Episode Description
In this craft-focused episode of What If For Authors, Claire breaks down one of the most common storytelling anxieties writers face: getting stuck on the ending. A satisfying resolution isn’t just nice to have; it’s the moment where readers discover whether all the promises your story made actually pay off.
Claire shares a practical troubleshooting framework she uses with authors to diagnose why an ending isn’t landing and how to fix it. Using the Enneagram as a tool for understanding character motivation and conflict, she walks through four key questions that can help you reconnect your plot, theme, and character arcs, so your ending lands with the impact your story deserves.
In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
How the Enneagram can clarify character motivations and story dynamics
Why understanding both the protagonist and antagonist is crucial to resolving your plot
How identifying your story’s central theme can guide the resolution
The three layers of conflict every powerful ending resolves:
Philosophical (beliefs and worldview)
Emotional (feelings and internal struggle)
Physical (actions and external obstacles)
Why the most satisfying endings resolve all three layers at once
The importance of letting your protagonist make an active choice in the final moment
Resources Mentioned
Iconic Five-Star Endings Course
Learn Claire’s full framework for crafting powerful endings.
Visit: liberatedwriter.com/coursesWrite Iconic Relationships (Upcoming Book)
Explore Enneagram relationship dynamics between every pairing of types.
Search “Write Iconic Relationships” on Kickstarter and click Notify Me on Launch.Write Iconic Characters
Claire’s guide to building unforgettable characters using the Enneagram.
Available at major retailers or: books2read.com/WICStory Alignment Sessions
One-on-one troubleshooting for your manuscript.
Book a session at liberatedwriter.comLiberated Writer on Substack
Weekly essays on storytelling, the writing life, and the publishing industry.
Support the Show
If this episode helped you solve a storytelling problem or gave you new ideas for your manuscript, here are a few ways you can support the podcast:
Leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. Reviews help other authors discover the show.
Share the episode with a friend who might be wrestling with their ending.
Subscribe to Claire’s Substack (free or paid) at Liberated Writer to receive deeper essays on craft, the author life, and the industry.
Happy writing!
TRANSCRIPT:
Claire: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of What If For Authors. I'm glad you're here. My name's Claire Taylor and I'm an Enneagram certified coach for author as well as a humor and mystery writer. All my services, courses and books for authors can be found@liberatedwriter.com. Go check it out. If you're curious about how you can build a more sustainable author career in uncertain times.
I also have a new book out called Write Iconic Characters, all about using the Enneagram to develop realistic and relatable characters that live rent free in your reader's head. You can find that on most major retailers or go to books to read.com/wic and that's books two as in the number two read.com/wic for right iconic characters.
Alright. I thought we might be due for a craft related episode, and it's not like writing isn't without its own storytelling related anxieties. Right. Maybe you jump into the first act and the [00:01:00] story is writing itself. Then you hit the messy middle, and you sort of throw some things in there that maybe feel right or maybe they don't, but you think they should be there.
And slowly the dread grows in your stomach because you don't know how it's all going to come together for a satisfying ending. Or maybe you had a really awesome ending in mind, but the story has gone off the rails and you're not sure how to steer it back toward that ending. Sticking a landing for your novel is a crucial skill, perhaps second only to figuring out how to keep readers turning the page until they reach that ending resolution is something we don't often get in our real lives, and so being able to deliver it to the readers makes you a bit of a deity.
And failing to deliver on the promises you make at the start of the book can turn you into quite the villain. So let's talk about it. Ready for some storytelling, troubleshooting. Let's ask and answer the question, what if I'm stuck on the ending? I actually [00:02:00] offer a self-paced course called Iconic five Star Endings, which you can buy on liberated writer.com for way more in depth steps than what I'll be able to cover today.
But I'll try to give you something to work with in the next half hour or so. There are four places I usually poke around when an author comes to me needing help sorting out the end of their story. So here are those four places. One, do you know what motivates your protagonist? Two, do you know what motivates your antagonist?
Three. Do you know what central theme you're exploring? Four. Are you attending to each of the three layers of conflict?
