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Ask About Writing
How To Finish Stories

QUESTION: I like writing short stories, but have problems bringing them to an end. Can you tell me how to finish stories?

How often do I hear this one. It’s such a frustrating problem too because competitions and publishers (for some weird reason) only seem to want stories that have a beginning, middle and end – funny about that.

In my opinion there are a variety of reasons why people can struggle to write endings.
1 – They really want to write a novel-length story, but haven’t got the time or focus to do so at the moment.
2 – They are the kind of person who needs to plot out a story before they begin writing so that they know exactly what happens, how it joins up and where it ends.
3 – Somewhere along the line they created a habit of not finishing stories.

As a writing coach I usually find the answer is number 3. The habit could have been caused by lack of decision, commitment, confidence, time or even the plan to finish your writing later. The reason, though, really doesn’t matter, it’s the solution that’s the important bit.

At some point there’s a need in the story to stop going off at tangents, letting your characters get away from you and waffling on. At some point there is a need to say, ‘This is where this story ends’. You might not be happy with your endings at first but they will improve, it’s necessary simply to accept that a short story needs to be short and have an ending.

If you need to understand how to tie stories up I would suggest reading books that are anthologies or collections of stories. See how other people finish their stories and how they manage to tell their tale within a limited word count.

Suggestions
To break the habit of not finishing, write a story every day for the next two weeks. Set yourself a limited time to complete each of story, perhaps 30 minutes, then stick to it.

In that 30 minutes simply write a short story from beginning to end, it doesn’t have to be written perfectly, it just has to be written. Don’t spend too much time focusing on planning, just write a story with a beginning, middle and end.

At first the endings may be abrupt and not tie up the story completely, but as the days go by you will get better and may even find yourself coming up with the perfect conclusion to the story you wrote the day before.

At the end of the two weeks you should notice an improvement in your endings and that you are starting to form a new habit – writing stories with endings. It’s then up to you to decide if you want to continue the daily writing for another fortnight to enforce the change.

Don’t forget that if you’re having problems finding triggers for your short stories that the writing blog writing blog has new writing prompts added every week.

Have you a question? Ask it at Ask About Writing

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Ask About WritingHow To Finish Stories

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What people are saying about our online courses ...

Ask About Writing
How To Finish Stories