Whether you’re like me and don’t outline your stories or you outline them to the last detail, if you don’t know how your story ends, you have a lot of head-scratching coming. Lately not knowing how my story ends has bothered me a great deal. I think I have that great hook of a beginning, leading to a nice conflict in the story’s middle game, and then… I’m stuck.

Adapting and hybridizing a couple of pieces of advice I’ve read — mostly from outliners — I tried a new approach. Somewhere around 25,000, with the story well underway and with a good understanding of what makes my characters tick, I asked myself how the conflict would escalate naturally. I’m sure it doesn’t always work this well, but in fifteen minutes — no kidding! — I knew how my story ends after — count them — five critical escalation points.

These critical points derive from key decisions my protagonist has made leading up to his current situation and from stresses other characters make him face. The next decision my character makes based on his motivations and his personality drives a further escalation in the plot. This repeats until the laws of Physics and logic allow no further escalation which means… That’s where the story needs to end — or where it starts to end — hopefully with a bang that I’ll resolve through a well composed resolution.

Believe it or not I sketched all this inside one page, with double-spaced 12 point font. No, it isn’t a full-up outline, but it lives up to the same spirit and fulfills the same purpose. Best of all, what a relief it is to know I have an ending. Now without fear of hitting a writer’s block wall, I can enjoy the journey to my newly discovered ending.