As an aspiring writer, I have of course experienced the frustration of rejection letters from agents and publishers. Having come maddeningly close to actual publication a couple of times, it is all too easy for me to moan about the traditional publishing industry. Again and again one hears complaints about it being a closed shop, about it being who you know, no-one being prepared to take a risk on a new author, etc, etc…

However, at the television company where I work, part of my job is to sift through the TV equivalent of a “slush pile” or “unsolicited” submissions of films, documentaries and other programmes hopeful fledgling production companies or individuals wish to have us broadcast. Said programmes generally range from the mediocre to utter rubbish, and only a very small percentage of them are remotely of interest. All too often I issue the dreaded standard rejection letter, so I know what it is like at the other end of this process.

Indeed, on one occasion, a particular individual was so incensed by the rejection that he turned up at the studios demanding to speak to me personally so I could explain myself. Needless to say, the gentleman was escorted from the premises, but the incident made me more sympathetic to those who had perhaps on occasion rejected my work. Besides, perhaps they had a point. Looking back over the last decade or so, I can see how much my work has improved – hopefully to the point where rejection may not be forthcoming to such a degree.

Literary agents employ armies of “readers” to sift their material, and as someone who sifts television programmes I know this is not an easy task. Just as there is a wealth of bad programming out there, I am sure the same is true of writing. At any rate, agents and publishers are not the devil incarnate. If they reject your writing, they just might have a point.

Maybe.

I recently had an avid discussion with a writer friend of mine about whether or not it is important to know your ending before you begin writing a story. My friend believes you can discover the ending organically by beginning a story and seeing where the characters take you.

Obviously there isn’t necessarily a right or wrong answer to this, but for me, when I plan a story, I almost always begin with the ending and work backwards. The ending is what occurs to me first. Only then do I figure out how the characters got there and why.

My friend finds this method restrictive, claiming it forces characters into the narrative rather than allowing them to create it. But again, I dispute this. Working backwards from an ending means I devise characters that will realistically end up in that kind of situation. I will concede that it is possible to write a character biography and discover a story (including the ending) in doing so. But I simply cannot write a story with no idea where it is headed. I always have to know the ending.

For me the process is typically thus:

1)      Think of an ending sufficiently amazing to justify the time and energy needed for everything that follows in the points below.

2)      Write a brief plot outline explaining how this ending was reached.

3)      Create character profiles of people who would find themselves in the kind of story outlined in point 2.

4)      Research the subject.

5)      Write a detailed chapter outline.

6)      Write the novel.

7)      Rewrite the novel (this step is repeated as much as necessary).

Sometimes 2) and 3) may switch round, but not that often. I have never discovered the ending of a novel by starting to write and seeing where the characters take me. I have occasionally tried this approach with short stories, but on those occasions the end product was rambling and aimless. Without a clear idea of what happens at the end, I get hopelessly lost.

In short, for me at least, it is absolutely essential to know my ending before I start writing.

WARNING: this article contains potential spoilers for Atonement, The Remains of the Day, The Godfather Part II, Great Expectations, Romeo and Juliet, To Kill a Mockingbird, Life of Pi, No Country for Old Men, and Mockingjay.

Some people claim to only like stories with happy endings. Perhaps they think along the same lines as Burgess Meredith’s playwright character in the 1981 Clash of the Titans: “Real life is tragic enough without my having to write about it.”

However, when questioned closely, I generally find what people mean when they say they don’t like unhappy endings is that they don’t like badly conceived unhappy endings.

Atonement features what I consider to be an ill-conceived unhappy ending. Wiping out the romantic lead in a bombing raid simply isn’t satisfying. The incident acts as a tragic deus ex machina. It may well be that in real life that’s what could have happened, but the very best storytelling should be about what is dramatically satisfying. Sacrificing the right ending on the altar of realism is never a good idea. I for one think the lovers in Atonement ought to have been reunited in some way, shape or form.

On a similar note, I think the unambiguously happy ending of David Lean’s version of Great Expectations is better than the bleak ending Charles Dickens originally intended. After all Pip and Estella have gone through, somehow one feels they deserve to be free from the ghosts of the past and start again together.

Of course, it is easy to write a happy ending: just give your protagonist everything they want. But this isn’t necessarily right either.

How, for example, should The Godfather Part II end? Michael Corleone forgives his wife and brother, goes straight and retires from organised crime? How should The Remains of the Day end? Stevens and Miss Kenton get married? How should Romeo and Juliet end? The star-crossed lovers live happily ever after? How should To Kill a Mockingbird end? Tom gets acquitted?

If these stories had happy endings their premises would be emasculated; themes of power, corruption and family curses in The Godfather, wasted lives in The Remains of the Day, the feuds and reconciliation in Romeo and Juliet and the institutional racism exposed in To Kill a Mockingbird. A happy ending in each of these cases would render the stories nonsensical, phony and morally dubious.

In other cases, a more ambiguous ending is appropriate. Some do not care for ambiguity, but in the right context it can greatly enrich a story. Life of Pi, No Country for Old Men and Blade Runner are all good examples of this.