If you don't know what's motivating your protagonist, and I mean that on a deep core fear level, then it's gonna be really difficult to know where they can land in a satisfying way when it comes to their character arc. This is where the Enneagram comes in. [00:03:00] I have a whole episode on What if I Don't Know My Protagonist that you can listen to?
If you're struggling with this part of the process, you can pause this episode and go listen to that one. But essentially, do you know what their Enneagram type is? If not, you won't know what their core fear is and how to trigger it. You also won't know what kind of brave they're being asked to be.
What fear are they avoiding? What are they being called to do that asks them to push through that particular fear? How are they poorly solving the actual problem they're facing? It is possible to intuit what kind of brave they need to be. And authors do it all the time, but sometimes your intuition isn't firing on all cylinders, or maybe your logical brain is fighting with it, and that can bring the whole writing process to a grinding halt or maybe what your character is being asked to do to resolve the conflict scares the shit out of you to even think about, and so you're avoiding putting [00:04:00] them through it.
The waters can get muddy here when we rely on intuition every time. So troubleshooting, using the Enneagram is a nice fallback for authors to have. So do you know the protagonist's type? If not, figure it out. And I say figure it out, because if you're already well into your draft, you're probably writing them as a particular type or two.
Without even realizing it Often the problem is that you've been splitting their type, writing them in some scenes, more like your own Enneagram type, and in other scenes more like some other of the nine types. So you may lack some clarity on who they are, but picking a type and making minimal changes if possible, to align the character more with that type can really clear the runway for your protagonist.
This alone might be enough to help you see what ending fits for the story.
Now let's look at the antagonist. Do you know them well enough? The antagonist doesn't have to be a [00:05:00] villain, just the main person pushing back against the protagonist. In the case of like 95% of the stories I consult on the antagonist is a person or specific character. I know there are different options, like man versus nature and man versus self, but even in those cases.
It can help our brain to imagine the antagonist as a person. So let's set those other options on the shelf for now, and just focus on man versus man, and of course, gender neutral. The job of your antagonist is to antagonize your protagonist. The most potent place for that to happen is your protagonist's core fear.
Sometimes the antagonist is villainous, but sometimes, as in the case of a two person romance, the antagonist is the romantic partner. And in Dark Romance, the antagonist is often both the romantic partner and a villain. To know how your [00:06:00] antagonist will needle your protagonist, you need to know who they are.
You can't understand the dynamic between the two characters until you understand the two characters. Again, I'll bring this back to Enneagram because it's endlessly useful when it comes to character dynamics. Let's look at say, an enemies to lover's romance. So your protagonist is a female, five, the investigator, maybe a brilliant scientist who's struggling for respect at her new research job, what antagonist would really needle her?
Here's who you probably don't want to pick for this scenario. Her manager who's a nine, the peacemaker. Can a nine and a five have conflict? Can an investigator and a peacemaker have conflict? Sure. But you also have two withdrawing types here, and the ingredients for an explosive dynamic are just not really there.
Not only will you likely struggle to get the conflict off the ground between these two, the ending is [00:07:00] not going to offer itself up readily, not in this sub-genre trope of enemies to lovers.
But if your antagonist is her manager who's an eight? The challenger, yeah, now we're talking. That's because the eight is an assertive type. So as much as the five tries to withdrawn to isolation, the eight will pursue eights, bring a lot of energy with them into the room more than is necessary usually.
And for a five who's easily worn out by interpersonal intensity, that is likely something that will make her irritable.
And fives when irritated can have a pretty sharp tongue. So the five wants to think before acting and the eight wants to act before thinking. And the power dynamic between the two manager and employee is perfect for some immediate dislike. Now eights aren't the only possible antagonists for five. Any type can work depending on the tropes in the sub-genre, [00:08:00] but you do need to know what type of conflict you're brewing.
Is it subtle? Is it explosive? Knowing your antagonist, along with your protagonist will give you some clues on this.
