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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48039
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

I'm largely not a discovery writer myself, but many --perhaps most --of my favorite authors are discovery writers. It seems like **discovery writers almost universally struggle with endings** --for obvious reasons --and I've read my fair share of horribly disappointing endings to otherwise great books. In my opinion, the biggest crime committed by discovery writers when ending their books is rushing to try to tie everything up neatly. Many of my favorite Diana Wynne Jones books fall into this trap, where a compelling, absolutely magical story suddenly collapses into a incomprehensible, illogical mix of _deus ex machina_ and gobblety-gook. But even when discovery writers do find ways to solve their layered mysteries logically and convincingly, the ends of their books often seem flat and lifeless as compared to the vitality of the rest of the story.

In my opinion, the discovery writer who has best solved this problem is Haruki Murakami. True, his endings are often illogical, impossible to understand, and filled with dangling plotlines, but --at least in his mature work --they aren't disappointing, and they don't seem like they belong to a whole different book. I think the secret is that his endings have **emotional and psychological resonance**. As with dreams, if they make psychological sense, gaps in logic and resolution don't destroy the power of the narrative. Murakami's surreal discontinuities can seem superficially laughable, but the psychological acuity of his storytelling has made him a global literary superstar.

I'd recommend you do put on your plotter hat, just for a moment, and just for the end of your book. But don't waste your time trying to figure out the _logic_ of the plot, or the answers to all your unsolved questions. Instead, analyze your story, like a critic, in terms of overall themes, and **the story arc of your characters**. What do they need, emotionally and psychologically, in order to have a complete story? Find a way to bring them to that point, and let the rest of it go.

Original score: 4