Develop Your Exit Strategy

Novelist's Boot Camp: 101 Ways to Take Your Book from Boring to Bestseller by Todd A. Stone

To bring your novel to a satisfactory conclusion, you need an exit strategy for your story. Map out your ending now in order to give yourself an objective to write toward. The following three techniques will help you build a more integrated, compelling, and memorable ending.

1. Set up a one-on-one confrontation. This key event in your novel's ending take the conflicting issues, ideas, and characters down to a personal level. Exhaust all other options, block all exits, and take off the kid gloves.

2. Satisfy the readers' hearts. Your ending must feel right to the reader, though that doesn't necessarily mean a happy ending. Your ending must be genre-appropriate and it must clarify and confirm the reader's feelings about the characters.

3. Satisfy the readers' minds. Your novel's logic (its cause and effect) must work. Your ending must address the characters and complications, and bring them to a resolution.