of take a bird's eyye view of what your story how it's coming together
structurally and how that's building into the ending that you want to create because it is important to kind of hold this idea in your head that the ending is in the beginning so whatever you write in the beginning even if it's very far away from wherever your characters get to in the ending and even in some instances if you don't know yet what's going to happen in the ending whatever you've set up there whatever seeds you've planted even down to the imagery sometimes that's set up that is what is going going to create the um
cohesion and the resonance that needs to come full circle in your story's ending so if your ending isn't working it's either because um it wasn't the ending that was actually set up in the beginning or because the beginning and subsequent parts of your story failed to set up the ending that you want to have happened by the time you get there in your story so again it's like the problem with endings usually isn't something that's happening in isolation but it's important to understand what is is the function of the ending right so what are you
trying to build toward throughout um your story's entire structure and the point of the ending simply is that in the climactic moment your character is your protagonist is going to definitively end their relationship to the plot goal so very often this is because they definitively gain the plot goal whatever it is they've been seeking throughout the entire story it could also be that the antagonist definitively gains the plot goal keeping the protagonist from having it and in other stories it can be perhaps that the protagonist has it within their reach but they choose to let
it go because because of their character Arc and how they've evolved over the course of the story they realize this is no longer in alignment with who they are and who they've become so they choose to Let It Go but regardless they no longer are in pursuit of this plot goal that they have been moving toward throughout the story and as a result there is no longer any reason for there to be obstacles between them in that plot goal that's what creates the conflict and once you have no conflict you no longer have a plot
no plot no story the story is at an end so that is the purpose and the focus of your story's ending it is the climactic moment and how it definitively determines whether or not your protagonist will get the plot go that they've been chasing throughout the entire story so once you know that that allows you to look back over your story's entire structure and particularly the main structure ual beats so you're going to want to kind of pull those out and look at them in isolation so we're talking about things like the inciting event and
the first plot point the mid plot Point midpoint and the third plot point and looking at those and making sure that they're all of a they all have a thematic Unity they're all about the same thing right they're all specifically about the character's relationship to the plot goal that well be decided in the climactic moment your climactic moment is always going to tell you going to prove what your story is really about so if all of your structural moments have been about one thing let's say they've been about a relationship plot line and then you
get to the climactic moment and it's about something else it's about um you know catching a bad guy or something those don't match that is an instance where the structural through line is mismatched and you're really trying to tell two different stories and it's fine to have one of those stories as a subplot but the climactic moment needs to be focused on what ever is the main structural through line as proven by what's happening in all of the previous structural beats so if the that is a primary thing to look at if you feel like
your ending isn't working or it's mismatched or the conflict's just kind of petered out um is it in alignment with everything that's come before and by the same token you can look at your theme and determine what that's really about by looking at the climactic moment and in that moment what is your protagonist's Rel relationship to the Thematic truth in a positive change Arc they will have you know grown into and embraced that truth in a negative change Arc they will have grown away from it in a flat Arc they will have um maintained their
relationship to it but the characters around them will have evolved into an appreciation and understanding of it so that will show you too what is your story about thematically and again you can look at all of the structural beats leading up to that to make sure that the the same theme is showing up but again you're not you know proving one theme through the character's actions in earlier structural beats and then you know highlighting something completely different by the time you get to the climactic moment that you're able to achieve that cohesion and that resonance
and that thematic Unity throughout your entire story okay so the question of is your ending strong enough that really depends on the particular story um how much of a punch your climactic moment pass really does depend on just the nature of the story and how dramatic it has been in general um generally speaking um the greater the impact of the climactic moment it's just it's it's how definitively the character gets that goal because in some stories it's actually pretty ambiguous um particularly like in series you know what may seem you know what may be a
definitive enough relationship to that goal at the end of book one is then going to be be something that continues in the conflict in future books and that's fine and in other stories it's purposefully ambiguous because they're it's trying to prove a point about you know probably something to do with its theme but in most Stories the more definitively your character um ends their relationship with the ploto whether they get it or not is going to determine how strong that ending feels to readers and by the same token how strong is their character Arc that's
