Planning your story's big finale
How to land the ending of your long-running serial project
The first chapter of Tales from the Triverse was posted on this newsletter on 24 September 2021. New chapters have gone out every week since then, and the book currently sits at just over 150,000 words.1
Eighteen months in, I can see the end. It’s just peeking over the horizon, still a fair ways off but approaching with alarming rapidity. Which means I’m entering into a new phase: wrapping it all up. That process is what I’m talking about today.
If you haven’t read any of it yet, you can check out the collection of stories so far here:
The three phases of an online serial
I’ve been writing like this since 2015, publishing new chapters of a larger story each week. Those chapters are hot off the press, which means I’m constructing the novel in public, chapter-by-chapter. I’ve done three complete projects this way, with Triverse being my fourth.
Over the years I’ve noticed that there are (at least) three distinct structural phases of writing like this, which loosely correspond to rising and falling action in story arcs.
Phase 1: Discovery & rising action
Phase 2: Familiarity & the long middle
Phase 3: Culmination & finale
I’m currently hitting the end of phase 2 with Triverse. Let’s poke at what each of those actually mean, in terms of how I define them.
Phase 1: Discovery & rising action
This is when you’re setting up the story. Nobody has encountered your story before, and it may not even be clear what it’s supposed to be at this stage. At this point there’s some education to do:
What is this story? Who is it for?
Who are you? Why should people invest time in you as an author?
How frequently are you publishing your serial? Daily, weekly, fortnightly?
How long are the chapters going to be? How long will it take a reader to get through a new instalment?
What kind of commitment are readers looking at? Will the serial last a month, six months, a year? More?
What kind of storytelling are you employing? Do you need to give readers a gentle welcome before ramping up?
I always thing of David Simon, showrunner of The Wire, talking about how season 1 began more traditional in its structure and tone, because it had the responsibility of taking audiences from the cop shows they were used to watching and guiding them into what The Wire was doing. Straczynski did a similar thing with Babylon 5 (a common reference for me), with season 1 being more typically episodic, as was the style of television in the 1990s, before shifting into a more long-form style of storytelling.
Triverse has a bit of that. It’s a slightly mad collision of science fiction, fantasy and crime fiction. I could have chosen all sorts of ‘on ramps’, but decided to structure the narrative primarily around the crime fiction angle. It’s an anthology of episodes, each focusing on a different investigation. There’s a story bubbling away in the background, which increasingly comes to the fore. Readers can dip into individual stories or read the whole thing in order for a deeper experience. Very much me chasing the experiences I had watching serial TV in the 90s. It’s a gentler introduction to the wackier aspects of the setting, though, rather than diving in head first.
This is also when I tend to have the most buffer. I write at least half a dozen chapters before I begin posting, just to make sure that I like the story. These serials are multi-year projects, so you don’t want to end up trapped i one you’re not enjoying.
Phase 1 is when everything is discovery, and you’re inviting readers to join you on the journey.
Phase 2: Familiarity & the long middle
The middle chunk of a serial project is the comfy bit. You have readers, and they know the drill. The story and characters are established and the wheels are turning. You no longer have to explain everything, because that was done in Phase 1.
By this point readers will also know that you’re serious. You’re not going to disappear and abandon it after a handful of chapters. This is when word of mouth is a thing, with readers helping to spread the word. There’s a momentum and history to the project.
Depending on the type of story you’re telling, this is also the most flexible part of the serial. You can keep it running for as long as you want, a bit like a TV show being renewed season after season. The characters are well-known, the settings is understood, and you can have fun exploring the hidden corners of your fiction.
Phase 2 is also when you have to find ways to keep things interesting. Be too formulaic, or if you drag it out for too long, and you might see readers start to drift away. Play with the formula and structure or what you’re doing: regular readers will likely enjoy such experiments.
An issue that can arise around this point, if you’re serialising online especially, is how to avoid the back catalogue of chapters looking like homework. You need to figure out ways to make either the opening still easily discoverable, or build a story that has multiple jumping-on points. In the world of online serials, you’re often engaging with people in a manner closer to television shows than novels: think of shows you jumped onto mid-way through, before perhaps returning to the start to catch-up.
I’ve been in phase 2 for the last year, I’d say. Phase 1 was about six months of serial writing and publishing, and phase 2 for Triverse has been a year.
At some point you’ll need to figure out when to head into phase 3.
