That’s…kind of a hard question to answer, really, mostly because I’m not sure it’s the *right* question. In trying to come up with an answer to this, I feel really puled between two very different feelings about the stories I write:
- Every story I’ve written, I think, has the ending that it needed to have in that particular moment. In a broader sense, no, every story has the ending that I think it needed–or put even more strongly, I think every story resolves in the only way it could have done so.
- Running completely counter to the first, at the same time, every story, as I start writing, feels like it has an infinite number of possible permutations of elements. Probably the greatest source of writer’s block, for me, is trying to decide and settle on one particular path for the story to go down, because every option feels worthy of pursuit.
Those aren’t particularly easy to reconcile, and they probably seem contradictory, but they aren’t. Once I’ve narrowed down the potential options in number 2 to the story I decide on writing, the ending of the story is pretty heavily determined from that decision, hence why I also feel number 1.
That said, I’ve had stories which I settled on, but which didn’t turn out particularly well, making me wish I could have gone back and picked a different sort of option at the beginning, but most of those stories never get posted as complete stories–they either get abandoned towards the end and posted as a sketch of some sort, or wind up in the unfinished story pile, which I keep promising I’ll get back to at some point.
I don’t know if this is a satisfactory answer to the question, really, but that’s as close to the truth of my process as I can, at the moment. A good example of this would probably be “Rick and the Beast”, as a story I’ve started, but which petered out without any clear development, and so it has ended up mostly abandoned.
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Bracken's Corner 