Ten Feet From The Finish Line

I don't usually write from an outline.  I've tried, it doesn't really work for me.  As a result, I never know exactly how anything is going to happen until it comes out of me.   I have a vague sense, maybe a rough order of events.  I always know how I want the story to feel when it's finished but I almost never know how I'm going to achieve it.

As I write today, I am about ten to fifteen pages away from finished with the first draft of a screenplay.  At this point in the story, more than any other, every line is a decision.  I'm sitting here looking at about six different ways it could end.  It's very exciting in one sense but, mostly, it's terrifying.  None of them feel right, which means none of them are right.

So.  I have six wrong ways to end it.  They are all very similar.  They all follow the same theme.  The same basic things happen, for the most part.   But in none of them do the right things happen in the right order.   Every option feels like a stretch too far in one direction or another.

The ending is hiding somewhere in the shadows and webs of these six wrong options.

I'm not worried about it.  The answer always comes to me.  I am, however, very impatient.  I want to finish this sucker.

It's at a point right now where, at any moment, I could do one thing and end it in two pages.  BAM.  I could be done. That's dangerous.   I was talking to my girlfriend about that aspect and she likened it to the conclusion of a bad paper in school, i.e. "And that's why I think Pride and Prejudice is a great book. The End."  

I've done so much work to get here that I owe it to myself and my story to make sure to take the time needed to get this right.

There is that old wisdom that just says, "get a draft out there" and I agree with it for the most part.   I don't agree with it, however, when it comes to the end of a script.  I think you have to get the end pretty close to right the first time. How can you stop typing otherwise?

Indeed, getting the end right helps me focus the revisions.  When I know I've hit the right chord at the end, I can go back and make sure the script leads to it appropriately*.

What am I going to do now?  I'm not sure.   I'll probably write some of these wrong endings just to see how they shake out.  Maybe the process of writing the wrong stuff will open up my thinking in a way that makes the answer clear.

Or I could go to sleep and hope it comes to me in a dream.  If only I had peyote...

*Which, by the way, it probably doesn't