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Region: The East Pacific
Because most likely, you don't understand the structure of narrative and you have more work to do
It could be that the particular work you're looking at, might just have no future. That happens too... you'll gain instinctive knowledge of what works and what's throwaway after playing with hundreds of ideas
Sometimes things do get more complicated before it starts to become clear.. That's the time you need to persevere. But writers need many tools.. knowledge of various genres, sub-genres, how a structure 'should' finish, the basic rules, the advanced rules that underlie the basic rules. You can break the basic rule, but never the advanced rules
People like Kafka and Hemingway and King tied themselves into knots because they didn't plot. But even if you don't plot, you will, by dint of practice, move towards a bunch of possibilities as you write.
I'm currently working on learning mostly plotless, multiple POV, no-good-guy, no-through-line storytelling. It's very confusing because anyone could die, no one's a hero that has to live, no ending is clear, and I mix and match genres. But the way starts off universally will set the mood for your work. You change it too much, no matter how great your skill, your audience will hate you. The way you start does lock in your story or narrative into max a dozen finishes. How do you know the right one? You just try different combinations, till you find what fits. And if you don't like it, you try other things. Switching out themes, foreshadowing, plants, the moral view of each character. It gets annoying, but this is where real writing lies. Working within your own world, and the rules you set for characters.
The events you decide on shouldn't t break the rules of the story world, or make characters do what they can't possibly do, just for the story to make sense. If you do, the story won't work. There aren't an infinite combination of events in a story.. each genre might have 20 major variations max. Each character might win, lose or ally with others, form groups, and the characters' moral views will either be proven true, false, unimportant or random. Looking into some of the longest works ever written, such as Ice and Fire or Malazan or The Stand, there always were a limited number of satisfying possibilities. The hero wins.. the villian wins.. the hero turns villian.. both win.. both lose.. the world resets.. the world is destroyed.. the villian becomes hero.. the hero and villian die.. the heros' ally becomes new hero... the villian's ally becomes new villian.. etc etc. Other possibilities, like the hero's unremarkable long lost brother becomes the hero, won't be satisfying. The villian's dog brings all of them together and makes everyone live happily ever after will not make sense.
Stories are problem solving exercises, treatises on the right moral stances and exercises in human change. Depending on the kind of start you make you have only 6 to 10 satisfying conclusions you can get to. These change from genre to genre. Practice, experience or an unusually competent mind will teach you the possibiltiies you can choose from. Trial and error will teach you which one is best for the specific story you're telling. Whether it be Christie, Grisham, Murakami or Shakespeare, or Hemingway, King, Kafka, Nabokov, or Martin, the way they set up their stories forces them towards certain endings. Plotters andarchitects do it before writing the prose. Gardeners and farmers do it as they go along. It's just a matter of experience and going down dead ends, till you find the right paths
