“The End” is part four of my series on Plotter-Oriented Writing. The series introduction is here, and contains links to my other posts. I’ll post more more articles on this topic soon.

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Why we start at the end, borrowing from Chris McQuarrie

Recently, my creative partner shared a great quote by Christopher McQuarrie (screenwriter for The Usual Suspects and writer, director, and producer of many blockbuster films). When asked how he came up with his stories, he replied:

“I create a difficult movie problem. And then I imagine a character who is the least likely to solve it.”

Read that again, because McQuarrie’s simple answer is a fantastic distillation of what makes a great story.

• A difficult problem
• A hero
• The wrong hero for the problem

The wrong hero for a hard problem

“A difficult problem” means a plot. A plot with a big problem to solve. It’s gonna take someone with real moxie to solve this problem, and the problem is big enough and interesting enough to keep the reader invested from start to finish. An evil wizard is on the loose! A great artist has a disabling disease! A tyrannical empire crushes everyone in its path! Who is Keyser Söze?!

“A hero” means a character. This character has the moxie to confront the difficult problem. They might not know they’ve got that moxie (we’ll get to that in a second), but it’s in there somewhere. Also, they may or may not be successful in confronting the problem. That’s a separate question. But this hero is somehow the right person to apply to this problem.

Except that they’re not. And that’s why they’re “the wrong hero” or, as McQuarrie puts it, “a character who is the least likely to solve it.” This crucial ingredient establishes your character’s arc. When we meet them, the hero might be horribly introverted, lack any desire to take a journey, or have been too beaten down to get up again. But all that’s about to change through conflict.

Conflict and change

All great stories are about conflict and change. A hero comes up against an obstacle. She overcomes it and learns from the experience. Sometimes she fails and learns from that instead.

As she approaches the end of her story, she faces progressively more difficult challenges until she encounters the “Big Boss” of problems, the one that the story is really all about. If she’s learned the lesson (aka the theme of your story), she’ll prevail and you probably have a happy ending. If she hasn’t, then she’ll fail that final test and you probably have a sad ending.

In the end, the wrong hero is the only hero

I’d even add one more bullet to the list above and phrase it this way:

• A difficult problem
• A hero
• The wrong hero for the problem
• …who is also the only possible hero for the problem

A great hero is perfectly matched to their story. The problem is neither too big for them to succeed, nor too small to pose a serious challenge.

Heroes who are underpowered relative to their opponents can certainly work – we all love an underdog – but if they succeed the story might not ring true. And if they fail there’s a serious danger that the audience walks away thinking “Geez, why did I watch that if the guy never stood a chance from the start?!”

On the other hand, I’m sure we’ve all seen or read stories where we fumed “Well, of course she won. She’s got all the superpowers of the Gods, and the bad guy was a chartered accountant with halitosis!”

The hero and their problem should match, so that this least-likely-of-all heroes is also the only hero who perfectly fits into the gap left by the problem. A farm boy from nowhere is the least likely person to threaten an evil galactic empire, but Luke Skywalker is the son of not-just-any Jedi Knight. An orphan under the stairs who can’t even brush his hair can’t possibly confront the most powerful dark wizard in history, but Harry Potter is connected to that wizard by a deep, magical bond.

In the end, Luke and Harry must face Darth Vader and Voldemort, respectively, and overcome them if they’re to get their happy endings. They may seem like the wrong hero at the start, but as they grow and learn we realize that they are in fact perfectly suited to their problem.

A good story starts at the end

Which brings us back to The End, and why your story starts here.

Much like the hero mismatched to their problem, we’ve all seen great stories that failed to stick the landing. “It was sooo good, but the ending was a cop-out!” There can be many reasons for this, but I suspect that the main problem comes when the writer starts writing the story in the wrong place.

No story ever starts at the beginning. Stories start in the middle.

Starting from the beginning is the most natural thing in the world. But no story ever starts at the beginning. Stories (as readers perceive them) start in the middle. In Star Wars, Harry Potter, Macbeth, and The Hunger Games, wars are already raging or even over. In Master and Commander, Bridget Jones’ Diary, and Frankenstein, the characters all have well-established personal and professional lives.

