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Showing posts from May, 2014

The Perfect Ending to a Perfect Story (Hopefully)

We've invested a lot of time and energy into writing the perfect story, only to be faced with creating the perfect ending. We want our conflict wrapped up with a nice, neat bow, but we don't want to cheat our readers. My prime example of this faux pas is the Hunger Games series. I loved about 2 1/2 books of this series, and was furious at the last half of the 3rd book. Suzanne Collins broke every promise she had made to her reader, and she broke many of the beginning rules of writing. I'll try not to spoil the story for those of you who haven't read it yet, and if you haven't read the series, you should...at least as a case study. But basically, Collins wrote her character into a corner (which is good practice, by the way), and then gave up trying to find a logical, believable way to get that character out of the corner (which is NOT a good practice). Plus her main character did not actively solve the conflict driving the entire series, and the difficulties in th