This post is a chapter from my book, The Write Attitude, which is now in a second edition. I’m posting it here to entice you to to pick up a copy. You can preorder copies from all online retailers. Here’s a link to the ebook.

The second edition of The Write Attitude is quite different from the first edition, which originally appeared in 2016. I kept some parts of the original book, but much of the material is newer. The new material comes from my Patreon page. Not every post from my Patreon page shows up here, although several do. If you want to see everything, though, head to Patreon and sign up. 

This post is from February of 2025, and is one of the early chapters in the book.

Sticking The Landing

 

Oh, wow. Endings. They’re so very important. They make or break an entire novel. Sometimes they make or break a reader’s entire experience with the author.

I’m very aware of this, and sometimes, as a writer, I don’t care. I’m not trying to please my readers. I always write to please myself.

Last week, as I was planning the future of my own writing, I ended up marinating in memories of my traditional publishing days, which brought back all those compromises I had to make. I never compromised on the work. I would walk instead of changing my vision for a story or a novel. And that made me unusual.

However, I would compromise as I was developing the idea, because I needed to sell on proposal. Often, I just ignored the proposal later, but occasionally I didn’t.

There were often dozens of fingers in my work on the proposal stage. People would say: Make it more like this current trend. No one wants to read about that topic. And my favorite, which still reverberates in my head sometimes: Wow, you’re trying to insult everyone all at once.

It’s hard to write when you have a crowd in your office. It’s hard to do a good job. I’m aware of that, and it makes me so happy to be indie these days.

I still read traditionally published writers, though. I have several whose work I love. And I sample books from writers I’ve never read before.

In January, I read a lot of short story anthologies, and in one of them, I read a story by a New York Times bestseller of long-standing. (And no, I will not tell you who she is.) I remember when her career started in the early part of this century. I thought she was a good mystery writer.

But somewhere along the way, she pivoted to the trendy. She became a writer of domestic thrillers—you know, the kind that happen in upper class suburban neighborhoods and gosh, by golly, gee whiz, there’s crime there and domestic violence and OMG, untrustworthy people.

Yeah, as you can tell, not really my genre, although I did sample a number of writers, realized it was me not them, and returned to my mean streets of cities fiction and other things.

I think I sampled this writer’s work then and didn’t like it— remembering that it’s me, not you—so I was a lot surprised by how much I liked that short story. I figured maybe she had moved off the domestic thriller train. It’d been a decade or more, after all.

I ordered her latest, which is set in New York (yay!), and then picked up one more book that sounded interesting as well. I settled into the latest book, and sure enough, the first part was pretty darn good. It kept me reading, anyway, even if there were parts that reminded me of Ira Levin novels from sixty years ago.

That’s okay. I don’t mind homage.

About two-thirds of the way through, though, there was a lot happening and it was getting more and more unbelievable. There were ghosts, but she wanted it both ways—maybe they’re an hallucination, and maybe they’re not—and the ghosts may or may not have an impact on the plot.

Then there was the bombshell about the husband that our protagonist knew but never mentioned, and then a lot of people died off-stage, all of them, and then…

Well, I kept reading, and sure enough, the twist was that it wasn’t the husband, like it usually is in domestic thriller. Okay, fine. The main plot ends, the ghosts are laid to rest, more people die, and we get to “six months later.”

And again, off-stage, we learn that some of the bodies were indeed dropped by the husband. The only person who ever believed in him was the wife, who at this point is (as the romance readers say) To Stupid To Live. She’s the only person in the book who isn’t a bad person, but that’s only because she’s dumber than a box of rocks. Everyone else is venal or a criminal or both. Most of them have murdered someone or accidentally caused a death, and all of them are unlikeable.

I finished that book, took it and the one I hadn’t read, and tossed them into the trade-in pile. I’m never reading her work again. Because really, honestly, that last third of the book was a truly terrible read.

She had a five-page long afterward in which she thanks her first readers, her second readers, her editors (both New York and London), her writer’s workshop, her agent (whom I happen to know and who is all about what she can sell, not about good storytelling),and all of her friends.

In other words, she lists the crowd in her office, and I’m sure, given that six-months-later section, they had a lot of influence on that.

Plus, the math was wrong. That might have irritated me the most. The main killers are eighty years old. It’s 2025. They had an eight-year-old child in 1963. Which meant that the kid was born in 1955. Which meant that the parents were both 10 years old when the kid was born.

Seriously, there were 1,000 early readers on this book and no copy editors? No one caught this but me? I actually went back to see if I had misread, but no, I hadn’t. Everyone listed in that afterward was math-challenged. Or they figured 1963 was so long ago no one would notice.

No one except this 65 year-old-reader who has a sister who turned 80 last year and who was sixteen when I was born in 1960. And no, she didn’t give birth to a kid in 1955 either.

