Well it’s all winding down now. I’m rewriting the final push of the film. The ultimate showdown that represents the two opposing ideologies that round out the theme is about to take place. While it is great to be at this point, and this sequence is really what the whole thing is about, it seems that the freight train I’m pushing up the hill has hit a patch of quicksand (That’s right. Uphill quicksand. The difficulty is so extreme, only that dysfunctional metaphor will do!), so there’s not much sense of relief.

We’ve all seen a hundreds of movies that start strong, develop into an engaging premise, and then take a nosedive in the third act, usually either petering out, going off the rails, or seriously flying in the face of audience expectations, and not in a good way. The result? The fun, the audience, and the whole objective behind making the film in the first place, are lost. How does this happen, and how do we keep it from happening?

From the outside, looking in, it might not be that obvious why so many film endings suck and drag all of these otherwise decent stories down the crapper. But the truth is that getting some  compelling narrative threads rolling is one skill set, and resolving them in a fitting and satisfying way is quite another.

He can’t just kill the bad guy, get the girl, and save the family floral shop from foreclosure, even if those are the ends the movie has been driving at the whole time. We’re all too sophisticated (read jaded) to buy that. There has to be some kind of wrench thrown into the gears to subvert such a clean and linear conclusion, and that thing has to fold seamlessly into plot, and serve the story. Too easy, right?

A lot of screenwriting instruction paradigms embody this principal in a structural element call the “third act twist,” in which we think the ending is all sewn up, and usually in a happy way, then things suddenly and hugely shift back to crisis mode, testing the protagonist one last time to decisively settle the issue. This is a sound mechanism, and one can certainly point to many classic examples of it that worked beautifully, but I’m not convinced that it’s the magic bullet that hits the mark every time.

Translation: I can’t figure out how to make a third act twist work in my script.

There’s also talk among some gurus about having your protagonist “win by losing” or “lose by winning,” as the corollary of the want/ need dichotomy that’s plagued him/ her throughout the film. Here our hero realizes what’s really important (the need), and so gives up or sacrifices his or her prior object of pursuit (the want). Again, there’s plenty of merit to this idea, but I’m just not sure if it properly meshes with the needs of my story.

Translation: I can’t figure out a felicitous way to have my protagonist win by losing or lose by winning.

So, as I sally forth to “The End,” my focus is going to be on keeping these aforementioned principals in mind; one, both, some combination, or something similar, and brainstorming what my movie really needs for its ending. My hope is that it will spontaneously “tell me” how I should go about it. Stranger things have happened.

What do you think? What other ideas have you heard about how to do endings? Let me know below!