This is part of an inter-blog duo of posts on endings in fiction. The sister post, written by William Morris, can be found at A Motley Vision.

Endings are hard. Of all the time I spend writing a piece, at least 40 percent of it will be spent on getting the ending just right. I think it’s important that a great deal of sweat and blood go into the ending, because that’s when the soul starts to enter.

However, endings are in no way voodoo. There are principles to making a good ending.

You’re not going to believe me about these principles, by the way. No one ever does. Do you know why? It’s because when I talk about stories, I talk about bones. I’m not talking about organs, I’m not talking about flesh, I’m not talking about makeup or bodybuilding programs. I’m talking about bones.

Bones are not pretty. They are not poetic. No magazines or Web sites are dedicated to the eroticizing of bones. But why are George Clooney and Brad Pitt so handsome? It’s their bone structure. Why do Nicole Kidman and Catherine Zeta-Jones get all the leading roles? Talk all you want about their flesh, but the flesh takes its shape from the bones. Bones hold your posture. They dictate your walk. They provide your hip and ankle girth. They sculpt the nuances of your face and hands.

Most people are so in love with what Nicole looks like with flesh on, that they can’t imagine that something as hard and practical as bones could possibly be under there. It’s the same with writers who have read the world’s great literature. They’re so enthralled with the complete story that they assume that its writing process must have been as poetic as its reading — that it started as a small George and grew into a big one.

I’ll admit that there are probably some people in the world who can gestate perfect stories like that, but they make up about .0001 percent of the population. If you’re willing to take the chance that you’re one of them, stop reading now and go pour your genius upon the page. If you think that just maybe there’s a craft to fiction, read on.

To make a good ending, you’ll need two bones.

Bone 1: A Goal. If the character has a goal and pursues it through the story, you can resolve the story perfectly fine by having the character reach the goal. This creates an up ending. Or, the character can not reach his goal, which creates a down ending.

Do you want to strengthen that bone? Make the goal especially difficult to achieve. Require the character to sacrifice all that is dear in the pursuit of that goal. The more the character sacrifices, the more powerful the ending, whether it goes up or down.

However, it might be more interesting if you add …

Bone 2: A Dramatic Need. If you have given your character a dramatic need (something about their psyche that needs to change, for example: learning to love, or learning to stand up for one self), and the character can meet that dramatic need, while also attaining his or her goal, you have a doubly fine ending because character changes are more compelling than achieved goals. As with the goal, the more the character has to sacrifice in order to achieve his or her dramatic need, the more powerful the ending, whether it goes up or down. But if you want to play you can always …

Break bone 1 in order to make bone 2 possible. It’s simple: the character’s goal gets in the way of his or her dramatic need. So the character pursues the goal until either: 1: he or she gives up the dramatic need for the goal (a tragic ending) or, 2: he or she gives up the goal to attain the dramatic need (an bitter-sweet ending).

These are the bones that make up an ending. There are only two. However, their strength is completely based upon how well you have set up the goal and dramatic need, and how they have been pursued throughout the story. But that’s an article for another day.

Already have a story mostly finished? Can’t find a way to end it? Try this. Go back and say, “What is my character’s goal?” If the character doesn’t have a goal, lend him one, just to see what happens. Do you want a happy ending? Let him achieve his goal. Want a sad ending? Don’t let him achieve his goal. Now turn the power of the story up and down by making the goal less or more difficult to achieve. Play with the emotional punch of the story by insisting on greater or lesser sacrifice.

Want to kick it up another notch? Go back and say, “What is my character’s dramatic need?” If the character doesn’t have a dramatic need, lend her one, just to see what happens. Do you want a happy ending? Let the character achieve her dramatic need. Want a sad ending? Don’t let her achieve her dramatic need. Now turn the power of the story up and down by making the dramatic need less or more difficult to achieve. Play with the emotional punch of the story by insisting on greater or lesser sacrifice.

Now put it all together. Take the goal and the dramatic need and make them mutually exclusive. The character can only have one or the other. Want a bitter-sweet ending? Let her gain her dramatic need at the expense of her goal. Want a tragic ending? Let her gain her goal at the expense of her dramatic need.

Are you annoyed with me? Have I stripped the poetry out of writing? Do only hacks think about writing the way I do? Let’s take a look at the master, the godfather of all English departments, yea even the Bard himself, who will surely strike me down for my impertinence.

King Lear. Lear’s goal: To prop up his ego. Lear’s dramatic need: to learn to love. Lear does not achieve his goal. But he does achieve his dramatic need, but only after losing his riches, his power, his family, his sanity, and worst of all, the only person in the world who actually loves him.

Henry V. Henry’s Goal: To take France. Henry’s dramatic need: to grow into the mantle of kinghood. Henry attains both his goal and his dramatic need, but has to sacrifice his friends and his past along the way.

Othello. Othello’s goal: To ensure Desdemona’s faithfulness. Othello’s dramatic need: to learn to trust Desdemona. Othello reaches his goal, but only through the sacrifice of Desdemona, which leads to his dramatic need, but too late.

So what if Lear had gotten into a few tiffs with his daughters, gone to a pub with a son-in-law and revealed a past indiscretion, and eventually lost his marbles and wandered around the countryside philosophizing until the end of the play?

