Authors are expected to fall into the category of plotters or pantsers – those who like to plot to some extent or extensively and those whose storytelling quite literally flies by the seat of their pants.

An important part of the editing process will nonetheless involve ensuring your story arcs have been concluded satisfactorily for your readers and for your characters. Otherwise, you are including story lines that intrigue but which are left hanging and seem – on reflection – to be irrelevant to your ending.

Readers continually evaluate and second guess what they are reading. As readers, film and TV viewers we remark upon and are delighted by an ending. One we haven’t seen coming, but which – when analysed in hindsight – has a network of clues strung throughout. If we view these clues from the perspective of the story’s denouement, they should appear like map coordinates. All should lead to this exact point in the story.

A carefully and subtly plotted ending differs from the sudden ending where the reader and indeed the author haven’t seen the ending coming. A sudden ending can leave a quite different and at times unsatisfactory feeling with the reader: a feeling of time having been wasted and possibly that the author has cheated their way out of exploring other potentially more satisfying endings. It is suggestive of an underdeveloped plot. More often too it is suggestive of underdeveloped characters.

Character development will generally involve research unless it’s totally written from the author’s perspective and based on personal experience. It will always be necessary to do a certain amount of research, even if it doesn’t involve plotting per se. As you write, make notes of the points that need a little more work by highlighting the areas where more research is needed. This allows you to write without disrupting your flow. At the end of your writing, you can go back to the highlighted points and research them thoroughly. Don’t forget that any wrong assumptions you’ve made might involve rewriting. In this instance you can use colour coding to highlight instances where this point appears throughout your story. At the end of each writing session, ensure any new notes are easy to understand.

Even a heinous crime against humanity should have an understandable ending. It is also important that the ending has been given sufficient narrative exploration, that it can be sketched into a typical three act structure. In a three-act structure, the build-up and ending should represent roughly twenty-five per cent of the book’s word count.

The ending of your story is a tying up of plots and sub-plots and in the case of a series of books, it is also a case of making explicit any sub-plots whose story arc will be concluded in a later volume. Ensure you’ve copied and pasted details of sub-plots, characters and locations into separate files. Then you can ensure you have picked up and concluded your storylines.

By a story’s ending, its plot lines should be drawn tight with a sense for the reader of everything coming together.

Happy writing,

Lesley