There is often a lot of discussion about crafting the beginning of a story – the first line and following paragraphs. There is no denying a good beginning is essential to hooking a reader or prospective editor. But what about the other end? The end-point of all that structure and character development? The bit that comes before those extremely satisfying two words (at least in the first draft) “The End”.
A good beginning combined with an attractive character might net a sale despite the book’s other faults. With enough marketing buzz it might even create a best-seller, but without that sublime end point, the book is in danger of losing its essential impact.
Perhaps the ending may be less important for books that survive on their characterisation (super-cool protagonists can carry a story through loose or even illogical plots), or that support themselves on superior prose style. But for the other books that lack that well crafted ending, are they destined to drift out of the consciousness of readers as time passes?
So what constitutes a good ending? For me it’s emotional punch and a simultaneously delivered, poignant realisation. A feeling of emotional resolution. When the character arcs have reached their end in a satisfying climax of drama and action that leaves the protagonist changed for the better. I know this does not work for everyone, perhaps seeming too ‘formula’. Some prefer unresolved endings, particularly in short fiction. I think everyone enjoys a surprise ending to mystery that is built well from the beginning (i.e. not ‘the gardener you saw for one paragraph on page 4 did it’).
What do you consider a good ending?
Cross-posted at chrismcmahons blog.
Mad Genius Club 
25 responses to “Endings”
Yes, that emotional punch. The reader needs to leave the book, at least satisfied, and preferably delighted. I like to show that the characters are getting on with life.
The most recent book I’ve been working on has an unresolved romantic subplot. I show the woman doing the “I’m independent, starting a new career, probably move away” thing, and the man saying “Yeah, I’m independent too, but I just happen to have two tickets to the theater . . . ” so a sense that the romantic pursuit is going to continue. Another shows that the man who just killed his (traitorous) friend is getting back up and moving forward. The woman in the hospital gets the (magical) medical care she needs and so forth.
At the end of a book you’ve, presumably had some sort of climactic battle, and before that possibly some character development leap. You need to show that they’ve adjusted to the new determination/responsibility/relationship/whatever as well as recovering from the last fight where they snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. Or vice versa, depending on what will leave the reader laughing, crying, boggled or something.
You can’t just win, and then stop writing. BTDT. Got the complaints from the readers.
Hi, Pam. Having a climactic conclusion really helps, particularly if it’s an action piece, but agree you do need to show how the character has changed through the experience as well. Hopefully it all fits into the whole character development arc you’ve had mapped out.
One think I didn’t mention in the post is how to keep the endings of multi-series books satisfying. That can be a challenge, particularly if you have radically split the original manuscript and messed with your plotted arc. That happened with my early fantasy series. I had one mother of a manuscript – 240k. I split this in half, but then really had to put my thinking cap on to pull off an ending to the first book that satisfied. Because the (new) second book ended with the climax (what was the end of massive book 1), I had to concentrate on showing the development in the characters and how they had changed and were looking to new horizons with renewed determination.
I like to think an ending is obviously where the book has been headed since page 1 – only maybe it wasn’t apparent until the end. Like bookends, connected by pages.
I want the author to tell me how it ends. I don’t like the pick-your-own-ending books – it seems as if the writer was unable to commit.
Often, when I’m not liking the book I’m reading, I will go read the last three chapters. Yes, it spoils the end, but if I get to that point (of wanting to get the book over with), I usually find that I am so grateful I didn’t finish the stuff in the middle because the ending was just as unpromising as the beginning. So in a way the ending was exactly the one the beginning was promising: bad.
I want to see at least one character change – in a believable way. I want my loose ends tied up (most of them) instead of forgotten. I want to feel like people do at the end of Gone With the Wind: Nooooo! There must be more!
I prefer happy endings, but can live with bitter-sweet.
Most of all, I want to feel at the end that my trust in the writer has not been misplaced, that the story was going somewhere, that meanderings were actually important – in short, that the writer has done his job.
Hey, ABE. I must admit I never read the endings of books, mainly because I love to be suprrised, but also because I tend to have structured approach to most things. Having said that, I will often abandon a book after 20-50 pages if it has not grabbed me. If I am willing to walk away from a book, then maybe I lose nothing reading the end. I have to try that.
I also like to have the loose ends tidied up & to feel like the initial ‘promise’ made by the author in terms of where the story is heading had been delivered.
I very much prefer the hero to win the day, but credit a heroic loss as long as the character has stayed true to his/her purpose – hidden or otherwise.
