Should you know your series ending?

The title says it all. Should you know the ending to your book series before you start writing, or should you simply see where your story takes you?

 

It would help to have a notion, if not the specifics, if there's an overall story arc you're shooting for.

I have a vague notion of how my First Civilization's Legacy series will end. I've actually written the last scene to my Crax War Chronicles, and I have a pretty good notion how my Monsters, Maces and Magic series will end.

Is it a requirement? No. But I think it helps to keep the story from meandering. Now if it's a series that has no end, sort of like a Sherlock Holmes sort of detective series, where there is a new and interesting crime to solve with each novel...definitely an ending isn't required.

I will also add that I pretty much know how each of my novels will end, but you will find a solid contingent of writers that begin a novel with no clue what will happen in the final chapters.

 

I don't know if you have to have the ending to start with, but for many of us, that's the way it works. Some writers would say that this is too restrictive, and for them it may well be correct. Malcolm Gladwell adheres to the idea of having the end in mind first, but again, I think it would be overstepping to say that this has to be the way for everyone.

https://www.masterclass.com/classes/malcolm-gladwell-teaches-writing

I have seen not having an end in mind flop, though. The show Lost, got lost because it had no idea what its ending was going to be. The reboot of Battlestar also clearly had a period where it was also perilously close to getting lost. David Gerrold's War Against the Chtorr series remains incomplete, the 4th of 7 anticipated books having been published in 1993, and it's sad because I really liked that series and the characters were compelling, but even by the 4th book, it was clear Gerrold had no idea where this was going because half the book is a kind of natural history of the alien invasion, unrelated to the plot, like he just shoved half his world-building folder in between the chapters.

 

Meandering and having no clear direction is what I most want to avoid, as I've seen some of my favorite series go extremely downhill because of that. The problem I'm running into with endings, is that when I try to come up with them, I usually end up having to change them anyways when I come up with more ideas for early on in the story. I have a vague idea as to when the series will end (I mean this in terms of time), but not much else.

 

I had no idea there would be no book 31.

It might be a good idea to have some inkling if you
actually believe in the old school version of series.

The more modern one is like a never ending serial,
so if that is the route your going don't worry about it.

Or you can pull a George RR Martin and just quit writing
it entirely once it becomes a hit show for some random reason.

But if you must have an ending, you better make it fucking epic.
Otherwise it will be a real let down after sitting through the first
dozen books.

 

I think shoulds are rare in writing. We all work in different ways. You could probably wing your way through a series -- I know I couldn't, but then I'm neurotic as hell a control freak a planner. I started working on a series that I originally thought would be about six fairly self-contained books, which turned into more like twenty with a lot of mysteries and secrets throughout that I know need to be meticulously laid out so I'm never contradicting myself and can foreshadow and such properly -- so now I have to plan out about twenty books before I can start writing the first. Coincidentally, work on that project has ground to a complete halt, because that's incredibly daunting to me. But I gotta do it 'right' if I'm gonna do it at all.

Don't be me!

On the other hand, I'm sure there's a happy medium. It depends on the nature of your series, for one thing. Something like my monster up there that's based around assorted mysteries and gambits and shit would turn into spaghetti, plotline-wise, if I tried to wing it. Something more monster-of-the-week (like my monster was supposed to be ...) without too much hinging on stuff that happened in previous entries would be fine.

If you've read Harry Potter, say, the first few books didn't have much to tie them together outside of the basic premise -- the sorcerer's stone and Professor Quirrel probably didn't come up at all in Chamber of Secrets, right? It wasn't until the later books that the mythos that'd been built up started to really matter. If you scrapped that aspect, all you really need to know (if you're J. K. Rowling) is that at the end of the series, you need to defeat Voldemort. That's how it ends: the big bad gets got. Simple enough. But if you're planning on a more complex plot/ending with horcruxes or whatever, then you do need to know about them from the get-go -- not spontaneously come up with them in book six and decide they're integral to everything, but you have nothing in place to prop them up.

I think what it comes down to is "Is your series all one story, or is it a collection of stories?"

Think of it this way: do you need to know the end of book one before you start writing it? Depends, right? Sometimes you figure it out as you go, sometimes you plan it out. But if you consider each book a 'chapter' in the greater overarching story, then you probably want to have some idea of what you're building towards, or your chapters are just going to kind of meander around the place. If your chapters aren't building towards a definitive climax, then you've got a weirdly-paced novel -- or, you've just got a book of unconnected / loosely-connected short stories. That works as a series too. Just figure out if you're writing a novel or a collection of short stories (ideally before retrofitting to change things up is too much work).

This feels very disjointed. Hope it helps.

 

I typically don't know the ending, and just write and at some point force myself to do a full stop as I may have gone on further then I should have.

 

There's been more than one series that ended up flopping because the author didn't know how to end it. A Song of Ice and Fire is a pretty good current example of a series that doesn't know where it went with an author that doesn't know where to go.

You don't need to have a clear ending in mind, but you do have to be careful to keep your story concise. When you're just 'seeing where the road takes you' it can be easy to lose sight of a cohesive plot and the story turns into a meandering series of events that don't exactly build up towards anything, and then you enter the "I am truly fucking lost" stage where you end up running into corners and creating plot holes.

 

First of all, I hope you manage to get out of the eternal planning phase. It's a trap a lot of writers end up in (or so I've heard), and no work ends up getting done. As for my series, it's sort of a collection of stories, but there is an overarching plot. I have no idea how many books it's going to contain as of yet.

