A recent Twitter thread brought up problematic reader expectations with story endings. Can we find a balance between “fulfilling our story’s promise and our genre’s expectations” and avoiding a cliché ending?
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When faced with the many decisions of writing our story, the best choice is whatever tells the story we want to tell, but what does that mean? Let’s take a look at what storytelling really is and how we can improve our skills.
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Given reviews about too-abrupt endings, readers might want a sense of closure beyond what authors deliver. Should we use epilogues—or epilogue-like endings—to breach the gap?
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We often talk about the pros and cons of prologues, but epilogues can be good or bad as well. Let’s look at how epilogues differ from normal endings, what they can do, and what they shouldn’t do.
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A truly broken story is one where the pieces of the story don’t come together in a coherent whole. But if we’re willing to put in the work, virtually any story can be saved. Then question then is: What steps should we take to fix a broken story?
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Just as we have go-to favorite authors that we know we can depend on for delivering a certain type of story, readers are evaluating us for what we can deliver: What’s our promise to readers when they pick up one of our stories?
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How much of yourself is in your writing? This question can dig much deeper into who we are than just the superficial, and the more we’re aware of our influences, the more we can improve our stories.
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We all love a “good” villain, but sometimes we want our bad guy to see the light and find redemption (or at least start on that path). Becca Puglisi is here to show us how with four paths to redemption for our villain.
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Because our themes live in the subtext, it’s easy to create unintended themes that undermine our intended theme. That risk increases if we’re trying to create success themes but our story has a bittersweet ending.
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It’s time for another post as a Resident Writing Coach over at Writers Helping Writers, and this time we’re talking about how to find and fix the mixed messages undermining our story’s themes.
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