The beginning of your story is nothing but a selected moment in the long history of your tale, an untethered cord flapping in the breeze. Things happened before that moment and things will happen after. The only detail that makes this moment significant is this: it’s where you invite the reader to join the show (already in progress).  

Finding your way to the end

Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to find your way home from an unfamiliar destination than it is to get to that destination in the first place? On your way there, everything looks unfamiliar and strange. On the way back you probably recognize a number of landmarks, and the further you get, the closer you are to your home territory, to where your instincts are the most certain.

What tethers your story to a fixed point isn’t the beginning, it’s the ending. It’s the resolution of that difficult problem by the least likely character. Within that simple notion is plot, character, arc, and resolution. Put another way, the end gives you a strong indication of what your story is about: the theme.

And if “home” is the ending, if it’s the neighborhood you know best, it’ll be a lot easier to find your way to it than it will be to start at some random location and find your way to a place you’ve never been.

And so we reach…the end?

As part of the Plotter-Oriented approach, I recommend that you resolve your ending first before you go further. Figure out:

• What is the difficult problem?
• Who will solve this problem?
• Why is this the wrong hero to solve the problem?
• But also, why is this the only possible hero to solve the problem?

Notice that I did not include how the hero solves the problem. While this is certainly a key element of the ending, I tend to think of this as a purely mechanical question. The answer will occur to you as you craft the story. While this may turn out to be a thorny question (especially if you’ve made your big problem a really big problem), it’s really just a detail.

This isn’t to say that you should actively refrain from knowing the mechanics of the end. Simply that it’s optional.

Example: Harry’s end

At the end of Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone, Harry must defeat the Dark Lord (difficult problem). Harry, an orphan who is disrespected, bullied, and unloved at the start (wrong hero), must understand the theme – that his wits and faith in what’s right, rather than his celebrity, will see him through. Moreover, while he doesn’t understand it yet, Harry’s been marked as the ‘chosen one’ (only possible hero) who will either defeat Voldemort or die trying.

The fact that Harry accomplishes his victory by understanding the secret of the Mirror of Erised and fooling Quirrell/Voldemort are details of this ending, not the intrinsic elements that need to be understood at this stage.

We know that “Harry must defeat Voldemort.” That, in a nutshell, is the ending. Four words. Simple, right?

The trick is in understanding the implications of those four words. Firstly, that the Dark Lord is a big problem and why he’s a big problem. Secondly, that Harry is simultaneously the wrong hero and the only hero for this problem. And finally, what all this says about what your story is really about. Not the plot, but the theme.

(Sidebar: I’ll write a post on theme someday. For now, here’s a podcast that discusses it.)

Once you have a handle on the ending, you can move on to everything else. It’s possible that you’ll still pull this stake out of the ground and move it later (writing is a messy process), but if you start with a strong idea of the ending, you’ll be surprised how much more easily the other elements fall into place.

Confession time

When I started work on The Poison Sky I did not follow this advice. I’m sharing it with you now precisely because I realized what a balls I made of things by not doing so. The result for me was a lot of tortuous re-working. Sure, I had some idea of my main character and the problem he was facing. But I hadn’t thought it through nearly well enough, leading to numerous re-writes of the Key Beats and Story Beats steps (about which I’ll write in the future) before I felt like I had remedied that shortcoming.

The End (of a series)

Finally, let me add a note about writing a book series. This includes another confession, because I hope to make The Poison Sky a series.

A series – and here I mean a series you intend to conclude, rather than something never-ending – adds an additional layer of complexity. In essence, Book One is Act One of your series. Therefore, not only does the first book need to be amazing, it needs to set the groundwork for everything that follows. So…do you really, really want to know the end of your series before you start writing your first book if you want that series to be amazing? Emphatically, yes.

Look for example at the train wreck that is the most recent Star Wars trilogy. It began efficiently enough with The Force Awakens: a reasonable if uninspired retelling of the original Star Wars. As that trilogy advances, though, the lack of a coherent vision becomes breathtakingly obvious.

Contrast this with Lord of the Rings. Do we think that J.R.R. Tolkien was working this series out as he went along, or that he had a plan from the beginning? Exactly.

Now, do I know at this moment how The Poison Sky series ends? Errrrrm….

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