Awful, horrible, irritating.

Because I’ve been looking for another good thriller writer. I don’t mind suspending disbelief and putting up with a high body count. I like to race through a book when it makes sense.

I thought, midway through, that I was really going to like this book. I almost ordered more books from this woman, but I’d learned long ago to see if the writer could stick the landing.

And, as you can tell, she didn’t. For me.

Sometimes sticking the landing is personal. Sometimes I don’t like the reveal that the narrator is the killer, even though I often love unreliable narrator stories. I hate books where the cute kid or puppy dies at the end—so much so that I now look ahead to see if the cute kid or puppy introduced on page five ends up dead at the end. (In paper books, I scan for kid/puppy’s name in the last chapter. It’s a pretty reliable method. I also have a few friends who know that I hate this with a profound passion, and they will let me know if a favorite author veers into dead kid territory.)

Oh, and a disclaimer—sometimes I kill the kid and the puppy in my fiction. As I told one of my students in January, I’m a complete hypocrite. (Or maybe just a true Gemini.) I hate that in my reading, but if the story I’m telling requires it, I will go that far in my writing.

Often, though, mostly, in fact, I will jump through major hoops to prevent the death of cute kid/puppy because I don’t like writing it. It’s devastating.

Anyway, that’s a me thing. And I will break the rule for some writers (I’m looking at you, Stephen King). I trust Stephen King to make sure that the death of the cute kid/puppy is never there solely to tug on my heartstrings. Usually the death is well foreshadowed (thank you) and it’s never there just to get more readers. It’s there because the story demands it.

I’ll abandon any writer who introduces the kid character, and then kills him off for no other reason besides giving the protagonist motivation. And again, that’s a me thing.

But the book I read this past week—which is not going on the monthly Recommended Reading List on my website—reminded me why so many traditional publishing books fail to stick the landing, particularly for authors who can’t stand up for their own vision.

I don’t know this particular author personally, but I will wager that she has made it such a habit to outsource her final draft that after two decades, she can’t conceive of any other way to write. And as a result, the end of the book was a mishmash of icky dumb stuff. (Everyone suspects the husband so make someone else the bad guy! If it’s the neighbors, there will be echoes of Ira Levin! We can use the Ira Levin thing as a pitch to the movies!)

The short story, on the other hand, would not have gone through the hands of the agent or both editors or anyone else associated with them. There’s not enough money in short fiction for those folks to waste their time.

So the short story was written by the unvarnished writer, who doesn’t write out of fear, the one who trusts her own vision.

As we all should.

I know, I know. I’m making a bunch of you very worried about your endings now. You wonder: How do I make sure I stick the landing?

Well, you write clean first drafts, don’t rewrite, and don’t let anyone else in your work. Then, you trust the process. Believe me, your creative voice will set up the proper ending. It won’t do fakey twists. If there’s a twist, it will be a legitimate one.

And then you let the project go. You move to the next.

There will be silly and stubborn readers like me who have ridiculous rules about what they read. (I will not read anything with corn on the cob in it! You can’t make me.) You’ll never get those readers. They will hate your work because you violated some personal rule you (and probably everyone else) had no idea existed.

But if you let an entire committee into what you do, then the writing you do will not be your best. You will stick the landing once in a while. Enough so that some readers will like what you do. But you won’t do it most of the time.

In fact, your books/stories well be good enough. As in mediocre. As in readable and little more. As mostly forgettable.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my fiction to be forgettable. I want it to be memorable.

The only way you will get people to read your next book is to have a satisfying ending on the current book…whatever that current book is for your readers. (I just finished a novel that I’ve had on my TBR shelf since 2009. That is the next book for me from that writer.)

So write your vision, and keep your friends, family, first readers, agent (if you’re dumb enough to have one), and editors out of it. You’re the writer. They’re not. How will they know if the storyworks? The story lives in your head.

The manuscript might fail, but that’s just a communication tool.

The story is all yours…and should remain all yours.

If your work is consistent—as in the ending should flow from details that exist in the beginning—then readers will return to you, even if they didn’t particularly like the ending of a book. They will see the authenticity.

The book I just finished reading had no authenticity. It was filled with kitchen-sink items, and that 1963 problem was a tell. The date had to be left over from an earlier draft.

I feel for the author. She’s clearly got it into her head that she needs the assistance of an entire village to make her books work.

And her work is good enough. It will help readers pass the time. But her work certainly won’t make them remember her for a long period of time.

That’s a shame, because the short story shows a writer with great power. Her novels do not.

Ah, well.

I’m sure I won’t remember this book much after this week. Maybe the Ira Levin stuff, and the 1963 things because it’s so egregious. But I will remember that I have not had a good experience with this author in the long form.

And I will not buy another novel from her. Ever.

“Sticking The Landing” from The Write Attitude

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

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