Writing a Twist Ending
How "The Last of Us" helped me write my picture book
Last September, my debut author/illustrator picture book hit the shelves!
I wrote a fun post about all the hidden work behind a book which everyone seemed to enjoy immensely. It was also incredibly validating for me to lift the curtain and show the amount of work that went into this book.
In the post, I mention that I struggled a lot with writing the ending to this picture book. The original post was getting far too long so I decided to write a second post about how the ending came about.
Needless to say, there are spoilers in this post for my own picture book Oh, Olive! which has a fun surprise ending. If you care about spoilers and haven’t had the chance to pick up my picture book yet, you can order a copy below:
Okay this is your final warning! Spoilers below!
The Original Ending: Sickly Sweet
To talk about the final ending, we first need to revisit the original ending of this book.
In case you haven’t read my book yet, here is a very quick summary of what happens:
Olive’s parents send her off to school where she continues to make a mess. From here onwards is where the story begins to branch into different endings.
Below is the first “official” ending we used in the dummy which I submitted to editors:
In this ending, Olive is reaffirmed by the beautiful nature outdoors and is inspired to bring some of that into her parent’s boring artwork. Her parents and the whole town come around to it and they paint together.
It’s… cute! But… kind of expected and cliche right?
A NEW CHALLENGER APPROACHES: My editor enters the scene.
After this book was acquired by my editor, Mabel, we had our first zoom call to discuss the book. Here are some of the notes I took from our call:
On the call, both my editor and I agreed that perhaps we should push the story more and come up with a surprise ending instead that isn’t as cheesy and predictable. She saw a spark of humor in my work which I still hadn’t fully embraced yet at the time. This was before I would create this unhinged-substack newsletter and I have her to thank for pushing me to embrace my humorous side.
Saying you want to write a surprise ending is one thing, actually coming up with a surprise ending is near impossible. It was insanely difficult coming up with a surprise ending that doesn’t devalue the heart of the book while simultaneously subverting the reader’s expectations.
Commence the Furious Brainstorming!
I agonized over what to do for weeks.
I explored every avenue of a possible ending.
In one ending, Olive had a little sister who struggled to find her own voice instead. In another, there was an alternate color town where colorful people reside and Olive bridges the gap between the two towns.
None of these endings felt right though and I felt SO stuck! I started turning to other picture books, novels and movies with surprise endings to try to see if I could find inspiration.
And I found it in the most surprising place…
A bloody zombie video game!
My confession is that I did not play this game at the time as I am an easily stressed and sweaty person. Instead, over the past couple of years I’ve gotten strangely obsessed with watching Youtubers play videogames. I will say, recently we’ve gotten a PS5 and I’ve starting playing this game all on my own!! On the easiest mode of course.
Anyways, if you haven’t played/watched the game or the show and don’t want spoilers, scroll past the upcoming dividers because this is going to become a dissection of the ending for the first game.
If you don’t know, the Last of Us is a post-apocalyptic zombie game where you play as Joel, a man whose daughter is killed when the zombie apocalypse first starts. The game is set years later where he works as a smuggler. He is hired to smuggle a girl, Ellie, across the country to a research lab. It turns out Ellie may be the key to developing a vaccine against the zombie virus as she was bitten by a zombie but never turned into one.
Joel starts out hesitant to let Ellie in, however over the course of the game they begin to warm up to each other. Eventually, they develop a deep bond.
Of course!
They spend a lot of time talking about settling down after this is all over. So much precious video game time was spent between them talking about living regular lives in a little village utopia that Joel’s brother as built.
All this precious time that made me know, deep in my bones, that one of these characters is TOTALLY going to die at the end of the game. I’ve played this game (not literally) before, I know when I’m being toyed with! One of them totally has to die and it’ll be devastating!
But then the ending happens.
They make it to the research lab and Joel finds out that Ellie must die in order for them to extract the anti-viral-whatever from her brain.
Instead of letting Ellie die, Joel massacres dozens of people to save Ellie’s life (most probably against her wishes). When she wakes from her coma and asks what happened, he lies and tells her that the researchers didn’t need her. They then go back to his brother’s village to live out their lives together just like they always wanted.
Except now things have changed, what they wanted earlier in the story is tainted and no longer the answer to their problems.
Ellie has her suspicions that Joel lied, and Joel must now keep up this lie for the rest of his life. Their relationship is changed.
And that’s how I came up with the ending for my book!
Part Eight: Oh my god, that’s it!
Throughout the entirety of my book, Olive’s parents are hellbent on getting her to paint a shape. They want Olive to paint just like them but she refuses to because she wants to do her own thing. In the end, their eyes are opened to the beauty of Olive’s paintings and they encourage her to paint her splatters and swirls.
This is the ending that the reader is expecting.
So how do I surprise the reader?
I can’t have Olive’s parents reject her, the story is still a positive one and needs to end on a positive note.
So just like in The Last of Us, the surprise is that we get what we wanted all along.
Olive paints the world’s most perfect circle.
Her parents have wanted her to paint a circle all along and she’s refused.
Only when her parents accept her and ask her to paint her splatters does Olive rebel and paint a circle which she knew how to do all along.
What they wanted earlier is no longer what they want now!!!
I actually came up with this idea when I was falling asleep during a nap. For some reason, my afternoon naps have proved to be very productive! Something about being in a state of half consciousness seems to get the creative juices going. Frantically I pulled up my notes app and wrote this down before falling back asleep:
And so that is how the final twist ending came about!
A very PG book with inspiration from a very R rated game!
Here’s the final page of my book:
A perfect twist ending!
As a fun little end to this post, I’ve been trying to make better thumbnails for my posts and I was trying to come up with funny ones. Here is a very hilarious one I came up with that obviously did not end up becoming the final:
Have a good one today folks!
that twist ending is so relatable though. It reminded me of when I was young and trying to make my even younger cousin say "photography". He kept getting it wrong and I eventually gave up. Before he left the room he called me, gave me the most michievous smile, said the damn word perfectly and ran away laughing like a maniac.
Iconic, enthralling, and inspiring. Now you can put the "Last Of Us" as your muse in your wiki