When Oscar Hammerstein wrote “Let’s start at the very beginning // A very good place to start” he was talking about teaching children to sing, not writing a novel. Sometimes the beginning is the very worst place to start, so in this ‘cast the Writing Excuses crew starts at the end.

Dan leads with a reminder that we should all watch his five-part lecture on story structure, and then hits a couple of the high points in his process. Brandon points out that he and Dan both start in the same way, even though Dan usually discovery-writes his way to the selected ending, and Brandon typically outlines towards it in advance of putting chapters down. Unsurprisingly, Howard starts in the same place.

So what are the problems with working backwards? How do we prevent those things from happening? What are some great things about working backwards? How can we ensure that those happen every time?

That’s the first half of the ‘cast. The second half is a right treat, as you get to listen to Brandon, Dan, and Howard attempt to brainstorm a great ending from which they can work backwards to a beginning. Producer Jordo provides a pair of headlines as prompts, including programmable matter, Harley Davidson motorcycles, and a thrown puppy.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Furies of Calderon: Codex Alera Book 1, by Jim Butcher — a book that Brandon tells us was written when somebody dared Jim Butcher to build epic fantasy around Pokémon.

Writing Prompt: What’s the character arc for our mathematical analyst biker dude? Yes, you’ll have to listen to the ‘cast in order to figure this prompt out.

Sound Effect of the Week: George Jetson’s Harley

Weekly Feature You Won’t See Every Week: Sound Effect of the Week.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: Many writers start by figuring out the ending, then working towards it. Be careful about telegraphing the endings too much. You can always turn an too-obvious ending into an early reveal distraction.

