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Showerthought: I fixed my terrible endings by writing the last line first, and it worked in 3 days
I write short stories on the side and my endings always felt flat, like the story just ran out of gas. Last week I tried something backwards: I typed the final line before anything else, just one sentence, then built the whole thing toward it. Wrote 3 stories that way and all 3 landed way harder than anything I did in the past year. Turns out picking the ending first is like setting a nail before you swing the hammer. Anyone else write backwards like this, or do you figure out the ending as you go?
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dylanbell21d ago
The nail analogy is spot on. Where it gets really useful is when you pick not just the last line but the last image. I wrote a story where the final picture was a kid holding a burnt match, and every scene before that ended up being about small things running out. The match gave me a filter for cutting stuff that didn't belong. It also kills the temptation to keep adding plot in the last third, because you already know exactly where the road stops.
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