The flipside is I get enraged when the initial promise made by the author is not delivered and the character wanders off somewhere pretty much unchanged. That’s book at the wall territory for me, no matter how cool the protagonist is:)
One thing I particularly hate are endings that aren’t. For example the numerous books in the iddles of numerous series that leave practically every thread still loose. Or worse still – those that end on a cliff hanger with no resolution.
A good ending should provide resolution to the main plot in the book. I think it is entirely reasonable that the author drop some blatent hint about what the next book will be about if it is in a series, however the end should be sufficiently fulfilling that you don’t feel like you have to read the “next thrilling installment” right now.
For example consider Dave Freer’s Dragon’s Ring. The basic quest objectives are all completed, our heroine has done her maturing so we have lots of completion. But then our heroine solves the ultimate part of the quest by disappearing which leads us nicely on to wanting to know “what happens next?” but yet we don’t feel like we have to know instantly because everything else came to completion
Nicely summed up, masgramondou. Series are particularly tricky, but you need to have enough resolution as well as extending threads to leave things in balance. Dave’s book had an awesome cover BTW:)
With series, the internal break points need to either tie up major subplots, or tie up what looks like the main plot, and at the start of the next book, you find out that behind the problem you solved, there’s another, bigger problem.
Or put the books out really close together, with _reasonably_ good break points. So long as they buy the next book and are satisfied in the end, all’s well.
Heh. Says the writer whose readers refer to her ten mostly stand-alone books in the same universe as “a chronicle.”
How to get me not to read your book: end with a life-or-death cliffhanger and let me know the next book will be out in four years. Yes, I flipped to the end because I was curious if this would be the last book of a trilogy. It isn’t, but I’m not going to read and then hang for four years.
I’m with ABE, give me an emotionally satisfying resolution, have a character develop, don’t add a thread just to wrap up the book, and spare me great declamations and sermons [glares at book that jumped the rails and almost got tossed with ten pages yet to go].
Hi, TXRed. Let me guess – you have a dart board with a picture of George RR Martin on it? Don’t you just love and hate that guy! Why, why, why. . .Such a huge gap between books.
I have to admit to being the guilt party on the series front. I released book 1 of the Jakirian trilogy in 2006 in Australia. I never would have guessed it would take me another 7 years to get the latter two books of the trilogy published! I felt terrible about the undelivered promise to readers of book1. All three are being released in new format in November. This time I was determined anyone could buy book1 knowing the others were out.
An amalgam of what the poster and others have said, for me. The book should close with resolution, but it doesn’t have to be ‘endings.’ Pam Uphoff’s WIP example above of an unresolved romantic subplot is a good one. The major arcs of the plot have been grounded, but the resolution phase of the book often has as much to do with indicating the ‘lives go on from here.’ This is done frequently and quite well in Romance. In SF/F it’s often more acceptable to conclude the story arc and leave the ‘resumption of mundane life’ to be assumed. I’m cool with that approach, as well. But I want resolution! I really dislike ambiguity or FUD when I close the book.
In shorts, the rules can be different. The investment is smaller, and the payoff of suspended endings can be worth it for me. IF they spark the thinking and imagining. I’ve read cliffhanger shorts that feel unfinished, and that frustrates.
So, resolution, or leads you to ideas of continuing resolutions, or sparks enough ideas and thought to substitute for resolution (only in shorts!).
Hi, Eamon. Interesting thoughts on resolution there – how really it is showing how things could continue perhaps in a new way. I do so much intinctive plotting, I often get surpised by new ways of looking at what I do, and I think this is an interesting way to consider things.
Nice point with shorts. Been a while since I written them, but the idea of showing ideas for sparking off thinking on top of closing off other angles is an intriguing one. I probably tend to go for too much closure, if anything.
My favorite ending, from a Louis L’Amour story I forgot the name of:
“He took a shot at me and missed. I took a shot at him, and didn’t.”
grin
What promises did you make to the reader in the beginning of the story? When those are fulfilled, I’m happy. Usually, I want to see character growth – but I understand with noir detective and some other genres, the main character ending the same as he started, a little more battered but with a little more payoff to make the rent, is about all you can expect. (Simon R Green’s Tales From the Nightside twisted that trope, though; that’s all I was expecting, and then I got deeply hooked in the larger plot questions – who is the collector? what happened to the detective’s parents?)
I recently read a book that was being offered free, because i vaguely recognized the author’s name, and why not? The world was unique, and it sounded interesting. It opens with our protagonist as a small-minded two-bit con artist and thug. Well, heck, Han Solo was presented much the same, so I kept reading. At the end, after it turns out that all the major players are corrupt, and all were using each other and destroying the structure in which they lived, having gone far out beyond anything he knew and come back home, having been helped by the kindness of strangers he wasn’t grateful to, the protagonist was… a stupidly small-minded two-bit con artist and thug. Only now his girlfriend that he was unfaithful toward had left him, too. That book nearly caused a kindle-sized dent in the wall. No matter how big the bangs and flashy the fireworks, if there’s nothing likeable in the character, and nothing in the way of character growth or world growth, then there’s no real story there. That story was worth less than free, because I wasted several hours reading it I can’t get back.
