on Fiction University:

Your novel’s ending will have more impact than everything that came before it.

Some writers have troubles with beginnings, or more commonly, middles, but for me, it’s always been endings.

I tend to rush them once I reach the book’s climax, and summarize what happens instead of dramatizing scenes to the big finish. I always have to rewrite those last three or four chapters several times before I get them right.

There are two reasons for this—impatience and story fatigue.

When I develop a novel, I reach a point where I’m tired of planning and want to move onto the writing. And that typically happens before I’ve fully fleshed out my ending, so I only know a general sense of what happens. And when I’m drafting it, I hit another wall of fatigue, where I’m so ready for it to be over and I can start revising. Then I rush past the ending I didn’t develop enough in the first place.

It’s a vicious cycle.

Which is why I’ve spent a lot of time finding ways to make writing endings easier.