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses. Now go write.
[Howard] 15 minutes long because that was the end. Wait…
[Dan] And also the beginning.
[Brandon] We’re going to talk about endings. This is season four episode 28. I’m Brandon.
[Dan] I’m Dan.
[Howard] I’m Howard.
[Brandon] And we’re going to talk about how to work backwards. Specifically, we’re going to talk about brainstorming endings and working backwards to a beginning from that ending. Well, what do we mean? Dan, this is your process. Tell us about it.
[Dan] Okay. Well, this is what I do. If you’ve seen my story structure thing that’s up on my website, [see http://www.fearfulsymmetry.net/?p=405] this is essentially what I’m talking about. When I sit down to do a story, I will first of all figure out what I want the story to be about, so that I have some tools to work with. And then figure out what I want the ending to be, which will let me know where to start. Because based on the ending that you want, the beginning is going to be completely different.
[Brandon] I’ve found that for me when I’m writing, my best endings come when I know what they are very far ahead of time. I’m an outliner, though… it’s really kind of interesting to me that both Dan and I.. Dan who does a lot of multi-drafting, a lot of discovery writing, and I who do a lot of outlining… quite a bit of it… both approach endings the same way, which is we know what our ending is first, we figure it out, and then we work toward it. Dan discovery writes his way that direction. I follow point by point that I’ve built in my outline for developing characters and bringing across plot points. But we both point… target toward the ending. Howard, do you ever start with your ending?
[Howard] Yep. I… sorry, that was way too short an answer, wasn’t it?
[Brandon] Well, you know. 15 seconds long…
[Howard] I was just casting my mind… yeah, because I’m in a hurry and not very smart. The last year or so of Schlock Mercenary, I’ve been telling much shorter stories as part of a longer story. I’d been thinking about how much do I know about the ending that I still haven’t written, when what’s much more interesting is the endings that I’ve already put in place. The ending of the Credomar storyline, the ending of the Barsoom Circus, the ending of the Mall Cop storyline. All three of those, before I started writing any of them, I had… I came up with the idea for the setting, and I thought, okay, now what is the fun ending for that? So I came up with it.
[Brandon] But you’re looking for the fun.
[Howard] Well, yeah, I was looking for the fun. I was looking for the entertaining ending… what would be a fun, shortish story to tell? Then I worked backward from that point. Because I’m working in a short format, the foreshadowing and the… there is a limited amount of foreshadowing and a much more limited amount of red herrings I can throw out. I’ve just got to be much more compressed.
[Brandon] Now, you mention those two things. One of the problems with working backwards like we do is that sometimes you might telegraph your endings way too much. Meaning if you are driving so powerfully towards this ending, it may become very obvious to your reader what’s going to happen, which is not necessarily a good thing. Now, in some genres it can be. There are a lot of genres that will very much telegraph what’s going to happen, and the readers enjoy following that telegraphing along, and the twists and turns are made in a different way. The books that I like to read, and the books that I like to write, don’t do this. They telegraph sometimes to make those promises. But in other ways, you aren’t necessarily sure where the book is going to be going, you just have a feeling that it is going somewhere. Dan, do you ever have troubles with this? Do you worry that you’re telegraphing too much?
[Dan] Sometimes. Partly because our writing group is very similar. That’s one of the common things that will come up is… someone will read a chapter and then they’ll come to the group and say, “This is where I think the story is heading.” Which means that that is not where I want it to go. That’s just how we all tend to think, and so that, I’m sure, colors the way that we write. If I think that the ending is becoming too obvious, then one of two things has to happen. Either I need to back off on the hints, or I need to take it one step further, and surprise you with a different, better ending after we hit the one you saw coming.
[Brandon] A lot of times those telegraphs… those hints that people are picking up… if too many people are picking it up, sometimes you do just need to sit down and say, “Okay, what’s the next level?” And change your ending to allow what your original ending was going to be to be your diversion. I’ve actually done that before. It works fantastically well. Now, of course, to make that work, you need to add in even more subtlety and foreshadowing to make the other things work. I’ve talked about a writer before being kind of like a magician with smoke and mirrors. A  lot of a great ending depends on your ability to make those smoke and mirrors work. To distract your reader with things that they are sure are going to happen, and then with the things that they are kind of thinking will happen, and then completely surprise them with something that they didn’t see coming at them, but with pieces of the other things that they were expecting.
[Dan] Well, and that’s such a difficult balance because both of those are wonderful reactions. When a reader says, “I totally saw that coming, that was awesome.” Or when they say, “I never saw that coming, that was awesome.”
[Brandon] The best reaction I’ve gotten, the ones that make me really feel good, is when someone starts to get it like about the page before. Where a page before, they have the awakening, and they have the [whoosh] moment where they say… and then on the next page, it comes true. They have figured it out. They are a smart reader.
[Howard] That’s perfect, because…
[Dan] And yet they didn’t get enough time to get bored with the idea.
[Brandon] Yep. And it just hits them, and it’s exciting. That’s what I love as a reader, I can see that happening, when I’m picking up on a book and I get it just right before and have just a moment of either horror or surprise or awe before it hits.
[Howard] See, the problem I’ve got is that I think I am writing that kind of fiction, where you’re going to get it just before the next installment, but that means that you’ve got four days or two weeks of waiting and so…
[Brandon] That’s true. Poor Howard.
[Howard] So people sometimes will end up bored. I find that… uh, nobody ever gets bored reading Schlock Mercenary. Forget I ever said that. The forums… somebody was talking about how they thought this and such was going to happen at the end of a particular story. I read that and had two reactions. Reaction number one was, “Boy, you’re wrong.” Reaction number two was, “But the tone of voice you’re using as you describe this makes me feel like you’re going to be disappointed by being wrong. What am I doing wrong that I feel worried that you are going to be disappointed?” It’s a horrible, horrible mental place for me to be in, which is why I’ve stopped reading those sorts of posts because they really don’t help me.
[Brandon] You’ve never read online somewhere where someone comes up with an idea for an ending that is just way better than yours and you think, “Oh, I should totally use that?”
[Howard] That has never happened. I’ve had some… people have come up with some cool ideas, but they haven’t been endings that could work for the books that I’m currently writing.
[Brandon] All right. We’re going to do our…
[Howard] I’ll steal them later.

[Brandon] We’re going to do our… be lump da lump.. we’re going to do our book of the week. I’m going to do it this time. I just finished reading Jim Butcher’s first Codex Alera book, and I absolutely loved it. It was a great book. It’s called Furies of the Calderon. The reason I liked it is I really liked his use of the magic system. I also like going into it knowing that he’d written the book half on a dare, to make Pokemon cool in a fantasy world.
[Howard] That’s sweet.
[Brandon] Yeah. It’s based on people who bond with these elemental creatures that give them powers and they use that… they can fight each other or the… anyway, it’s a very good epic fantasy. The fascinating thing about it for me is that it actually is plotted like a thriller, so when you read it you’ll be very interested… it’s interesting to watch an epic fantasy play out as a thriller. It covers the space of about a day. It reads kind of like a Pratchett narrative as the pacing goes, but instead of humor, you’ve got the epic fantasy. So I highly recommend it. You can go to audiblepodcast.com/excuse and start your 15 day free trial. If you do download a book, you support Writing Excuses. So thank you very much.

