too many setups, not enough endings

Carnevil9 said:

I must respectfully disagree with the OP here. Personally, I think endings are overrated.

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Sorry, I've read (and seen) too many storylines where an exciting narrative piddles-off into mediocrity, where the author seems to have given up and slopped-on some crap to meet their deadline or whatever. Where I reach The End and think, "Why did I bother with this crud?"

Anyone who've ever performed on stage knows that you end the set with an attention-grabber, not some wimpy oh-this'll-do. Don't leave'em yawning; you won't be invited back. Leave'em cheering or chanting or dreaming or horny or hypnotized. Leave'em wanting more.

Hypoxia said:

Sorry, I've read (and seen) too many storylines where an exciting narrative piddles-off into mediocrity, where the author seems to have given up and slopped-on some crap to meet their deadline or whatever. Where I reach The End and think, "Why did I bother with this crud?"

Anyone who've ever performed on stage knows that you end the set with an attention-grabber, not some wimpy oh-this'll-do. Don't leave'em yawning; you won't be invited back. Leave'em cheering or chanting or dreaming or horny or hypnotized. Leave'em wanting more.

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"and then I exploded, stuffing her gash with great gobs of goo"?

I often end with a hook for a sequel, but also often never write the sequel...

I'm in the process of writing a story where I pitched the ending as the prologue and I needed to write my way back to present time.

* woman is laying on the bed getting mercilessly fucked by her master, there are red welts marks all over her body from flogging. She's on the verge of major orgasm and just as she passes out she wonders to how she got in this predicament.

So now I'm writing the beginning of her life before getting involved in BDSM lifestyle. She's character who you wouldn't immediately suspect that she'd ever be in the predicament described above.

I started out writing it very easily but I've injected so many subplots and characters along the way that I've kinda hit the wall. So I've taken a break from it until I know I can flesh out the story better so I can hit the ending.

Interesting enough I had developed a strong supporting cast that I've decided to write a story focusing on one of the characters. I already knew the ending, or shall I say beginning of her new life from the above unfinished story.

This time however I created an brief outline broken up in chapters. Basically I labeled a bunch of chapters and gave them a brief synopsis to what happens in each chapter. So now I'm just filling in each chapter with exposition and dialogue. I think I'm going finally finish a story or two within a year now that I've come up with comfortable technique. Yeah I'm a slow writer.

I've actually have 4 stories all work in progress, 2 of them have all their chapters labeled and summarized. It's just matter of filling in the details and writing plausible dialogue. All of them are connected, so it's one big story broken up in several parts based on the focus of the protagonist.

sirhugs said:

"and then I exploded, stuffing her gash with great gobs of goo"?

I often end with a hook for a sequel, but also often never write the sequel...

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Just wait till the readers beg for more. More story, more goo, ooh ooh...

Sensitiveguy708 said:

... I had developed a strong supporting cast that I've decided to write a story focusing on one of the characters. I already knew the ending, or shall I say beginning of her new life from the above unfinished story.

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Yeah, spinoffs are fun. Spinoffs with closure should be fairly easy. I spun-off a set of supporting players from one series into major players (a decade earlier) in a separate but congruent cycle. They will probably pop-up again in future cycles.

This time however I created an brief outline broken up in chapters. Basically I labeled a bunch of chapters and gave them a brief synopsis to what happens in each chapter. So now I'm just filling in each chapter with exposition and dialogue. <snip> I've actually have 4 stories all work in progress, 2 of them have all their chapters labeled and summarized. It's just matter of filling in the details and writing plausible dialogue. All of them are connected, so it's one big story broken up in several parts based on the focus of the protagonist.

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Sounds like you know where you're going. When I have such a big-picture view of a story I don't outline it so much as establish a few plot points for the players to hit. I've tried chapter outlines but they tend to metastasize. I outlined the middle episode of The Book of Ruth as a 3-LIT-pager and it grew to 11 pages in 3 chapters. Oy. I hadn't yet figured out how to end its last episode so coming up with the right conclusion took me MONTHS. And that story cycle has spinoffs and crossovers. THE END? No, only The-End-For-Now-And-Here.

