How to Write a Novel Ending They Won't Guess! - Hackney and Jones Writers and Publishers

This is a quick trick to help you write an awesome novel ending.

Do you find it difficult to come up with an ending for your book?

It seems to be even harder to be able to pull off that same ending without the reader suspecting, doesn’t it?

On top of that, you can’t see HOW you can get from the beginning through to the end…

If you struggle with that, keep reading…

We are Hackney and Jones, authors of fiction and non-fiction books.

We are bringing you a cool trick for how you can create an ending that your readers don’t see coming.

I discovered this trick by watching a lot of crime dramas, especially ones that end with a whopper!

I don’t know about you, but I hate it when I’ve invested loads of time in a series and then the ending is ridiculous, or I saw it coming.

Do you feel the same?

I’ve discovered a simple way of how they seem to pull it off.

I wanted to put it in an easy-to-use strategy for you.

First- Come up with some ideas for an ending that would be the worst thing to happen to one of your characters.

Make it big, make it shocking.

Play around and brainstorm, so don’t worry too much.

This example is from our crime workbook – How to Write a Winning Fiction Book Outline for Crime.

You can find it on Amazon by CLICKING HERE.

My example here is in the crime genre, but we have included all the main genres.

The worst thing that can happen at the end of this story, is Meg, Alice’s mother, killed Sophie (who is a child).

Meg is a school teacher.

A school teacher is supposed to be trustworthy and nice, so the fact is that if you’re a mother and a school teacher, and then go on to kill a child, well…that’s horrendous – and shocking.

Another idea could be Alice, who is Sophie’s best friend, killed Sophie because she was protecting somebody else.

Or lastly, Ben, who is Alice’s dad, killed Sophie after an obsession with her. He’s a doctor and has been prescribing medication she doesn’t need. Sophie’s threatened to expose him which is Ben’s motive.

I picked option 3 as my ending because I thought it’d be more dramatic and dark.

To keep my readers from suspecting Ben, I need to make the beginning the complete opposite.

When you watch a movie or drama, how it starts at the beginning, if it’s written well, is not going to be how it happens at the end.

We just do the complete opposite.

For my example, in the end, Ben is the one who killed Sophie.

So at the very beginning, we want it to be that Ben pretty much ignores Sophie and throws himself into his job.

He’s a doctor and everyone loves him and finds him very charming.

But secretly, he’s obsessed with Sophie.

If you read the rest of the worksheets in the workbook, you’ll know what I mean.

That is essentially how to come up with an ending.

Come up with something shocking for the end and do the complete opposite for the beginning.

We can go one step further with act two, or the middle part.

I think of this as changing the mood.

How do we get from act one to act three?

Well, we start to change Ben’s character a bit. He starts to get a bit more irate with the police investigation. He starts snapping and acting suspiciously.

But is he covering for somebody?

Is he protecting somebody, his daughter or his wife maybe?

How can we show that he gets irate? He starts to snap and he wouldn’t normally do that. That’s out of his character.

We can go one step further by adding another little bit of a plot twist.

Ben could frame his wife, Meg, for the murder.

How do you do that?

You can start dropping in conversations where he starts speaking with the police to say, “Do you know what? I wasn’t sure where my wife was at the time of this murder. She did seem a little bit like she didn’t like this Sophie for some reason.”

That is, in a nutshell, how you can not only come up with an idea for an ending, but how you can actually make it happen where your readers don’t suspect it.

This is a really basic plan. Our ‘How to Write a Winning Fiction Book Outline Workbook’ goes into so much more detail.

Don’t think, “Oh, okay. This is brilliant, but how would I still start and end the novel?” That’s what our workbook does, and I will leave a link in the description.

There’s so much in here, it’s ridiculous. I’ll show you the rest of the genres that we’re covering. Just in case you’re thinking, “Well, I’m not actually writing crime,” don’t worry, because we’re covering all of these genres.

I hope that helps. Drop in the comments below any genres that you’re writing that we are not covering here or any ideas that you’d like us to cover and I’m sure that we’ll do that.

There will be 14 genres in total, including these:

GET THE NOVEL OUTLINE WORKBOOK HERE

Good luck!

Vicky & Claire x

Please share with any writer friends you think would benefit 🙂

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