What if Henry had agonized over whether to take France while playing tennis, had a dalliance along the way, and eventually settled for a baronage somewhere in Normandy?

What if Othello had wondered now and again about Desdemona while out drinking with Iago, gotten into a fight with someone who slighted his wife, then came home to find the house a mess?

Even with Shakespeare’s unparalleled command of the English language, these plays without their simple but strong bones would be mere curiosities, if they had survived at all. People like pretty language, yes, they like metaphor, they like sympathetic characters. But what they like most is all the above sculpted aesthetically around a beautiful structure.

I believed in the Writer Genius for many years. He was this special, misunderstood person whose waters ran very deep. He was someone who had amazing novels and short stories swimming inside him like fish, just waiting to be caught and hauled up into the light of day. All he had to do was sit at the computer, cast the fishing line into his deepest depths, and type.

Oh, sure. He had to work to get those stories out, but it was his genius that created them. That genius was every bit as much a part of him as the color of his eyes, the shape of his hands, or the sound of his voice. That genius meant that story was something he didn’t have to worry about. All he had to do was find the words to embody that story.

And the really great thing was, in all possibility, I could be that writer genius. How many were the days that I sat down at my computer with an idea that seemed so full of potential? How many were the drafts I pumped out? How many were the critics who said, “Yeah, it’s fine.”

Fine? Obviously you don’t grasp what I’m doing here. Don’t you see the nuances? Can’t you catch the symbolism? Isn’t the story’s soul blindingly apparent?

I spent quite a few years trying to be the Writer Genius. Finally, I had to give up because it was evident to me that I had no natural storytelling talent. I was about as far from being the Writer Genius as it was possible to be. But I’m a stubborn cuss. I wanted to be a writer anyway, so I enrolled in a creative writing M.F.A. program.

I learned something during that time that opened an entirely new world to me, a world that made it possible for me to be a writer. That something is a single principle. And I’m going to give it to you free of charge, just because you’re you.

It is simply this: There is a craft to storytelling, just as there is a craft to engine design, or architecture, or artificial sweetener formulation.

This idea excited me so much that I spent the next five years studying it. The main text I used was Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. It may seem odd to focus on a screenwriting book when one wants to learn story craft, but, as I found out, screenplays are story skeletons. They’re the bones that the cast and crew hang flesh upon. You don’t have to cut through flowery language or extended metaphors or languorous description. You’re just looking at the beams and bones that make sure a building or body can stand. And there are ways to know if they will hold up, or if the art direction, costumes, actors, soundtrack and cinematography are just makeup on a cadaver.

Though I was obsessed with understanding the components that made a good story, it took me a while to learn to apply them. I look back on my M.F.A. thesis and cringe. Why in the world did they let me graduate?

But eventually, my work started to pay off. I could tell because the first time I submitted a screenplay to a film festival, they took my $20 entrance fee and never spoke to me again. The next time around, I revised that screenplay and won third place. The kicker was, I could tell what the problems with my screenplay were, and I could fix them. It was like fixing a toaster.

After that I got published and won writing contests on a regular basis. But it wasn’t because the Writer Genius in me had finally woken up, it was because I knew how stories work, just like an architect knows how buildings work, or an engine designer knows how engines work.

Learning the craft of storytelling has been great for my career. I can actually make a living with words. However, sharing my knowledge has proved to be very difficult.

As I think back on the majority of the fiction I have read, it all has one thing in common. It lacks story. Yes, those pieces of fiction may have lovely language, they may have sympathetic characters, they may have interesting ideas, but they don’t go anywhere.

I’ve written a lot of critiques to fiction writers focusing on their story’s structure, and with almost no exception I receive this response, “What in the world are you talking about? This is how the story GOES!”

That, gentle reader, is the voice of one who is under the thrall of the Writer Genius myth. It’s the voice of someone who believes that storytelling is an innate power they have. Like me many years ago, they don’t realize that there is a craft to storytelling.

As Robert McKee writes, “The novice plunges ahead, counting solely on experience, thinking that that life he’s lived and the films he’s seen give him something to say and the way to say it … What the novice mistakes for craft is simply his unconscious absorption of story elements from every novel, film, or plays he’s ever encountered. As he writes, he matches his work by trial and error against a model built up from accumulated reading and watching. The unschooled writer calls this “instinct,” but it’s merely habit and it’s rigidly limiting. He either imitates his mental prototype or imagines himself in the avant-garde and rebels against it. But the haphazard groping toward or revolt against the sum of unconsciously ingrained repetitions is not, in any sense, technique, and leads to screenplays clogged with clichés of either the commercial or the art house variety” (15-16).

Lack of story craft is the bane of Mormon fiction. In fact, I believe it is the main barrier that keeps Mormon writing from gaining the strength to compete in the national and international markets. Too many potential Mormon writers think that there’s a Writer Genius inside of them just waiting to get out. I figure that a Writer Genius pops up only once for every million people born. Possibly less often. But the Writer Genius myth is so powerful that a great many people who could be good writers, if only they learned the craft, spend their lives waiting for a fish that never bites.