[Brandon] All right. We’re going to do something weird for the second half of this podcast. We want to try and do this, meaning we want to show you how we brainstorm coming up with a great and interesting ending for a story. So we’re going to have Producer Jordo throw two of his random odd new story ideas at us, and we are going to try to turn those into a story very quickly in seven minutes with characters and then come up with a great ending that we could then work toward which we will then talk about. This may fail miserably…
[Dan] Be forewarned, gentle listeners.
[Brandon] If it does, then we’ll cut the podcast here, and it will be nine minutes long. All right. Producer Jordo, give it to us.
[Jordo] All righty. Programmable matter could lead to universal toolbox.
[Brandon] Programmable matter could lead to universal toolbox?
[Jordo] Oh, you want both?
[Brandon] Yup.
[Howard] Please.
[Jordo] All right. They don’t go together. German throws puppy at Hells Angels bikers, then flees on bulldozer.
[Dan] that’s obviously a case of the programmable matter going wrong and producing a puppy instead of a knife.
[Howard] That’s… wait a second… that’s just… that’s… yeah, that’s… you’ve… we’ve got a magic system right there. We’ve got programmable matter where you have the ability to disguise a thing as another thing.
[Brandon] Right. You can program matter to change into something else at a given time over a given place. All right.
[Dan] And we also have it going catastrophically wrong. You ask it for a knife and a Harley, and it gives you a puppy and a bulldozer.
[Brandon] OK. So is it self-aware programmable matter or is there some bug in the system that we don’t understand that you try to program something and it gives you…
[Howard] There’s no… see, that maybe your ending right there, is that it’s glitchy, it’s going bad, you know, this tool is going bad, and it is self-aware.
[Brandon] OK. There is ending possibility number one.
[Dan] There’s a cool reveal.
[Brandon] I’ve seen that done enough times that I’m worried about it.
[Howard] OK, so let’s make that an early reveal.
[Brandon] OK. There, we back it up. People assume that it’s gone sentient, but something else is going on. We need a character. Who is our character in the world of programmable matter that is… let’s back up. Is it going wrong randomly or is it going wrong in an expected way? Can you anticipate it?
[Dan] I am intrigued by the idea that it is going wrong seemingly random, but there is a pattern to it.
[Brandon] OK. Secret pattern.
[Dan] That there is no reason for the objects you request to keep coming out as puppies and yet, you keep getting things along those same lines.
[Brandon] All right. So there’s some sort of mathematical or confusing thing going on, that you’ll ask for a light bulb and instead you get a pomegranate. But there is some reasoning that you have to figure out. So our main character therefore is pattern recognition… survey mathematician, a statistician, maybe?
[Howard] Yeah. He’s a statistician. He’s sort of a… to borrow from Tom Clancy, he’s your Jack Ryan sort of character. He’s an analyst, he’s a data cruncher, and he sees patterns.
[Dan] He’s a civil engineer.
[Brandon] I’m going to throw a wrinkle into him to use the original premise and say he’s also a Hells Angel. Why is he a Hells Angel? Is this a weekend warrior sort of thing or is he a failed mathematician who decided to go biking on the road and escape the corporate society, or who is he?
[Howard] I like the second one.
[Brandon] OK. All right, we’ve got…
[Howard] I think he’s a collegiate post-doctorate whatever mathematician who has thrown it all away because in the light of where society has gone with this programmable matter, he’s just better off on his bike [garbled — out on the dunes?]
[Dan] On the road.
[Brandon] OK. All right. We’ve got someone who either invented it or maybe for some reason he’s vitally important to what’s going on here. Everything starts to break loose…
[Dan] I’m assuming from this premise that we have a fairly widespread technology then? This is not one guy or one company has created programmable matter, but it’s everywhere?
[Brandon] And it suddenly goes on the fritz. Suddenly…
[Howard] No. In terms of making it ubiquitous, it’s ubiquitous in the same way that as of right now, iPads are ubiquitous. It’s brand-new consumer tech. It’s like the headline originally said, it’s the universal toolbox. It’s a box, and you reach into it, and you pull out a block, and you get a thing based on what you key in. And that starts going wrong.
[Dan] Not everybody has it, but you probably know someone who does.
[Brandon] Yeah. All those snobby, early adapter Mac types that… I mean… I love you all… never mind.
[Howard] Except these are snobby early adapter Craftsman tool types.
[Dan] The ultimate toolbox would be anything… it doesn’t have to be a screwdriver.
[Brandon] Right. You could… I mean, you could be programming yourself a… I want a Doberman or… whatever you want.
[Dan] And if it is producing puppies for no reason, then at least there won’t be a food shortage.
[Howard] Oh my gosh. What happens if you eat what it makes? Have we thought about that?
[Brandon] Can you reprogram it inside…
[Howard] Is the matter programmable or is it…
[Dan] Does it convert back?
[Brandon] I say you can program it with radio waves wirelessly, so someone could eat it, and it would remain what it is until someone hits it with the right radio waves and it changes into something else inside of you. And suddenly there is a live puppy in your esophagus.
[Howard] The iPad Craftsman tool diet. You eat an ice cream… you have a big old ice cream, and then you turn it into lettuce in your gut.
[Brandon] Oh, wow. That’s genius. We need to trademark that… patent that.
[Howard] I just figured out my application for it. OK, but we need an ending.
[Brandon] Oh, no… see, that’s also explosives… military, you could turn it into a grenade.
[Howard] It’s an assassination tool. Here, have some ice cream…
[Jordo] Puppy flavored ice cream.
[Dan] It’s also a grenade.