Hypoxia said:

Sounds like you know where you're going. When I have such a big-picture view of a story I don't outline it so much as establish a few plot points for the players to hit. I've tried chapter outlines but they tend to metastasize. I outlined the middle episode of The Book of Ruth as a 3-LIT-pager and it grew to 11 pages in 3 chapters. Oy. I hadn't yet figured out how to end its last episode so coming up with the right conclusion took me MONTHS. And that story cycle has spinoffs and crossovers. THE END? No, only The-End-For-Now-And-Here.

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Well I've had some early chapters 'metastasize' and realized right away that these outlined chapters would need to have singular goal to achieve.

Here's a rough sample of two chapters;

Chance Meeting

Blaise meets Kyle Wolfram at a job fair and is immediately charmed by his cultural intelligence and obviously wealthy lifestyle. He gives her a chance to be interviewed if she passes the company’s Aptitude, Integrity and Personality Test to determine her candidacy. She tries to flirt with him to gain a favorable advantage over other potential candidates. Kyle rebuffs her flirts.

Opportunity

Kyle learns that Blaise could be more than just a prime candidate for the job, after going through rigorous personality testing and other security background checks. He discovers her strong passive personality despite having a MBA degree, the latter which is considered to be highly ambitious. She takes a lie detector test and reveals the nature of her elaborate ambition that was fostered by her passive aggressive parents. Finally he interviews Blaise for the job. After asking her the usual work related stuff, he asks her very personal and awkward questions about sex. At first she’s freaked by his line of questioning, but then she takes it as a sign that he might be interested in her romantically and/or is testing her. She attempts to flirt to see where it can go, and he gets physical with her and spanks her over the knee. She doesn’t take it too seriously and he’s disappointed.
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As you can see these are very rough outlines, with no paragraphing, just spillage of ideas to be fleshed out for each chapter. By labeling my chapters I've given myself a narrow focus of what each chapter should be about it. As you can see 'Opportunity' covers a lot different things (yes, on verge of metastasizing), but I've stayed true to what the chapter's focus...which is opportunity for Blaise as well as Kyle.

Sensitiveguy708 said:

As you can see these are very rough outlines, with no paragraphing, just spillage of ideas to be fleshed out for each chapter. By labeling my chapters I've given myself a narrow focus of what each chapter should be about it. As you can see 'Opportunity' covers a lot different things (yes, on verge of metastasizing), but I've stayed true to what the chapter's focus...which is opportunity for Blaise as well as Kyle.

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My 'outlines' tend to be much rougher. I may cheat and base a piece on an old folksong (Jenny-Be-Fair) where each verse suggests a brief episode.

Left Behind was simpler. Rosa is Left Behind by her family. She decides, Fuck'em! and heads off to a new life far away. Many adventures in the road trip from Texas to California. Once there, she reinvents herself as a cougar and has more hot and dangerous adventures. After a vicious attack (with players surprising me as I wrote them) she ends up snuggling a guy half her because Mature. I spent less time on the plot points than on a character map, specifying names-ages-ethnicities. Is that The End of the story? Maybe...

You know Sensitiveguy, I pretty much do the same thing, only I word my 'summaries' as goals. Use to come up with my Chapter titles in the past, but for the most part I think of the main goal(s) of a chapter now but leave room for change if it's needed. Like my Dragons of Fraidel story, I've changed up the middle part of my story because I wanted to find a better way to get the main conflict going while still expanding on the world itself since most of the story takes place on a fictional planet I created.

Zodia195 said:

You know Sensitiveguy, I pretty much do the same thing, only I word my 'summaries' as goals. Use to come up with my Chapter titles in the past, but for the most part I think of the main goal(s) of a chapter now but leave room for change if it's needed. Like my Dragons of Fraidel story, I've changed up the middle part of my story because I wanted to find a better way to get the main conflict going while still expanding on the world itself since most of the story takes place on a fictional planet I created.

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I use the chapter labels as goals, the summaries are just things I may want flesh out. I've had summaries completely scraped but kept the chapter labels as reminder of the goals.

I wouldn't agree to write a story for someone who gave me the ending. If I'm going to work to someone else's idea, I just want the setup. The ending will be mine.

sr71plt said:

I wouldn't agree to write a story for someone who gave me the ending. If I'm going to work to someone else's idea, I just want the setup. The ending will be mine.

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Do you write with endings in mind? Your own, not someone else's.

Hypoxia said:

Do you write with endings in mind? Your own, not someone else's.

