@diseonfire Asked me to talk about endings, and how to handle the pacing leading up to and surrounding that moment. I’m not an endings expert by any means, but I do have some thoughts, and perhaps some of this will be of help to some of y’all.
So first off: Endings aren’t quite as important as they may feel.
By which I mean: As a writer, knowing your ending is a really important part of working through the middle. You gotta know where you’ll end up before you can write (or at least revise) all the bits to get to that point. So from a writer’s perspective, endings are really vital, and very challenging.
But from a reader perspective? Honestly, endings are probably the least important part of the book. Many, many excellent books have terrible endings, but we forgive them for it because everything else was pretty good. We’ll put up with an ending that falls a little short if everything else is satisfying.