 

I'm 10,000 words into 'Of Sins and Shadows'; book one of my 'If Eternity should Fail' series.
I've plotted out all five books. Book one would not be what it is without knowing it's place in the series story arch.
That said, every writer and every project is it's own animal. Find out what works for you.
My progress journal is a blow by blow account of the development of my series if you're curious as to what my approach has been.

 

Am I right to assume Game of Thrones got a bit lost too?

Personally, I think that's how a lot of animes end up with their less than stellar endings. The shows just go on and on until it doesn't even make sense anymore, with a very thin story spread out over the whole thing.

As for myself, I'm writing a standalone novel and because I have no ending, I'm still struggling to bring the plot elements together into a cohesive story. That's just one book.

So not having an ending is certainly possible, but it will mean a lot more editing at the end. It may also mean you get so entangled in everything you've created, love so much about all the different aspects that don't actually gel that well together as one piece, that you run the serious risk of not ever finishing the thing. Something to bear in mind.

 

Well, at some point the antagonists have to be stopped, right?

There’s a risk in not knowing how your book is going to end. It’ll just keep going on and on until the readers will experience what TV Tropes call ‘Arc Fatigue’. By that, I mean the readers will slowly just stop caring about what’s happening as there’s no clear goal to reach, and the characters don’t appear to be anywhere near that goal. Check out Dragonball Z for a prime example of it, especially during its Majin Buu arc.

 

I was quite tired when I posted this thread last night, so I should probably clarify this. I do have an end goal in mind, in the sense that I know what event is going to signal the end of my series. It's more that I don't know how my series is going to end in the sense that I'm not sure what my main character's ultimate end goal is. That, and I'm not entirely sure who the final antagonist is.

 

I do, at least in the broad strokes. For the book I'm currently working on, I know absolutely everything before the first word goes on the page. For anything beyond that, I understand the major story beats and what, in essence, is going to happen. I may not know all of the details until I move on to the next book in the series, but I have some pretty good ideas.

 

Personally I think it helps to know where the overall arc of a series of stories is going. I'm currently working on a series of five stories. The first three lead up to and have a massive impact on the fourth, they essentially detail why everything in 1-3 happened, and the first three plots tie into the fourth. The fifth stories is the one that brings everything full circle, ties up loose ends, and has the hero finally achieve what he started out to do in the first story, but for completely different reasons. It's also interesting the effect the journey has on the MC, because his motivations originally revolved around petty revenge, but as the series moves along, he begins to realize it's about just more than him, and he grows up and starts to fight for more than just himself.

 

I have a plan for my opening chapter and a general idea for my climax scene (for now), and a couple of details for the aftermath/cool down. Now I just have to figure out everything between. I don't have a title yet, but maybe something'll come to me as I get further with my plot.

 

Titles are weird. Sometimes I just know what it's going to be from the outset and sometimes, like with my current WIP, I have no idea. I mean, for my last piece, I not only knew the title, I visualized the book cover before I ever wrote a single word.

 

Just get millions of people across the globe completely into your television series, and then 10 seasons in realize you didn't write an ending.

No pressure.

 

True.

To Hell with writing an ending then. Let it be the problem of somebody else.

This is a good point, and I think largely has to do with the fact that the story *is* Jack Reacher. It revolves around him and his life. New narratives and plots come about and are resolved within a movie, or a series, but the story lives on because Jack Reacher will always have another adventure.

Is your story about a character and his or her life (or career as an MI6 agent or something), or is it about a plot that bears significance on a character or cast?

 

Me personally? I think at least a target should be in mind.

I don't care how vague that target is.

Like imagine if you were gonna go for a drive. I can accept the impulse of not wanting to plan the route in precise detail. Or seeing where the wind takes me.

But if I am visiting Mexico or Canada I think is a fair amount of planning. Lol. Otherwise I just imagine myself driving in circles. And it seems very pointless.

 

A little of both? For me, when I started work on my current WIP, I had no plans to make it a trilogy. But then as I fleshed everything out more and saw where my characters were taking me, I realized I couldn't tell all of my MC's story in one book. (Well, not if I wanted to keep it YA-length, anyway).
My 1st book is totally mapped out now. Books 2 and 3- I know the major story arcs and what plot points I want to address, but beyond that, it's all vague. But when I first began, books 2 and 3 weren't even in the picture. My story led me to them.

Now this, I see as more of an issue. I think a MC's end goal should be in your head from the beginning, otherwise, how will you know where they are going, what their motivations are, what drives them?

And as for the "final" antagonist- do you have more than one? I mean, there's nothing wrong with that (I myself have one specific antagonist who is working directly against my MC, but I also have the ongoing threat of another country attacking her country, so in a way, I have multiple antagonists.) But I know who they are- because, again, without knowing who she is fighting/who is working against her...I think it would be quite difficult to nail down appropriate actions/scenes/emotions of my MC leading up to that final scene or confrontation.
I liked izzbot's example:

I feel like not knowing the MC's end goal and the final antagonist is going to cause the situation where you spontaneously come up with them and have nothing to prop them up.

 

I very strongly feel that the answer to this depends on your writing style. There are plenty of established authors in both camps. I think it depends on how high concept your work is, as well. If you're writing a series of thrillers where the central mystery hinges on a final denouement, you're probably going to come unstuck if you only happen upon the plot for this late on. If you're writing a sequence of literary novels bound by the theme of loss, then you're probably going to have more flexibility. In either situation I'd brainstorm extensively first, to try and feel out some possibilities and their consequences.