Phase 3: Culmination & finale
If you’re telling a story with a proper ending (rather than an on-going forever serial), you’ll need to navigate your way to that climax.
This is where serial writers - and by that I specifically mean people who write and publish as they go, to a greater or lesser degree, rather than writing the whole thing up front prior to serialising - are potentially at a significant disadvantage.
Phases 1 and 2 are fine for serialising as you go, because they’re all about exploration and discovery and setting things up. Phase 3, on the other hand, is about bringing all those threads and character arcs back together and landing them in a satisfying way. We don’t have the luxury of writing a draft, re-writing it, and iterating it until it works.
An online serial is a plane that’s been flying for years and is now seriously low on fuel. You have one shot to land it on the runway.
Think about how many TV shows have been spoiled by terrible endings. That’s in large part because they’re also produced and published piece by piece. A five-season TV shows is not written all in advance, but season-by-season. It’s why phases 1 and 2 of popular TV shows are able to be so successful, but phase 3 tends to falter or miss the runway entirely.
Some tips:
Start planning really far ahead. Like, midway through phase 2, if not earlier.
Think about the core themes of the story: what feelings or questions or answers do you want the reader to have at the end? Start threading them into the story at an early stage.
You might not know exactly where the plot is going to go, but you’ve probably got an idea. Work some foreshadowing in as early as possible. Make sure you’re letting everyone know about Chekhov's gun.2
Think about where your characters need to be and start laying the groundwork to get them there. It’s a problem that trips up a lot of TV shows, with characters suddenly needing to make nonsensical decisions or journeys, their personalities contorted to fit the plot requirements. Plan ahead of time and it can enhance character development, rather than mess it up.
Look back through the project so far. If you’ve been serialising for months or years you might have forgotten some plot elements, or supporting characters. These might be key details that you absolutely need to address in the finale, or they could be incidental moments which might enhance the ending.
Remember that your readers have a different relationship to your project than they do a typical novel. A book is a finished product that someone reads in days, or perhaps weeks at most. A long-running serial has been part of the reader’s life for months or years. It’s an interesting quirk to consider when designing the ending.
The key thing, I suppose, is to plan ahead. Even if you’re primarily a pantser, this is the one time you might want to think about sketching out a rough map. It’ll prevent you from falling into plot holes of your own making, or hitting dead ends, or realising that you forgot to set something up ahead of time.
It’s not about making phase 3 a dull, prescriptive writing experience. A map is there to help you get to a destination, but you can still choose different routes along the way. In fact, it’s precisely having a map that makes it safe to take those less-worn paths, and to take risks.
Anyway. That’s how I do it. How about you?
Before you go, here are some ebook giveaways that you might enjoy:
Photo by Sebastian Grochowicz on Unsplash
That’s a lot of words. Sorry about that.
The interesting thing here is that you don’t really need to worry about whether the foreshadowing is going to pay off. It’s OK to have elements that don’t come back in the finale! Readers won’t mind (or even notice) if certain things aren’t referenced again: but if you can point to something in chapter 10 that pays off in chapter 70, they’ll think you’re a genius.
A clear and generous guideline for anyone undertaking serialization or thinking of heading down that path.
You even make it sound like a great deal of fun, for the writer and the readers.
Serial endings are an interesting topic for me right now because my current project has a lot of starts and endings, with each potential main character having a distinct and complete story. So in effect I've dealt with the whole process in miniature, things are a lot simpler with only six chapters or so though.
But when I think about ending the project in relation to this post, it does feel like closing off on the story that happened to be published last would be a little anti-climatic for how long of a journey it will be. I do like the idea of some sort of little bonus for seeing every story that could work as a grand finale, but it'd have to be in line with fourteen different versions of events. Maybe if it was set just far enough in the future where nobody would mention their placing in their tournament.
There's also the Smash Bros fanfiction I've left abandoned for a while as multi chapter fanfiction tend to end up. On the side I've been working on finally giving it an ending and I have a somewhat clear idea of it, complete with the final scene and line. Just need to get there so people can finally have some closure, I recently got a like on it despite it being dormant for what must be over a year or two at this point.
That fanfiction was an interesting serialization process actually, because it's based around new characters for the latest Smash Bros game, which I started when the game was first announced. So I very much have written around things out of my control. Gives DLC announcements a new tension when you know you're going to have to write a chapter for whoever the new character is, and potentially have to do research on yet another game series you haven't played.