September 16th, 2023
I get asked a lot if I have any secrets for how to finish writing a book. My secret has been shared so many times that it’s gossip at this point: I have to know how it ends.
If you had to run a marathon, but no one told you where the finish line was, do you think you’d keep running far enough to find it? In my experience, people regularly run out of gas when they don’t know where they’re headed.
Once I know how a story ends, I can get there.
Of course, there are always exceptions. And, of course, Theia is one of them.
I knew how it ended, and it was with a game-changing twist. But once I wrote my way to that revelation, I had another one: my ending was only the middle.
(If you’ve read Theia, I hope you’ll keep this twist to yourself. It’s part of the magic of the book and, three years later, I’m still getting messages from people who are absolutely shocked by it, and it’s because my readers have kept it to themselves and they are just the best.)
A funny thing happened once I found myself stuck in that middle, though: I had written such strong characters and knew my themes so well that the ending jumped up and curled into my lap. In fact, my ending had to be a direct result of these characters and those themes, and to think I almost skipped the stages of acceptance and resolution is just silly to me now.
One of the best-ever reactions to the twist was during one of my first writing panels last year at Twin Cities Con. I was telling this story, about how an end turned out to be the middle, and someone in the audience unexpectedly shared that they threw their book across the room when they got to that part.
One of the best reviews of my career, tbh.
And I was absolutely shocked, as I was added to the panel last-minute, to find that I had a reader in the audience and they reacted to my story in such an emotional way.
Keeping the spoilers, again, to a minimum, I also put a tremendous amount of foreshadowing in the book, starting with Theia’s name (the first person to get that reference sent literal goosebumps over my skin; I didn’t think anybody would figure that particular secret out).
All of this to say: you can follow rules and develop techniques and take all the advice in the world, but if you can’t pivot when confronted, and react — see what your characters want and need, where your story is going even if it isn’t where you thought it would go — then you may not be giving your story everything you got.
And every story you write deserves at least that much from you, whatever “everything you got” looks like the day you’re writing it.
The Den 