For short stories you may find that your mind offers you a perfect last line. But no idea how to get there ;-(.
In this respect you are like the murder detective who arrives at the crime scene, looks at the corpse, and starts looking for clues as to why and how it happened. Some are more plausible than others.
Let’s give the corpse a name, we’ll call her Jane. If the line which first sprung into your mind was something like ‘Jane lay huddled on the kitchen floor, all her troubles were finally over’.
Just from that line alone you know she had troubles, and they were probably long-running or deep-seated, but it’s up to you to think up what they were, and how they led to her death.
Not much to work with yet. But at least you know her name. Your fictional detective may have to find her purse to know even this much, and he still can’t be certain purse and corpse belong together.
This is where you, as writer, play the ‘what if’ game. What if it’s someone else’s purse?
What if it’s not even her kitchen?
Did she just keel over and wasn’t murdered at all/ If so what was she doing in a strangers kitchen? Did she know them, even if it’s not obvious.
Could she be the husband’s mistress, coming around to confront his wife. Did the wife kill her? Or, an extra twist, did she commit suicide to hurt the husband. who she discovered was cheating on both of them?
Once you start thinking of the possibilities the story will start to come together. Making sense of the rag-bag of possibilities is your job as a writer.
But weed out the too easy/obvious answers as they arrive. Some people do slip on a wet patch and fracture their skull, but that’s not going to be much of a story is it?
But what if there are a couple of people with good cause to kill her, and her truly accidental death puts them in the frame for a while?
This backward writing doesn’t work for everyone, But I always suggested it to my writing students and gave them a final line to work toward as homework. The next week they were amazed that they all found very different ways to get there.
If you want to try it…
Jane lay huddled on the kitchen floor, all her troubles were finally over’.
Feel free to change the name if you have a close friend called Jane, because subconsciously you won’t want to harm her.