going to be largely determined by the tension that exists between the story's lie and truth so in some stories you know you have a a very dramatic Arc where the tension between these two things are are complete opposites right it could be the characters moving from hate to love and that's a huge that's a huge Arc right and then in other stories it's much subtler it could be something like they're moving from um indifference to love or like to love that's a that's a little baby Arc right and that's fine depending on the type of
story not stories want something that's extremely dramatic and you know really really punches through with this dramatic Arc so it really just depends on what's best for your story what do you want to have happen what do you want to accomplish and knowing that being able to be able to judge by the time you get to the end whether or not you were able to accomplish that in regards to the idea that maybe your climax is suffering because it's a string of sequel scenes or reactions the climax should never be sequels reactions or explanation right
that is um within scene structure that is a sequel that is a reaction part of the the scene structure and that is never the climax right the climax is like The scenester Story So within classic scene structure we can split scenes into two halves which we call scene and SQL which are action and reaction and the action half of that scene is made up of goal conflict and outcome and that is literally the climax right so it is the job of the resolution the scenes that follow the climax to show characters reactions and and finish
up any explanations or loose ends that need to be shared if that's if you feel like that's all that's happening in your climax is explanations and reactions then either you're misidentifying what is really your climactic moment which is again wherever the character definitively gets or loses the plot goal or you've skipped it like it doesn't exist and you just kind of petered out with your story in which case you can go back and identify what is your character's plot goal and how does that how is that going to be resolved and make sure you have
a really strong scene that um shows that to readers right the climax above all is not the place where you want to tell versus show okay so one final thing to think about as you're troubleshooting your ending and trying to figure out where where maybe the previous parts of the story weren't wrong so that they're not leading up to your ending in the way that you want is to think about the idea of chastic structure so chastic structure is where the two halves of the story mirror each other so the beats in the first half
mirror the beats in the second half in some way and story structure is just naturally this way in that the beats in the first half will set it up whereas the beats in the second half will pay it off and I've talked about about this in depth on my site I'll leave some resources down below but the you can take this a little further and do it a little more consciously and specifically um when it comes to your ending and we talked about this a little bit in some of the previous videos about Beginnings but
if you look at how specifically the hook in the very beginning of your story and the resolution in the very ending how they mirror each other so for instance you have a characteristic moment in the beginning in the hook you can mirror that in some way with the charact with another characteristic moment um in the ending in the resolution but more to the point of what we're talking about today you want to look to the insighting event which happens around halfway through the First Act um and is the Call to Adventure that sort of kicks
off the character's pursuit of the plot goal his interest in this and how does that mirror what happens in the climactic moment how does that set it up you can think of the inciting event as a question that has to be answered by the time you get to the climactic moment so those are just some things to think about obviously you know endings are very complex well I take that back there the endings are simple right the ending you finally get down to one single point which is the climactic moment and that is actually quite
a simple thing but everything that's come before to lead up to this is very complex right depending on your story I mean even the simplest novel you've got chapters upon chapters and characters and themes all of these loose ends that you're weaving that have to come together uh and funnel down into this one single point where everything that's come before makes sense and it has to do and is thematically related to this one point so it's a lot it's a lot to think about and consider you know and we always say it's it's like it's
one thing to hook readers with a good beginning and it's another thing to hook them with a good ending because then they will want to keep reading right it's not just about getting them to finish this one book but convincing them you know that you can give them a satisfying story experience so that they'll want to read on into the next book that you may be writing whether it's in a series or not so endings are you know as we all know extremely important they are they prove whether or not a story Works many many
a great story that people have enjoyed throughout you know by the time they get to the end they're upset by it in some way because it doesn't make sense or it doesn't work or they feel like the writer didn't play fair with them so it's important to really understand the technical um definition of what you're trying to accomplish with a story's ending to understand how it functions structurally and therefore how it's a part of the structure that leads up to that within both the plot the character AR and the theme so that you can bring
all of those things together in in a really solid climactic moment that ends your story's conflict so again I hope that was helpful um if you have a question that you'd like me to consider for a future video you can leave that down below if you'd like to stay in touch with me and all the content that I produce um the best way to do that is to join my mailing list at helping writers become author.com mailinglist I put out a um in-depth text and podcast post every week so you can keep in touch with
that as well as these videos and I will see you again later happy writing
