Endings have been on my mind recently. Last week, I noted down some ideas for a story about a monster under the bed. I could feel the shape of the story, the build up, the conflict between the two main characters… and then a bunch of loose, flapping half-ideas where the story’s end ought to be. I knew how the conflict was resolved, but it didn’t quite feel like a conclusion.

I tried to approach the problem logically: what does this character want? what is this story really about? how do we leave the narrator in a situation where she is able to actually tell this story? After a lot of muttering, and some swearing, I came up with something I thought would work.

I wrote the story, typed it up, edited it and took it along to my Writers’ Circle. (Technically speaking, it’s a Writers’ Triangle and right now - due to vacations and other commitments - it has been temporarily reduced to a Writers’ Line). The main feedback from the other end of the Line? This story ends in the wrong place.

Endings are really, really difficult. Worse, they don’t feel like they should be difficult. Once you’ve set up your world, your characters, and their situations and conflicts, you’ve done the hard part and you just need to write the story. Right? Sadly, that is not how it works - or at least, not for me.

Some years ago, I heard an interview with Lee Child in which he described how he writes each new Jack Reacher novel. He sits down with no ideas, works out the plot as he goes, writes until it is finished, then sends the whole thing to his editor. When his editor suggests that changing details, or switching events around, would make a better story, he says that yes, perhaps it would - but “that’s not how it happened”. (I suspect that this is the sort of nonsense editors will only let you get away with when you have well north of 100 million sales worldwide.)

To me, that is the cartoon idea of how a book gets written. One just sits down and writes it, no? Every author I’ve ever spoken to, heard speak, or read about, talks of writing, re-writing, editing, taking notes, despairing, re-re-writing, and slowly hammering their work into shape. Editing doesn’t just mean fixing the spelling and making sure all the apostrophes are in the correct places: it can involve huge structural change, adding and removing subplots, or reworking the whole direction. (It’s worth noting that Child was being interviewed by Karin Slaughter - whose novels also shift by the million - and she listened to his description of his writing process while shaking her head in disbelief.

When reading a novel, I am often willing to relax and enjoy the journey. If travelling through the book with the characters is a really fun experience, then I don’t actually mind too much about the final destination. The Starless Sea was still a delight to read; I loved hanging out with Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London even though I didn’t enjoy the way the plot concluded. But I don’t think a short story can get away with that; there simply isn’t enough of it. The reader expects - and deserves - a neat conclusion or a payoff at the end. There doesn’t have to be a twist (although a good twist is great) but there should be something that feels like a resolution.

A couple of months ago, a publisher sent me a rewrite request (if you’re not familiar with the term: they rejected my story, but said that they would consider it again if substantial changes were made. It is an invitation only, there is no implicit assumption that they will accept it if I make the changes.) They sent quite detailed feedback, but the headline news was we really like the story, but aren't happy with the ending. Would I consider writing a different ending?

The request threw me. The story I’d sent them was one where I had always been confident I knew how it ended. I had not been terribly sure how it was going to get there - which is why it had ended up almost novella-length. But the story had been written with the end clearly in mind, and every piece of the plot had been working towards that end. I simply couldn’t imagine how I could change it.

However, the feedback raised valid points and closely matched some earlier feedback I’d had, but chosen to ignore. The story as it stood had also received multiple rejections., so I got started. There was - predictably - a lot more swearing and muttering, and a couple of weeks later I had a new ending. It wasn’t a radical new direction, but there were substantial changes to events, and to characters’ motivations. Once I’d accepted the possibility of an alternative, it wasn’t actually as hard as I’d expected. Lesson learned: stories are more mutable than you think.

Sadly, even once I’d decided what was going to happen, I still had the problem of the literal end. The last line. Opening lines are important, because they grab a reader’s attention. Closing lines affect people’s perception of the story, and stay with them much longer than that really good bit in the middle. Once you’ve revealed the murderer, you still need the equivalent of “and they all lived happily ever after” to signal The End. Even if the outline is brilliant, the story will feel flat if the final sentences just, sort of, you know. Peter out a bit.

Halfway through writing this, working through my podcast backlog, I coincidentally reached the Start With This episode But How Does It End? It’s well worth a listen for a discussion of what makes for a good or bad ending, though sadly they concluded that there are few concrete rules - it requires a writer to identify the bit that just feels like the end. I shall be taking their advice and examining other people’s endings more critically - not to analyse the plot, but to see if I can learn more about what makes the final few sentences feel like a proper, satisfactory conclusion.

And will the novella with the re-written ending be accepted this time? I’ll let you know…