Sometimes the most satisfying endings are a mixture of happy and sad. A recent example would be Mockingjay, the finale of the Hunger Games trilogy. At the climax, for one awful moment it appears machiavellian President Coin and her resistance army are going to condemn the children of the capital to participate in a final Hunger Games in reprisal – thus proving that they have learnt nothing in their struggle against President Snow and his government. But then – at the very moment Katniss is supposed to publically execute Snow – she turns her arrow on Coin instead, killing her in revenge for allowing her younger sister to die as collateral damage in the rebel assault on the capital.

This ending is brilliant because 1) Snow and his oppressive government are overthrown and 2) the moral of the story – ie the inherent futility of vengeance and reprisals – is so powerfully delivered. Yet it works superbly on an ironic and tragic level too. Initially Katniss volunteered for the Hunger Games to take the place of her younger sister Primrose and thus preserve her life. This act ultimately leads to the uprising and successful deposing of the tyrannical Snow. Yet Primrose ultimately dies anyway, due to an order given by Coin who considers her death an acceptable loss. The ending of the Hunger Games trilogy is emotionally resonant, morally correct and hugely satisfying.

Ultimately, just as a well-earned happy ending will cause the reader/viewer to punch the air in triumph, so a tragic end can be truthful, beautiful and moving. As long as it is the right ending…

Know your subject is advice often given to writers. The writer should know every single detail of their characters and the world they inhabit – not just stuff that will obviously crop up in the narrative, such as childhood trauma, but the banal stuff too: what they eat at breakfast, a typical working day, bad habits, catchphrases, and so on. It may be that none of this background makes the final draft, but readers have an intuition; a sixth sense that tells them whether they are in the hands of a writer who knows their subject or not.

In Uncle Flynn, I wrote an elaborate backstory for Max’s father, much of which was revealed in the final act. But I cut the entire chapter because it took the focus away from Max and his character arc. However, the dialogue that remains contains enough hints and oblique references that allow for a certain degree of reading between the lines. This ultimately strengthens the final scenes with Max and his father a great deal, but had I not written the backstory, these undertones would not be present.

To give another example, the antagonist in Children of the Folded Valley – a novel I hope to publish in the future – has a very detailed history that informs his later decisions. However, I deliberately excluded this background because it undermined how evil he seemed in the eyes of other characters. No one would ever think they were a villain (in fiction or reality), but their actions will always appear without context to the protagonist unless they are specifically explained by the antagonist. In this case, such an explanation would have been out of character, and since the novel is a first person narrative, the villain retains his cruel core throughout. However, what this villain does has been thought through in great detail, and is based on many things, including what happened in his past. I could not have written the story without knowing this, even if this knowledge is not ultimately passed on to the reader.

In addition to characters, it is vital to know the world of one’s writing in every detail whether contemporary, historic or fantastic. Historic settings obviously require research, but the temptation with contemporary settings is to “wing it”. Personally I think this is a huge mistake. Even if a plot has a contemporary setting, knowledge of that country, city, town or village is vital. If, say, the village is made up, the general area probably won’t be, so again local knowledge is vital. Those little details add critical authenticity. Obviously one can play fast and loose with geography (I often do), but it is vital to know all that can be known about the setting – sometimes including its history even if it isn’t a historical piece.

Of course, the final product may not contain all this information. In the case of Uncle Flynn I excised a good deal of references to local villages and Dartmoor landmarks simply because most readers wouldn’t have a clue what I was referring to. But knowledge of these local places was vital when planning the story, and in many cases they were a direct inspiration for plot events.

If creating a fantasy world, a deep inner knowledge of characters, places and history is even more critically important. For instance, JK Rowling wrote a history of every single building in Diagon Alley. “Winging it” in a fantasy setting is even more dangerous, as the reader will sense the thinness of knowledge and disbelief will no longer be suspended. I have written a few fantasy books both for children and adults that have been taking shape for a number of years now. The reason they have taken so long – and the reason I am still working on them – is the sheer level of planning needed in terms of characters, family trees, histories, geography, languages, cultures, metaphysics and so on needed in the planning stages. Much of this material will never see the light of day (although for some of these books there will be supplements), but again I know if I cut corners, the novels will suffer.

The principle is also true in film. In preparing Jessica Chastain’s character for Zero Dark Thirty screenwriter Mark Boal will have written extensive character biographies. He will have shared this information with Jessica Chastain, even though none of it appears in the film. However, anyone watching the film will sense the depth of the character, even though the plot offers no distractions at all from her single-minded quest to get Bin Laden. Her character – and the film – is all the stronger for its lack of subplots, family background, love interest and so on. But I guarantee you it will all be known by Mark Boal and the director Kathryn Bigelow, and Chastain’s performance is informed by this knowledge.

One final point: I’d say a good ninety percent of story preparation is deciding what not to write, what won’t be included. Ninety percent of ideas range from mediocre to rubbish, and should be destroyed. It is worth mining through these ideas to find the gems that will form the story. On occasion, someone will read my work and say “I like your choices”. That is the ultimate compliment, because it means the person concerned understands the process of boiling a story down to its strongest, essential elements – typically six months of agony condensed into a novel that can be read in a concentrated stint of a day or two.