[Brandon] Okay. Well, we need our ending. People assume that it’s gone sentient. They’re wrong. That’s a red herring. In order to make that work, we need to make it… someone credible advance that theory, and have several things that lead them to come up… lead them to assume it. That’s our kind of handwaving, but one of the things we’re going to do is leave some flaws, that once the main character points out the flaws are, they become obvious. That throw… tosses down that theory. So what is really going on here? What’s our ending, what’s our climax?
[Dan] Okay. Let’s build toward it. Let’s say for example that some of these early hints that we are building that lead people towards the intelligence idea is not so much that it is artificial, but that a pre-existing intelligence was grafted into it. One of the scientists who worked on it — who happened to have a deep and abiding love for puppies and bulldozers — they think that his consciousness they now be inside of whatever central hub is controlling this technology, which is leading them to think, “Oh, that would explain these patterns.” Then it turns out that the patterns are actually based on something else… Howard?
[Howard] Well, you said central hub. That’s fascinating. It could be that one of our reveals is that these kits that are being distributed to people, which you think are self-contained, are not in fact self-contained. That in order for your programmable matter to work, it has to have a connection to the central hub, and something has gone wrong at the central hub that the average consumer didn’t know was there. So then you’ve got sort of your insidious corporate conspiracy whatever which can also be a red herring.
[Dan] Of course, the central hub is a secret because they’re using it as spyware to monitor you and your choice of programmed matter.
[Brandon] See, what I’m going to… the way I build this is… first assumption that characters in the world would make is that it’s on the fritz randomly.
[Howard] Yup. It’s buggy.
[Brandon] Then they would start to see a conspiracy… they would move into some sort of conspiracy, and then maybe even that whole sentience thing. In the end, I would want to… if we’re going to do this wirelessly, I would want to tie into somehow radio waves… specifically types… certain types of music with certain types of beeps are creating certain types of creations when you push the button. So if Ricky Martin happens to be playing when you push the button, you get puppies. And it…
[Dan] No wonder everyone is getting puppies.
[Howard] You just Rick rolled our book.
[Brandon] Yeah. Rick asked me to…
[Howard] That’s actually a great ending… for a book that came out last year.
[Brandon] It’s a time traveling book, and so therefore that’s your surprise ending.
[Howard] 2009 called. They want their ending back.
[Brandon] No. I think it would be interesting if it were partially something random, but if it were also something man-made, and so you could… your random seed then is what music happens to be passing through at the time.

[Howard] Okay. Is there a character arc for our biker dude?
[Brandon] Yes. But I don’t think we have enough time. Dan… um… oh, writing prompt… What is the character arc for our biker dude?
[Dan] Writing prompt. That is a great writing prompt.
[Brandon] We planned that all along, and was our twist ending.
[Dan] And we went back and foreshadowed it in the beginning of the podcast.
[Howard] 15 minutes long because you need to write about a motorcycle, and it’s actually 18 minutes in.
[Brandon] All right. Well. There you go. This has been Writing Excuses. Next time, we promise not to throw any puppies at bulldozers.