How to Finish Your Tween Book

It helps to know what and where your ending is when you begin your book. From the moment you conceive your opening sentence, you write with more confidence if you have a general idea about how your story will end. You don’t need to know all the details of the ending. Nor do you need to know how every step of the final scene will play out. But it’s a good idea to have a strong sense of the general direction in which you are going. Setting your sights with this literary compass is a solid way to avoid getting lost in the dark woods. Finishing your book so the reader is satisfied is as important as hooking them in your opening.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

1. The key thing to keep in mind about your ending is that it must honor the contract you made with the reader in the opening paragraphs. This does not mean the ending must be predictable. But it does mean that the ending must be inevitable.
2. There are lots of ways to end a book: happy, sad, mysterious, ambivalent, comic and tragic. But when it comes to endings, the bedrock issue to bear in mind is to keep the promise you made with your reader at the beginning of the book. Whatever ending you choose, you must lead up to it in an honest way. Like Hansel and Gretel, even in the simplest story you must drop enough crumbs for the reader to follow so that the ending is a logical outgrowth of the path you have traveled through the book.
3. Keep your promise to the reader. Critical to the understanding of the ending is the understanding that if you’ve made a promise to the reader, it’s your obligation to deliver on it. Anything less than a full payoff is a violation of the author-reader contract. In other words, the ending of your story should be the inescapable outcome of the plotlines you have woven together throughout the book and the promises you have made. And it should be played out onstage in full dramatic regalia.
4. For tween readers, endings don’t need to be happy, but they do have to be satisfying in some fundamental way. The stories grow out of the characters, their internal changes and their ability to understand and cope with the world around them. As a consequence, the endings to these books are more complex.
5. Sometimes life doesn’t turn out the way the hero wants it to. Yet she does get some of what she needs: an understanding of how the world works, perhaps, or a newfound ability to cope with a confusing and challenging event. He or she might have to accept adverse circumstances or even mourn a deep loss. But in all of these situations, the hero learns something, changes and grows. And begins to get a firmer grasp on the complexity of the world around. There can be no question this story is going to move forward. No question the hero will face life in the new direction that was set during course of the story. This is what makes the ending satisfying and the book worthwhile, and what makes readers come back for more.

Tips & Warnings

• You can’t spring a surprise on the reader at the last minute that you haven’t laid the groundwork for in advance. Whether you’re writing a drama, a coming-of-age story, a thriller, or a mystery, you must drop crumbs that lead to the inevitable ending. The groundwork might be obscured and the hint might be subtle, but the clues must be there in order to justify the surprise you create.
• Sometimes when we write a book, we commit ourselves to an ending that doesn’t work. We’ve constructed a story that has one inevitable conclusion, but by the time we’ve actually written that story, it becomes apparent that the previously planned outcome is a mistake.