Nailing the ending

 This week I’m coming to the end of my rewrite of my work in progress, and I’ve been stalled a bit on the ending.   A few weeks ago I wrote what I thought was a chapter plan for the end, but it wasn’t very detailed.  When I came to revisit it, there was a lot of detail missing.

Over the years I’ve become more and more of a planner of my novels.  These days, I usually write a very detailed chapter plan which runs to thirty or so pages before I start writing a novel.  I didn’t do that with this one because I was working from an existing manuscript.  That proved to be a mistake.

When I came to look at what I’d written for the Supreme Ordeal  at the end of the original book, it turned out to be two short chapters.  They contained almost no details of the setting.  Omitting detailed description is one of my weaknesses.  I did at one time wonder if I’m aphantasic, but having taken tests on this it turns out that I’m not.  Anyway, this inability imagine the places in my story in enough detail is one of the reasons I do detailed chapter plans.  They force me to think about the details. But this time I’d excelled myself in missing out all those crucial details.

The end of this story is the end of a second riddle quest.  The first one had my characters spending a year collecting objects which eventually revealed the name of an alien object.  This second quest was to recover the knowledge that artefact contained.  To do that, one of my main characters had to enter and go through a buried alien base.

He and the other characters didn’t know their way through this place.  That gave me the opportunity to throw a series of obstacles in their way which should have provided exciting set-piece action scenes and cliffhangers.  But I’d totally missed all these opportunities in my brief notes about the ending.

Enter my new, detailed, chapter plan, which splits the story into two viewpoints, one happening below ground, and one above.  Originally I’d  had nothing happening above ground, but now I’ve thrown in an aerial dog fight which threatens my female main character’s ship, and gets the male main character’s partner injured and in a coma.

Meanwhile underground, my team lose communications, and have to cross a bridge which breaks as they go over it. After various other attacks they finally find the artefact they’re looking for and recover its data. But that wasn’t enough danger, so I added in a  self-destruct and an escape from it which my characters only just make.

Having two viewpoints allowed me to switch the narrative several times to create cliffhangers and question endings to chapters, something which my original single-viewpoint manuscript couldn’t do.

I’m happy with the ending now.  I really think I’ve nailed it.  And all I have to do now is sit down and write it.