Writing Excuses 9.16: Coming up with a New Ending Halfway Through

What do you do when the ending you've planned won't be emotionally satisfying? You know, when you've discovered during the course of writing the story that you're making promises to the reader that this particular ending won't keep? Mary talks about her recent experience with this exact problem in an as-yet-unpublished project. Howard talks about how he had to come up with a new set of concluding moments for Longshoreman of the Apocalypse (which you can read for free here.) Dan weighs the difficulties he's having with a current project, and how he had to brainstorm what the story was supposed to be accomplishing, rather than simply what the plot was. We examine the various tools that we use to solve this problem, which probably offers you some motivation to keep filling your own toolbox.