Hi, Dorothy. Sorry to hear about your negative reading experience. That sounds like a story that would have irritated me too. It’s a good thing you didn’t throw the kindle, because they are much less bouncy than real books:)
I like Bujold’s endings. She gives you the grand climax, and then all the tying up loose ends, being happy about it all, maybe a little gloating, and what have you. It’s all very satisfying
Hm… haven’t gone on a Bujold reading binge for a while. Studying her endings sounds like a grand excuse. 😉
I enjoy Bujold. I have not read many though – never managed to get hold of the first of the various series and didn’t want to start half-way through.
The Miles Vorkosigan books are *very* readable out of order… at least up to the point I caught up with the new ones and only got them *in* order because I had to wait for the next one. I think that the first I read was _Brother’s in Arms_ and it didn’t hurt a thing going back from that to the earlier ones.
I think Sharing Knife books would need to be in order. The group starting with Curse of Chalion… I donno.
But the Vorkosigan books are stand alones. I’d bet the later ones do as well out of order as the early ones did.
I’m pretty sure I read the Chalion books in no particular order, and everything was just fine. I think there’s only two with character linkage IIRC.
I’ve been looking at some old manuscripts of short stories and remembering all the “this seems like the start of a novel” critiques I got. There was also a “serial” I wrote on a writing board that got a bunch of “but, but, but… what happened to this person and that person and… this can’t be *over*!”
And I’m realizing with hindsight that what I interpreted as “you’re doing something wrong” was probably mostly that I’d done things right and created a world and characters that people would have liked to see more of. So they get to the end and it’s, “there should be more.” But what I heard was “this isn’t complete, it doesn’t end, you’re doing it wrong.”
The endings could have been better, no doubt. Still, we’re so often our own worst enemies, aren’t we? I’m realizing that I’ve internalized “you can’t write endings” and possibly for no good reason. It would be great to have more discussion on endings, more about that last third of the story or book where the climax and resolution exist.
I’m starting to suspect that when my endings seem weak that it might actually be the stakes and the climax that are weak. Maybe I haven’t “sold” the consequences of failure so winning is meh. If there is no breath-holding in apprehension or tension between possible outcomes, then getting the perfect denouement might not be a matter of finally figuring out the right words. Maybe?
Check out the traditional “Hero’s Journey” structure. One part of it is a major dark moment, and the conscious realization of things like wrong approaches to a problem or realization of one’s own faults–followed by decision and determination to win/change/do what must be done and so forth. _Then_ the climatic battle or scene or confrontation. _Then_ the ending needs to show the character with his bright shiny new understanding going on with life, changed. Or that the character has the ability to return to a normal life, after the crisis. Whatever is appropriate. It could well be that the character needs to let go of what he learned or did to win.
Hi, Synova. I tend to do most of my plotting instinctively. I’ve come across various story structure theories, but never really followed any. One thing that did stick in my mind though was the general ‘thirds’ rule. The first third of the book should be setting up the story, introducing the characters, setting up the problem – which of course involves conflict ideally at both personal and world levels. The second third is where things start to move and the tension builds, perhaps the stakes rise – but no new characters are introduced. Then the last third should be all the action ‘after the dam has broken’ hurtling toward the big conclusion.
I often double-check that I have not accidentally introduced any new threads or characters later than that first third. I find it a handy rule.
I’ll probably never read ‘A Man Rides Through’, and am unlikely to buy anything from Donaldson, because he cheated me with the non-ending in ‘The Mirror of Her Dreams’. And I really liked the 98% or so of Mirror before I realized I was being sold an installment plan.
Hi, Dave. I actually didn’t mind Mirror of Her Dreams. I looked around at the time for the follow on books, but couldn’t get my hands on them. Then I moved on. I was not that committed to finding them.
With Donaldson though – I was bitterly disappointed with the end of his first Illearth war trilogy. He had great ideas for his world, which drew me in, but where he wanted to take the whole story was far, far away from the sort of heoric climax that rings my bells.
I heard Donaldson talk about that first series. It was that ‘power of guilt’ thing that was really turning him on – which I never really ‘got’ . I think he failed to achieve what he really wanted in that ending. The second Illearth war was even more disappointing for me. He seemed to want to destroy every postivie aspect of the world and demolish the characters while he was at it. So I guess I stopped being a fan after that.