Hey guys! I’m actually kind of surprised that this post is going to be on time. I have had a crazy week and an even crazier day. And in this hour that I have before more crazy I’m going to get all this last minute stuff out there. I have some stuff to tell all of you.
Getting Started: The Final Page
As the title would suggest this will be my last post for the getting started series. But don’t worry. This won’t be my last post forever. I’m still going to write another one soon. Next Friday in fact. I still don’t know which of the two series I’m working on is going to be the next post so don’t hold your breath for me to tell you what’s coming. But the title of this blog post is also what I’m going to talk a little bit about. I’m going to talk about a few things I think about how to end a book and then you’ll have to wait another week to hear from me.
First of all, I got a hold of some of my writing friends. Some of them were really busy but I managed to get one of them to find time to write a small piece for me. My friend Natalie who is a little younger than me is also a writer. I told her I was looking for a short page of how she got started as a writer and any advice she had for young writers. She’s a great person and I hope you enjoy the brief break from my ramblings and hear from another writers.
I started writing when I was in seventh grade, and it was bad. I’ll go back and look in journals and start laughing at how horrible and cliched my writing used to be. I once wrote the plot of the Little Mermaid on a page “but with dogs,” and called it an idea.
That being said, it took me about a thousand different projects to find my personal voice, and I’ve grown to appreciate that old work because I can see how far I’ve come just through writing as much as I possibly can. I’ve gone from writing, “but with dogs,” for ideas to recently writing a story that is equally as strange in concept but not nearly as simple. This (unpublished, so don’t bother looking) story only turned out so well because it was my idea and I knew how to write it well because my voice knows what it wants and tells my brain, and my brain goes, “Sure, I guess that makes sense if you type it out like this.”
Finding your personal voice is something that comes with time. You’re not going to write like a genius the first time you sit down at a keyboard. Heck, the first time I dedicated myself to sitting down and writing I stared at a blank page in my notebook for a solid hour before setting it down and walking away. It takes practice and dedication to get your ideas right in your head. Don’t be afraid to write the awful ideas. They get you prepared for writing the good ideas, the ones that you’ll be proud to publish. There are so many great ideas swimming around in a young writer’s brain. Get them out there. You owe it to yourself to write them down. Just do it. It’s the first step to getting started.
So, what do you think guys? Isn’t she great? Some of the stuff she talks about is some of the stuff I’ve talked about. So, if you’ve got two different writers telling you something than you know its true. On another note. I wanted to talk about the final page or the ending of your book.
First of all, DON’T YOU DARE ever ever ever ever ever ever ever leave things hanging at the end of a stand alone novel or series. (Unless you left it open because there’s supposed to be a sequel series. That’s totally fine as long as your readers know that’s why it was left open.) But if the novel is coming to and end and you know for a fact that it will not have a sequel or sequel series make sure everything is tied up. Make sure all of your characters have an ending. Even if you don’t notice and some readers don’t notice that one of your characters just disappeared and no one knows what happened to them, someone is going to notice. That’s one of the main things that bugs readers when reading a novel is when they get to the end and they go, “Hey wait. What happened to Tom?” You may not care what happened to Tom. But some reader out there is going to care what happened to Tom.
Second of all, you need to leave your reader with a bang. I’ve seen this done several different ways but these are my two favorites. My first favorite is called a single sentence. It’s exactly that. You find yourself at the end of the story. You don’t know how to finish it. Find a sentence that matches the story perfectly and then, on its own line, write that sentence to show how important it is. An example of one of my favorite stories that ends like this is about a girl who gets transported to another world. At the end of the story all the loose ends are tied up and she decides to stay in the world with her new friends and her boyfriend and, using some of the last of the magic, sends a journal home to her family with her story. At the end of the story the note that was written on the journals to her family ended the story with the sentence “Greetings to you From Far Away”. I still get shivers when I even think of the ending of that story. That one sentence was really powerful. From Far Away was also the title of the book. It was powerful. And example of my writing that ends like this is a book I wrote called Battle Lines. It’s a horrible book. But part of the story is about a girl who was abandoned by everyone, her brothers, her parents, and even her friends. At the end of the story she escapes the horrible place she’s living with the one person who stuck by her even when he should have left. The last sentence of the book is when she looks out at the land spreading before them and looks back at him and the last sentence says, “I knew then that I’d finally found a home”.
The second type of ending is called the circular story ending. In circular story ending something at the end of the story reminds the reader of the beginning of the story. Some examples of this are ending the novel or series with the same sentence at the beginning of the novel or series but with a different meaning. Sometimes it’s a character reminding another character of something that happened in the beginning of the story. And example of this is a book I enjoyed where a quiet girl who enjoys art starts dating the boy at school known as the ‘crazy student’. He rides motorcycles, skips school, and beats up other students. At the beginning of the story he really is a crazy student but by the end they are both mature adults who enjoy their life together. At the end of the story the girl reminds the boy of something he said at the beginning of the story that he had a really sad answer to. He answers more happily at the end of the book. This ending is circular. I wrote a book called Shadowcasters with a circular ending. The main character said the same sentence at the very beginning and the very end of the story. At the beginning she was angry and depressed and at the end she was happy.
A story should have a resolution. That’s important.
And for all of your beginning writers out there, just as my friend Natalie said, I encourage you to begin your writing. It doesn’t matter if its good. It doesn’t have to be publish worthy. It just has to be written. You can’t write the ‘happily ever after’ if there is no ‘once upon a time’. Start writing so that you can keep writing.
Hopefully you guys can all toon in next week for my new series introduction. I hope that you will all enjoy the new series that I am writing. Make sure to subscribe if you read this and you are not yet. If you subscribe I am able to send you the weekly emails when my posts, go out and I’m working on making special emails for the readers who are subscribed. If you don’t know how to subscribe scroll to the bottom of the page. Its there. And tell anyone you know who is a writer to read the blog and share it. Thanks for all the support you always give me. And as usual,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!