Keeping and Eye on your Endgame

If there’s one thing I learned from reworking my plans for two novels, then it is that you need to always keep an eye on your endgame. The whole story - in a multi-novel series perhaps more than one - relies on this endgame, on the big confrontation, on the resolution of the big question posed at the beginning.

Novels rarely have only one plot-thread, even my adventure stories usually unite two, three, or more plots. A really complex novel will have even more of them, but no matter how many there are, there will always be one main plot, one element which runs through the whole story and keeps it together. The most important thing at the beginning of the story is therefore to identify that one plot-thread which runs along the whole length.

There are only three difficult parts of a story, of course - beginning, middle, and end. I have most of a problem with the end of my stories, which might be why I really need to look at the endgame. It’s where I need to go to finish the story (the hardest part for me).

In a story, everything moves towards that big moment, towards the resolution. If you write a mystery story, that is when the mystery will be lifted. If you write a superhero romp, it’s where the big battle will happen. If you write a romance story, this is where all the misunderstandings will be cleared, so the ‘happily ever after’ can happen. No matter what you write, you will always have an endgame of sorts. Depending on whether you write a short story or something longer, you might have some parts after the endgame, bringing down the tension and letting the story finish on a high note, but even if you don’t, you will always have the endgame.

For my stories, that can mean different things. When I wrote “Stray”, the first novella for the first volume of “Theoretical Necromancy”, I was a little unsure about the endgame at the beginning. I had an idea about Gabrielle’s background and about her reason for being in a small North-Italian town, but I didn’t know what the big conflict would be. Once I realized that another group of criminals breaking into the same library and killing someone while Gabrielle was ‘liberating’ a book from there would bring in conflict, it was much easier. Once I realized that Gabrielle would need a very strong reason for finding those men and making sure they were caught, it was clear to me that I needed to bring Gabrielle down to rock bottom - which I did. I took all chances of getting away from her, one by one, until she had no other choice but to stand her ground, fight, and use all her skills to bring the criminals to justice. With Gabrielle being anything but a hero to sally forth and do the right thing, she needed enough of a push to do that.

For the John Stanton stories, the endgame is usually the solution to the mystery in question, but not always. “The Case of the Deadly Documents” has no mystery as a such, apart from ‘how will John and Markham survive the night’.

Of course, the endgame doesn’t work on its own. You need to build up to it and push the tension, to prepare the reader and make them curious. You have to suggest at some point what the endgame may be. In some cases, that’s quite obvious. In others, the endgame will be a twist, a surprise for the audience who has expected something different.

What does it mean, though, when I say that you need to keep an eye on your endgame? It means that you need to know what the big bang will be. I’ve been working as a discovery writer for a long time and I thought I’d never be able to write once I had plotted a story out in advance (I won’t lie, it’s less fun to write when I know where I’m going, but it’s more efficient). The big problem for me often was that I was meandering and needed to figure out what I was aiming for. Quite often, I did that subconsciously, quite often I knew what the endgame would be, even though I had not planned for it in advance. During other times, as with the two novels I plotted out ‘between the years’, I had no idea where the stories should go, no endgame. That was one reason why I couldn’t write the novels before. Now they’re plotted out, the endgame is clear, and I can go ahead and work on them.

So when you have the idea for a new story, ask yourself what your endgame will be. Do you have a mystery to be resolved? A big fight the main character needs to win? Misunderstandings to be cleared up? Once you know that, you can plot the course, add a few twists and turns, see who and what you need to make it all work. Once the endgame is clear, the road is clear as well. Quite often, you can even see the twists and turns. Other times, you will want to add a few to make the story a bit more interesting, but during all of them, you need to keep your eye on the goal.

I’m honest here: it’s become much easier for me to plot a story and to write it afterwards since I lean back and figure out the endgame first. Once I have that, everything else is pretty easy. Well, not that easy, but once I know where I’m going, I can figure out which detours from the direct path may be interesting and which additional plots would go well with it.

The endgame is important and you need to keep an eye on it while plotting and while writing. Will this additional scene serve the plot and lead towards the endgame? Is this character necessary or not? Does the additional plot you have added work well with the endgame or might it prove to be a roadblock? There’s a lot of things which become clear once you know where you’re going.