Landing the plane

The final 2,000 words might be the most important

Stories start so innocently. A single idea, popping into your head:

The next thing you know, you’ve been publishing an online serial for three and a half years, have written over 250,000 words and all those pesky readers expect you to come up with SOME KIND OF COHERENT ENDING LIKE I KNOW WHAT I’M DOING

ahem

I’m talking hypothetically here, of course. Asking for a friend, etc.

It starts with an idea

In my experience, stories tend to start with a single spark. Most likely influenced by multiple factors, but the very first moment I start taking a story seriously is a singular ignition.

It doesn’t stay that way for long. Characters start interfering, then sub-plots and subtext undermine the foundations, and all those pesky themes start pulling the story this way and that. Before I know it, it’s gone from a single strand to a fractal nightmare of infinite complexity.

During the first third of a story, this is fine. It’s exciting, for readers and the writer.

Around the middle third it can start to get a little hairy, somewhat out of control if there are too many strands. An engine running at too high an RPM, about to shake itself to pieces.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

You know, the usual.

This isn’t just me, is it? Please tell me other writers go through this as well.

Then the final third of a story approacheth, and this is when it’s time to change into the brown trousers.

Endings really matter

Remember Game of Thrones?

Everyone was obsessed with that show, right up until its final season. Possibly its final episode. It might even have been the final scene, or whenever that awkward “it’s all about the best narrative!” group scene takes place.

It’s the most acute example of a dodgy ending undoing the hard work of everything that had come before in the story. The last five minutes of a film can make or break it. The last 2,000 words of a novel. The last sentence of a short story.

The Great Gatsby’s final paragraphs still rent a space in my mind, from when I read it as a teenager:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Perfection. Not only an astonishing piece of writing by itself, but the perfect end note for the book as a whole.

I’m always chasing that feeling in my own stories: to somehow find a way to provide the ideal final words, and a definitive ending that lives up to all that came before it, without being contrived or overly comprehensive. Most is left unsaid in Gatsby, but it leaves you with a feeling that is undeniable.

As of writing this, in mid-December 2024, I’m into the last third of Tales from the Triverse, the epic serial that I’ve been publishing since 2021. At some point relatively soon, most likely in the first half of 2025, I will finish the project and write the last words for the last chapter.

Which means it’s time to take all of those characters and themes and sub-plots and tangential strands and supporting characters and plot details and weave them together into a satisfying, coherent piece.

It’s easy to use the ‘landing a plane’ metaphor, but I’d argue it’s more like landing a spaceship. Like this, in fact:

Still one of the most astonishing things I’ve ever seen. A level of precision that’s hard to comprehend, building on the accumulated knowledge handed down through generations. An inconceivable number of technological breakthroughs over centuries had to happen for that rocket catch to be possible.

That’s what it feels like to write a novel: am I going to pull off the catch, or will I have miscalculated? Is the rocket going to miss the arms and explode on the launch pad?

Catching a space rocket

At some point, the story has to end. Unless it’s a truly ongoing serial, in which case you can rinse-and-repeat forever, like Marvel and DC comics or TV soaps.

I enjoy crafting endings, not least because it signals the end of a project. I’m creatively monogamous, in that I try to only have one fiction project going at any one time. That’s the only way I can be assured of getting to the end of anything. Finishing one project is exciting, then, not only because of the inherent accomplishment but also due to the sudden possibility of the new.

Due to writing and publishing as I go (more-or-less), I have to think about all of this way ahead of time. I can’t go back and edit chapters to fix oversights or plot holes.¹

I’ve talked in a slightly mad fashion about my ‘story loom’ concept, and how I work towards key moments:

The Story Loom

The idea is that I always know where I’m headed, but can quite happily deviate along the way. It’s like having a destination in mind when going for a walk or a drive, while being open to exploring unexpected landmarks encountered on the journey.

The biggest key moment of all is the actual ending. That’s the final point at which all the strands come together. The strands that matter, at least: I never want to tie up everything, because that’s not how life works. There needs to be a sense that the characters and world will continue after the final page. Some aspects will be left unsaid or unresolved, which aids the overall verisimilitude.

Finding which strands to bind together is the real challenge. Every reader will have their own favourite character, storyline and theme. It’s impossible to control how an audience reacts and engages with the work.

Writing has always felt like problem solving to me. It’s a series of complex problems that have to be solved one after another, until the story is told. The way I try to make sense of something as gargantuan as Triverse is to first identify those problems, and then figure out how to solve them.

This is how I end up with documents and folders in Scrivener like this:

‘Story ending summary’ is a point-by-point outline of where I think the ending should land. It isn’t structured into chapters or actual story beats, it’s just noting the core points that have to be hit somewhere along the way. It’s actually a tidied-up version of a much older document that’s been around for years, from the earliest days of the project, which you can see here:

‘Stuff to weave into the finale’ is more of a stream of consciousness, which has evolved and expanded over three years. Those other documents have been useful along the way: ‘The smuggling ring’ was mostly season 1, while ‘The Conspiracy Arc’ played out over seasons 1 to 3.