If you know your protagonist's type and your antagonists type, then you're well on your way to answering the third troubleshooting question I usually offer. Do you know what central theme you're exploring? Each core fear creates a particular intentional flow or an intentional pull towards something. If your character is a six, the loyalist who's afraid of being without safety support and guidance, then some of the concepts they're going to spend their life exploring without necessarily being aware of it are things like loyalty, security, risk, certainty, authority, and reliability. Now, sixes aren't the only type that naturally waters each of these concepts with their attention over the course of their life. There is overlap with other types.
For instance, [00:09:00] ones the reformers whose core fear is being bad, wrong, or corrupt. They also pay a lot of attention to reliability. They may also pay attention to loyalty, but here's the interesting part, whereas sixes. The loyalists tend to practice loyalty to people or authority ones. The reformers tend to practice loyalty to principles and ideals, so we've just located overlap between the one and the six.
Loyalty, perhaps fidelity, but we've also found a point of conflict. What are you loyal to? They may have very, very different opinions on that. So the central conflict of a story with a six protagonist and a one antagonist might very well be loyalty, but it doesn't have to be. But you can make one hill of a story around that center of gravity, for sure.
Okay, so what about this enemies to levers between the five protagonist and the eight antagonist? What themes naturally emerge in common between their attentional [00:10:00] patterns? Truth stands out to me. , eights have no time for bullshit. And fives love facts. Also independence. Both fives and the eight hate the idea of relying on others for anything.
These are things that both characters might be exploring concurrently throughout the story, and they'll have different takes on, say, independence, but over the course of the narrative, they may both change their position slightly until they see eye to eye in a sexy way. Of course, enemies to lovers is sexy by its very nature.
The conflict makes it so.
Your job as the author is to find these places of shared understanding or shared attentional flow to a concept. If your antagonist is a villain, then their view on the central theme might tempt the protagonist to abandon their own belief or challenge it in a particularly destabilizing way. [00:11:00] But it's helpful to know what concepts make up the invisible battleground.
Sometimes authors write the ending and they feel like, oof. Yeah, this just doesn't hit. I've been there. This is usually when I bring in the diagnostic tool of the three layers of conflict. So just as the Enneagram describes patterns of thinking. Feeling and doing. The three layers of conflict in a story are philosophical related to thoughts and beliefs, emotional related to feelings, emotions, and physical related to action and doing behaviors.
Throughout your story, you'll be developing these three layers of conflict. So for the physical conflict, what are the objects or people standing in the way of your protagonist getting what they want? What actions are required of them for the emotional conflict? What does your protagonist feel about the situation?
What emotions are they experiencing and what emotions are they doing everything they [00:12:00] can to avoid feeling? How might those specific emotions be the very key to unlocking the other layers of conflict?
For the philosophical conflict, what does your protagonist believe about the central theme at the start of the story, and how is that belief and understanding of the world and themselves challenged in the inciting incident? How long do they try to hold onto that belief in the face of conflicting information before they're willing to let go of it or amend it?
What new beliefs or ideas do they develop as they gain more experience through the course of the story? A powerful ending resolves each of these three layers of conflict in quick succession. A fucking amazing ending. Resolves them all at once. So that would look like we see the protagonist take an action that shows both their emotional state and their adjusted belief about the theme.[00:13:00]
I'll sometimes call this their verdict. For instance, let's say the book's theme is justice. Hmm. At the start, your protagonist believes justice is something she has the power to dole out. So maybe this is a revenge plot. I love a good revenge plot. So over the course of the story, she starts to doubt whether justice is something that can never be gained through, say, violence.
Now, she's not sold on that new hypothesis yet, but maybe a mentor comes along and plants the seed that continues to grow. Maybe she's up against an antagonist who also believes that justice is something an individual has a right to dole out through violence. In this case, we have a bit of a mirror here with our protagonist and antagonist, which can be super fun.
The protagonist, of course, never really stops to consider that. The very belief of the antagonist that ruined her life is the one she's carrying around [00:14:00] in her pursuit of justice. Or rather vengeance. Okay, so let's flash forward to the ending. That's a very vague setup, but let's flash forward to the ending.