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I write with an ending in mind--and usually don't start writing without one in mind--but it's not necessarily the ending that winds up on the story. I have yet to agree to custom write a story for anyone without having my own ending in mind for it.

I must say also that even though I say up front that it will be my story resolution on the elements they give to me and fully in my control, few who have asked for a story must be happy with what I did with it. Almost none of them have acknowledged that I write a story for them by request.

How Did They Get There?

* The naked pastor's wife, or maybe the naked pastor, is about to be ejected from the pop-open cake at the stag party. How did they get there? Church is running out of money and about to lose their building if they don't pay their back mortgage in the next 90 days. The pastor's wife feels helpless as her husband realizes they can't save the church. Pastor's wife decides to secretly become a stripper to try and make enough money to save the church her husband loves.

* The videos were released showing her triple-penetrated by three rival presidential candidates, not all male. How did they all get there? The video is edited to appear that all three candidates were having sex together, but they really did not. They did, however, have sex with the same woman, who seduced them to her apartment where she had an elaborate hidden camera system set up to capture their exploits to edit the video. The candidates cannot deny that it is not them having sex in the video, but they have trouble explaining how it actually happened. The video was a set up by a third party candidate who hoped to steal the presidency as the only viable option.

* He proudly struts nude down Fifth Avenue to roaring approval at the head of the largest parade in the city's history. How did he get there? Man is secretly video taped by an ex girlfriend as he danced naked for her. She posts it as "revenge porn" and it ruins his career. In a moment of desperation to somehow make money after no one will hire him, he decides to make more videos of himself dancing to the latest dance crazes and posts them to Twitter. His videos go viral and he becomes a star, brining in millions for appearances, including Grand Marshall of the parade.

* Person wakes up in bed with a headache and a blank memory, naked; they roll over and finds somebody inappropriate or unlikely, also naked: relative, priest, celebrity, orangutan. What happened the night before? She met Bill Cosby...for real..that is the entire plot to what has been happening with the Cosby accusations.

* News item: Rescuers are called to break-apart a nineteen-woman daisy-chain at a Goddess retreat. How did they get entangled? Sorority girls decided to try a "daisy chain" during a stormy night. Lightning strikes a tree outside the sorority house and falls onto the building. The ceiling drops down, just low enough to pin them in the house in position, while not crushing them. Rescuers have to come to remove the debris and unearth the attractive girls naked and performing the sexual act.

* He ran and ran and nearly dropped with exhaustion. The huge crowd of sex-crazed women obsessed with his precious bodily fluids had almost caught up with him. How did he get there? It is a post apocalyptic scene where a virus killed off every living male. the lone surviving male was an astronaut who was at the International Space Station when the virus broke out. He returned to earth to find all the men dead. Women, realizing he is the last hope to repopulate the earth, rush to Houston to try and get impregnated by him. He is originally excited at the prospect of sleep with all of these women, but soon realizes how overwhelmed and crazed these women are to sleep with him.

* Yes, they were fraternal triplets, each with a different father, of a different race, different from her own also. That was a wild night, yes? And why is she not concerned? A young woman goes crazy at a party and sleeps with three different men. Somehow, each man was able to impregnate three separate eggs. When the babies arrive, she is excited to see that they are from three different fathers because that means she will get to draw child support from each of them.

* She leafed in disbelief through the stack of genetics reports, DNA analyses, relationship traces. It couldn't be! All the kids in town, all the boys and girls she'd grown up with -- ALL were cloned from her! What is the horrible secret of Samesville? The horrible secret is that the government set up a town in Kansas to experiment with cloning not long after cloning the first sheep. The government was able to successfully clone both boys and girls by slightly altering the genetic material. Everyone looks relatively alike, but is slightly different. No one in the town realizes that anything is amiss because they always grew up in this environment. All of the "parents" are actually scientists, observing the creations and creating more. The girl- Project 001, is an aspiring scientist and finds a genetics book in her parents closet. After running a make shift test, she realizes what it is going on.

tnhardon said:

How Did They Get There?

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Excellent! I especially like your daisychain solution. But the last-remaining-man trope has been done quite a bit IMHO. I prefer something like a test-drug that boosts his pheromones to irresistible levels -- maybe whilst cutting his libido. What a pickle!