My problem is wrapping up the ending all neat and tidy. My inner-self wants to drag it out (hence most of my stories are novels), but I need to end it somehow in a way that's satisfying, but brief. Any pointers?
Among some writer friends of mine, there's an ongoing joke about endings: "And then an asteroid came down and killed everyone. The End."
Just about any story can be ended that way, but I think you hit on the key point when you said "satisfying." For most stories, the asteroid ending would not be very satisfying.
Orson Scott Card has created a good framework for understanding endings, called MICE (Milieu, Idea, Character, Event). People often use MICE as a way of analyzing stories, but he says the framework is really about matching beginnings to endings.
That's one of the most important points about satisfying endings -- they deliver what the beginning promised. In order to have a good ending, you have to have a beginning that matches.
The MICE framework is explained clearly in both of OSC's books on writing, but the basic premise is that the type of story determines how the story should begin and end (in a very general way). For example, a typical mystery story (which is a form of idea story) begins by posing the question whodunnit? and ends when the question is answered (and one hopes the butler is not the answer.)
If you start off with a detective investigating the murder of a famous violinist, you're promising a certain kind of story. If you end with the detective deciding she doesn't care who did it, because she never wanted to be a detective anyway and was only pushed into it because her father was a cop and his father was a cop, then you have a character-story ending paired with an idea-story beginning, and that ending will not satisfy.
But MICE alone is not sufficient to having a satisfying ending.
I attended a David Gerrold workshop, and he gave a good explanation of how to end a story. Unfortunately, I have to explain the beginning and middle in order to get to the ending. (Note that the following is my interpretation of Gerrold's advice as I remember it, and it may not correspond exactly with what he said.)
What is a story? According to Gerrold, a story is a person with a problem. (I think that definition is incomplete, but it will do for now.)
Using that as a jumping-off point, here's the basic structure of a story:
I. Beginning
- Introduce the person
- Introduce the problem
- The person takes ownership of the problem (It's my problem, not someone else's)
II. Beginning of the Middle
- The problem becaomes wider and deeper than the person thought
III. Flipover Point
- Prior to this point, the problem drives the story, and the person mainly reacts. After this point, the person begins driving the story.
IV. End of the Middle
- The person tries various methods to solve the problem, and they fail. Such failures leave the person worse off than before.
V. Ending
- The person finally comes up with a method to solve the problem, and it works.
I know it sounds very simple, but many stories fail to have a satisfying because they don't follow IV and V.
Without the failures in IV, the success at the end doesn't mean as much. If it's someone else who comes up with the method to solve the problem, or if there's no method at all other than pure luck, the ending is not satisfying. (Deus ex machina falls into that category.) If the problem isn't solved, the ending is not satisfying.
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