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Okay everybody. When is the proper time to stop the actual story and move on to a different part of the "world"?
I need to know about what is going to be the proper way to end this story and move on to "pert two". This is a really long story line and I'm thinking of all of this stuff to go in the story, but I don't know when to stop and when to continue.
Your story line should have an arc: a beginning (problem), middle (attempts to fix the problem), and end (resolution of the problem). If you have multiple story lines, each one has its own arc.
There can be an arc which stretches over multiple books. Sometimes each individual book has its own beginning, middle, and end (c.f. Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire) underneath a major arc which also concludes in the last book, and sometimes it's one story told in multiple volumes (Lord of the Rings, the Belgariad).
If you have a really long story line, that's fine. It's up to you to decide if it's one story in many books, with only one ending (LOTR, ASOIAF, the Belgariad), or if there smaller arcs within the larger arc (Harry Potter).
The proper time is when the arc is finished. If you don't have an arc, either you didn't plan one or you're a discovery writer and you haven't invented it yet.
Most stories, (fairy tales at least), end as "... and they lived happily ever after." That's not always the case, but it illustrates a point. That is, the story ends when a crisis that might prevent people from "living happily ever after" is resolved. It's usually in people's favor, sometimes not, but in any event, "closure" is brought to the crisis.
So end the story when the main crisis is over and let the people "move on to the next stage of their lives" without the reader.
