Finishing with a Bang - Writing the end of a book

You have slaved over your first draft for months, maybe even years. You've written, reworked, deleted, and modified until your fingers fell off. The moment has arrived. You're in the homestretch, on those last few chapters. The light at the end of the tunnel is calling out to you along with a hundred more clichés. And then, if you're anything like me, you find yourself suck. Even though you've seen your perfect ending in your head for the entire process, you find yourself stuck, unable to get that last jumble of sentences down on the page.

Why is this? I have no idea. When I wrote EOA, I rushed the ending to the ending and in the process, butchered it so badly that it took me nearly a month of editing just to sort out that mush of chapters I left in my wake. This has been a problem for me with past manuscripts as well, so when I approached the end of book 2, I gave myself a stern talking to that boiled down to "never again".

So, in order to prevent another disaster, I've been taking the end of book 2 slow. In fact, maybe even too slow. I don't want to confuse this with the lack of writing, because that is not the problem I have created for myself. It seems every time I finish a chapter, I add another onto my storyboard. I have had five chapters left for almost two months now, although I have still made significant progress.

Looking from the ends of two extremes, I wonder if there is truly a way to find that perfect strategy. Some authors write the endings first and wear by it, but for me my ideas tend to shift as I write the story, and my initial plans never seem to be what I end up with at the end. Ideas work in fluid motion, and the thought of stapling them down to a specific manner of ending, whether through writing it first or a strict storyboard seems absolutely unappealing to me.

Although I hate how much the ending of book 2 has deviated me from my schedule, writing isn't something that can be forced. It can't be forced short without making a major mess as it has in my past and it can't be forced to conform to a specific plan. I have learned that, in my case at least, attempting this is wildly hypocritical. There are no shortcuts, no magic pills. A book will take the course it pleases. No exceptions.