Start at the End: Writing Fiction Without Friction

Writing anything - a screenplay, a TV series, a play or a book - is infinitely easier when you do one thing first:

Start at the end. 

Say you’re planning a road trip. Everything about the journey is first determined by your destination. How far is it and how much will it cost? What do you need to pack for your trip, and how long will it take you to get there? Where are the hotels and the gas stations? Are there attractions along the way? Planning ahead of time and executing that plan changes drastically depending on where you want to end up. 

A road trip without a destination sounds like a fun and carefree adventure - until you hit your first roadblock. That’s when confusion and frustration set in. Without a clear destination, you might decide it’s not worth the trouble, pull a U-turn, and forget the whole thing. 

The same goes for writing. You’re creating a journey for your viewer, and if you’re not crystal clear about where  you’re taking them, you’ll hit writer’s block after writer’s block.

Why? 

Because everything in the script - the characters, the dialogue, the beats, and the scenes - all serve the same, singular purpose:

To get to the destination in a way that makes sense and satisfies the viewer. 

How many times have you watched a film or a series where the end just didn’t add up? Besides wanting to throw your TV off the balcony, how did that make you feel?

Probably cheated.

Because there's a big difference between an ending you didn't see coming and an ending that came out of nowhere. The best endings can surprise us—even shock us—but once they happen, everything that came before suddenly makes sense. We can trace the road backward and see exactly how we got there.

A bad ending makes us ask, “Where the hell did THAT come from?”

A great ending makes us say, “Oh my God. Of course.”

And that's the difference between an unforgettable story that gives the viewer a big payoff, and one that leaves the audience furious and disappointed.

CASE STUDY: GAME OF THRONES 

For eight seasons, we watched Daenerys Targaryen fight her way toward the Iron Throne. Of course she could be ruthless, and the warning signs that her pursuit of power might eventually consume her were there. So Daenerys becoming a tyrant wasn't necessarily the problem.

The problem was how she got there.

Daenerys had spent much of the series defining herself as a liberator. She freed slaves, punished people she considered oppressors, and consistently distinguished herself from rulers who harmed the innocent. Then, during the battle for King's Landing, the city surrendered. The bells rang. Daenerys had won.

And she burned the city anyway.

Thousands of innocent people—the very kind of powerless people she'd spent years protecting—were suddenly slaughtered by a character who hadn't been convincingly transformed into someone who would choose to do it. 

Could Daenerys have ended up there? Absolutely. The series had planted those seeds years earlier.

But seeds aren't a story. We - the audience - needed to watch them grow.

Instead, the final season raced through that transformation, asking the audience to accept the destination without showing us the journey. And because that journey wasn't fully built, what could’ve been a devastatingly tragic conclusion to Daenerys's story felt like a character suddenly doing a 180 for no reason. 

The problem wasn't necessarily where the writers took Daenerys. The problem was that they hadn't built enough road to get her there. That’s the difference.

And then there was Bran Stark.

After eight seasons watching characters fight, scheme, betray, sacrifice, and die over who would ultimately rule Westeros, the series handed power to a character who had spent much of the story almost entirely removed from that struggle.

Bran's journey had been about something else. His transformation into the Three-Eyed Raven pulled him away from politics and from his own humanity. He wasn't developed as a leader. He didn't build alliances, demonstrate political ambition, inspire people to follow him, or spend the series learning how to govern. In fact, when offered the title of Lord of Winterfell, he rejected it because he no longer considered himself Bran Stark.

But then, in the finale, he's chosen to rule six kingdoms? Where did that come from?

Game of Thrones was overflowing with characters whose stories had been deeply intertwined with leadership and power. Jon, Sansa, Tyrion, Daenerys, and Cersei had all spent years surviving some of the most calculating and ruthless players, learning hard lessons as they fought to survive and secure their own power. It would’ve made sense if any one of those characters ended up on the throne. 

But if Bran was ultimately going to become king, the writers needed to give us a reason to believe that this was where his character had been heading all along. Instead, his rise felt more like a clunky choice made in the writers' room than the natural conclusion of the story we'd been watching. And that's when an ending feels like it came out of nowhere.

“But I can change the destination, can’t I?”

Sure. But not if it means ignoring everything you’ve already written.

If you change the destination halfway through, what’s the audience supposed to do with all the time they’ve already invested? What happens to the clues you planted, the relationships you developed, the promises you made, and the expectations you deliberately created?

You can absolutely discover a better ending while you're writing. Stories evolve. Characters surprise us. Sometimes the destination you originally chose isn't where the story wants to go anymore.

So change it.

But before you do, go back and make sure everything that came before still leads us there. Because your audience doesn't care when you figured out the ending.

They only care that, when they arrive, it feels like this is where the story was taking them from the start. Don’t make your audience pay for the fact that you changed your mind.

CASE STUDY: HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER

Unlike GoT, How I Met Your Mother shows us what can happen when writers become so attached to their original destination that they ignore how the story has developed over time. 

The show's creators had decided from the start that Ted would ultimately end up with Robin. The problem was that the series continued for nine seasons and the characters evolved.

Ted repeatedly learned that he and Robin wanted fundamentally different things, while Robin and Barney's relationship grew into such an important part of the show that the entire final season revolved around their wedding. And after years of anticipation, the show finally introduced Tracy—the Mother—and gave Ted the relationship viewers had been waiting almost a decade to see.

But then the finale killed Tracy, divorced Robin and Barney, and sent Ted back to Robin.

None of those choices were inherently impossible, but they felt off because the writers were still trying to force a destination made for an earlier version of the story. By the time they got to the end, they had to undo much of what the audience had already watched the characters learn, overcome, and become, just to make the original ending work.

That's the danger of zoning out.

If your characters and story evolve in ways you didn't expect, pay attention. You might discover a better ending along the way.

Having a destination keeps you from wandering aimlessly, and knowing when you've outgrown it keeps you from dragging your story backward just to reach it.

On the other hand, if you keep changing it, your story falls apart and you risk losing your audience. 

So what’s the solution? How do you establish a clear ending while also keeping it flexible?

Avoid wasting a ton of time and effort by starting with a few clear destinations that could all work given your characters, the conflict, and the setting. In other words:

Give yourself options, but not an open road.

Think of the movie Clue. In the 1985 film, the filmmakers created three different endings, each revealing a different solution to the murders; they all make sense, and none of them feels disconnected from the rest of the plot. The characters, motives, clues, and events were constructed with enough flexibility that multiple destinations remained possible without betraying the story.

That's the secret sauce; give yourself options, BUT:

Make sure every option belongs to the same story.

Of course, choosing the destination is easier when you’re clear about what your story is trying to say, so we’ll cover universal story themes next.

If you live in the NYC area and would like to hear your work-in-progress cold-read by local actors in front of a live audience, go to thewritersroomnyc.com and join us.

‘Til then, happy writing! 

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