How to write the end of your story.

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As you get closer to the end of your story draft, it might feel more difficult to write.

Writing the first part of your story requires curiosity: it’s about set-up, detail, exploration.

Writing the middle part of your story requires bravery: it’s about putting your characters in tough situations. You make things difficult for them. You create drama by making your characters say and do things that will create problems on the page.

At this stage, you have faith in your writing. You trust that the process will hold you. You don’t know how your characters are going to get out of these situations. You don’t even know if any of this is going to work at all! But you keep going.

Because you know that you can’t know what your story really is until you write it.

If your story has any transcendence in it — an arc that resolves through a combination of mystery, challenge and surrender — then you will have to embody mystery, challenge, and surrender as you write your story.

Writing the last part of your story requires surrender: it’s about facing the unknown.

It’s not easy for your character, and so it won’t be easy for you. If you feel frustrated, resistant, afraid to face what you need to face, scared that you won’t be able to do it — use all of that energy and put it into your story.

Your character can share that energy with you.

Feel the difficult feelings, and don’t let them stop you from writing. Instead, allow your details to be imbued with the emotion you are feeling.

You might not know that you’re writing your ending until you finish the last word of your final sentence.

You can’t know for sure, because you’re fully present in that final scene as you are writing it.

Presence is not thinking about what’s coming up — presence is being in the moment. Write from within that moment.

If you feel like it’s too hard, that’s just a sign that you're writing within dramatic tension!

This is not a problem. Let that feeling be an arrow that points you home, to the finish.

xo,


Photo credit: Freddy Kearney on Unsplash


Go wordless.
Abstraction.

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