The next step is to filter all of the ideas into an actual narrative structure. I tend to do this in temporary folders within Scrivener, with basic placeholder titles and single line descriptions:

(apologies for the redactions)

The benefit of working in Scrivener is that all of this is very fluid: chapters can be rearranged by dragging them around, sub-folders can be used to keep things tidy, and it’s all kept within the primary project.

I won’t be showing what’s inside the ‘Big Finale Season’ folder, for obvious reasons.

When it became apparent that a flashback story was going to be more involved than I’d originally planned, it became its own sub-folder complete with its own storylines:

These stories are not necessarily single chapters. An individual story could be comprised of five chapters.

Breaking everything down into these component pieces, often long before I get to actually writing any of it, is the only way I know to make sense of a long-form story. Chunking it into manageable pieces, which can then slowly, painstakingly be put back together again.

As with all entertainment, the intention is for the end result to appear effortless, as if it always had to be that way, as if the story simply emerged fully formed. Certainly for me that’s not how it works. Writing, and especially crafting a finale, is all about problem after problem after problem, and desperately hunting around for solutions.

And then, hopefully, across years and hundreds of thousands of words, it’ll come together something like this:

---

Thanks for reading.

How do you handle your endings? Do let me know.

Hey, look at that. I did a comic!

I’ve always wanted to make a comic, but couldn’t settle on a project. I still have lots of ideas bubbling around, but as mentioned above I can’t really begin any of them until I finish Triverse. At the same time I was thinking about how I really want to reduce my reliance on Unsplash stock images in 2025, but how it’s a challenge to find the time to create my own illustrations.

A lot of this comes down to not being as good an artist as I’d like. The art I want to do looks like Jamie McKelvie’s art. But that’s impossible, because he’s Jamie McKelvie and I’m Simon K Jones. He’s a once-in-a-generation talent with a very distinctive style and an uncanny ability to draw realistic-yet-stylised humans.

That’s been a blocker for years.

Me: I want to make a comic!

The Muse: Can you draw like Jamie McKelvie yet?

Me: …no?

The Muse: You are not ready.

I was ignoring my own advice. This entire newsletter is called Write More, precisely because the best way to improve as a writer is to do lots of writing. Waiting for the perfect moment, or the exact right skillset, gets you nowhere.

Anyway, to get to the point: I thought it might be fun to merge all these thoughts and illustrate today’s newsletter. I’d sketched visualisations of plots and ideas in the past, but only ever in the abstract. This was an opportunity to make something panel-based and sequential. A pretend mini-comic within the newsletter, one which didn’t need to stand on its own or be presented as A Comic in capital letters.

It’s basic, of course, but it has a mini narrative, and serves as a fun bookend for the newsletter. I’ve had some time off this week due to accidentally-accrued annual leave, which has afforded me some extra time to dabble. I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to do this kind of thing on a regular basis, but we’ll see. I’d certainly like to!

Some bits:

• Substack rolled out its live streaming features more widely last week. I did a reading of the opening chapter of No Adults Allowed, which was lots of fun. Not sure how much I’ll make use of the feature, but it’s definitely good to have as an option. I might stick the recording up over the holidays as a bonus.

• I was on

  John Ward
  ’s podcast a little while back, and last week he had a chat with
  Chris Best
  . It’s a nice combo of Chris finding out about John’s route into being an artist and writer, and John quizzing Chris about the origins and future of Substack. Crucially, he ends by asking Chris about better support for serial fiction on the platform. Nice one.

Live Stream with Chris Best

• I’m really enjoying Balatro, and found this very interesting about its 18+ rating in Europe. It’s a game which uses the visuals and language of poker, but a) is not poker and b) has no actual gambling in it at all. It’s a digital card game, and a very good one.

• More Jeff.

• Holly A Brown
  interviewed me for her newsletter! Lots of natterings about serial fiction, newsletters and Substack.

• An interesting post from

  Sarah Fay
  and subsequent discussion with
  Eleanor Anstruther
  on publishers getting confused about the relationship they now have with writers:

• Another good discussion, this time with

  Eric Falden
  and others about ‘list hygiene’, which sounds gross but is pertinent to anyone running a newsletter:

Last but not least, beware of impersonators. I’ve been informed of at least one person pretending to be me, complete with profile pic, so if you receive any follows or DMs please double-check it’s actually me. You can check it’s my profile by making sure the username is @simonkjones, without any additional numbers or characters, as in this pic:

Mike Sowden

knows how to identify the real me:

Right, that’s it for today.

Thanks for reading and have a lovely Christmas, if that’s your sort of thing.

1. Well, I can, but that would be unfair on the reader. That’s what the subsequent paperback release is for, when everything is up for grabs.