Happy November to everyone. I am thrilled to bring you a brand new guest blogger….Please welcome autor Courtney Breazile to the blog…..Courtney it is a pleasure to have you stop by today…Welcome..

Today Courtney will be talking about difficult endings…..

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My difficult ending

            I am not the type of writer that plans everything out.  For me this is the creative process I go through to write a story.  I usually begin with a vague plot idea or a great opening scene, and I proceed from there.

            The endings of my stories are usually as unplanned as everything else, I tend to just look at my screen at a point and say “wow I think that’s it.”  And there is the ending of my story.  It’s worked so far, and I have felt good about the endings and the stories I’ve produced.

            Recently my creative process slipped and I was blank to what I wanted to do with the ending of my story.  I couldn’t decide between two very different endings for my heroine and it was a struggle because, never having dealt with that before, I didn’t know what to do.  I almost went into panic mode.

            The first thing I did was try and force the idea to settle in my mind, that didn’t work.  Then I asked around, and got various suggestions like “It was all a dream” (from a twitter friend) and “Send in a dragon” (from my 4 year old daughter.)  As wonderfully helpful as those suggestions were, I couldn’t use them and I was still undecided.

            It took me a while to figure out what the real problem was.  It wasn’t that I didn’t know which ending I wanted to use, it was that I was unsure of myself for wanting to use an ending that wasn’t boy and girl live happily ever after.  I feared that readers would not like it because it was unfinished in a way, it doesn’t tell how the heroine is going to marry and live forever with some wonderful man.

            The more I thought about that the more I solidified my desire to write the ending I liked and felt needed to be told in the story.  It isn’t a sad or unfinished ending, it is a realistic ending and definitely a happy for now, ending.  To me it fits and it doesn’t make the story a disappointment, but that is really for the readers to decide anyway.

            So the lesson I learned with this was that if I start to try and force myself to write a story I don’t really want to write, I will be stuck, blocked, and tortured with indecision.  I know I have to stay true to my muse and my story, otherwise what I write, if I manage to write at all, will be unsatisfying for both myself and my readers.