Okay. The protagonist has the villainous antagonist at gunpoint. Okay, so she's got him right where she wants him. All that's left to do is pull the trigger and get the justice she's been after. Now, how do we show all three layers of conflict being resolved at once? We do it as authors through describing the action.
Here's how it might look. Our protagonist pauses, keeping the gun aimed on the target of her revenge. She reads this fucker his rights, laying out all her grievances against him, telling him all the pain she's endured since he murdered her husband. The rage comes through loud and clear all the pain she's been holding in Her heart spills out through her words, and we think she's finally about to get her revenge.[00:15:00]
Then she lowers the gun philosophical resolution alert y'all, if she still believed that killing him was within her right to justice, she wouldn't lower the gun. Something has changed You, the author have planted the clues to what has changed leading up to this point. So when the scales tip in an unexpected direction, readers can easily go back and figure out what actually changed without you giving a long.
Explicit description of it. So maybe she's crying by the end of her confrontation and we haven't seen her cry even once since her husband was murdered. Right? Emotional resolution alert right there and then just this little treat for all of us. The villains scrambles to their feet, insults the protagonist for being weak and sprints off only to be hit by a garbage truck and killed.
Not only do we deserve [00:16:00] a little bit of that in our daily life sometimes, but it also hints toward a more divine justice at work, which plays back into the theme and which may be what this author wanted to nod toward. That justice is something left for the larger forces, not an individual. Also, getting hit by a dump truck is just a fun way for a villain to go.
If you are struggling to make the ending hit like a dump truck, often the issue is that you are resolving the three layers of conflict too far apart from one another. So identify where that resolution is happening for each of the three and see if you can make it all show up in the same scene, if not the same moment.
So don't let your protagonist pass a verdict on their new philosophical belief until the very last moment where a choice is possible. And for the love of all things that are good in this world, please, please make sure that the conflict, all three levels of it are being resolved by [00:17:00] a decision your protagonist makes.
An active choice in this case will always produce a more satisfying ending. Then things just working out for them or them being saved. This goes for tragedies too. Have their tragic end be the result of their decision, not just.
If you wanna dive deeper into this framework, I have two resources for you to dig in on. The first is the Iconic Five Star Endings course available at liberatedwriter.com/courses, plural courses. The second is my book Write Iconic Relationships.
So I have a Kickstarter coming up for this one. What you can do is you can go to Kickstarter and search, write iconic relationships, then please hit the Notify Me on Launch button. Depending on when you listen to this episode, the Kickstarter might be in progress or it might be completed once it's completed.
The book will eventually be available to buy on [00:18:00] major retailers, but it'll be available to buy to Kickstarter backers first, and there will be extra treats, as is the nature of a Kickstarter. So this book will walk you through relationship dynamics between each pairing of the Enneagram so you can understand how characters connect and trigger one another.
This will help you pick fantastic characters for the story you want to tell. So I'll be looking at not just romances, but friendships, enemies, and yes, also lovers. You don't wanna miss this one. Anyways, , those are the two resources to check out the Iconic Five Star Endings course and the Right Iconic Relationships, Kickstarter.
So if you're wondering, what if I'm stuck on the ending, don't worry. There are ways to troubleshoot. Walk yourself through the four questions of do I know what motivates my protagonist? Do I know what motivates my antagonist? Do I know what central theme they're [00:19:00] exploring? Am I attending to each of the three layers of conflict?
Somewhere in there, you'll likely find the mechanism that's jumped the rails and you can start getting it back on track. And if you need one-on-one help, which is okay to not only need but to want, you can schedule a story alignment with me, go to liberated writer.com and you can find story alignment calls there.
I can quickly walk you through this troubleshooting and use my expertise. Frankly, my distance from the manuscript to get that 10,000 foot view needed to help spot what pieces aren't clicking and help you align the story. Yes, we can usually do that in just an hour. So that's it for this episode of What If for Authors.
Thanks for listening, and if you wanna hear from me more than once a month, come join me on Substack at the Liberated Writer. I offer up an in-depth post every week or two on topics like author life industry conversations, and yes, storytelling [00:20:00] and craft. So that's all for today. I hope you'll join me for the next episode.
Happy writing.