Part 3: Endings

Chapter 7: “Satisfying Endings: Delivering on the Promise”

The reader can just feel the forces gathering

Characters are on the verge of being pushed into action,
or disasters are on the edge of occurring,
or secrets are about to be disclosed,
or a deadline is almost here,
or a situation has become so intolerable that it’s obvious somebody is about to bring it toppling down around everyone else’s ears.

Something has to give.

At its beginning, a story makes the kind of implicit promise discussed throughout the book. In the middle, the development of both characters and conflict extends that promise by arranging forces in opposition to each other. We see various problems and tensions come closer and closer to collision.

Then comes the ending. It must use those same characters, conflicts, problems, and tensions to show us the collision (the climax).

How do you find an ending that delivers?

First think carefully about what your story has promised the reader, both emotionally and intellectually.

Vicarious terror?
Vicarious love?
Justice?
The answer to a problem?
An insight into contemporary life?
The feeling that life isn’t so bad after all?
A view of a workable alternate society?
A warm and cozy feeling?

Second, think carefully about the forces you’ve set in conflict throughout the middle.

What are they?
Can you list them?
Which ending would bring them into plausible, satisfying collision, leaving some victorious and others vanquished?
Which ones have you made promises about from the beginning?

The ending dramatizes the triumph of some of the forces developed in the middle, which in turn were set in motion by the characters and conflict introduced in the beginning.

That is what your ending must accomplish. How you accomplish it is by controlling the two parts common to most story endings: the climax and the denouement.

Climaxes That Do

The climax can be defined as whatever big event the forces in your story have been building toward.

If a character is going to change, this is the experience that finally demonstrates that change (although earlier experiences may also play a part).

If a problem is going to get solves, this is where the protagonist solves it. (The villain makes his last big fight, the lovers are united, the family tension finally explodes, the quest reaches its goal, the decisive confrontation occurs).

This is the payoff.

To succeed, a climax must do four things:

The climax must satisfy the view of life implied in your story.
The climax must deliver emotion. The readers should feel whatever your characters feel. If your characters don’t feel anything in particular, this is not the climax.
The climax must deliver an appropriate level of emotion. The level of drama in the climax must match the level of drama throughout the story. Too much drama will short circuit a restrained, quiet story. Too little drama will seem flat in a story already festooned with murder, betrayal, war, sex, car chases, or other strong action.
The climax must feel logical to your plot and your story. The climactic scene must grow naturally out of the actions that preceded it, which in turn must have grown naturally out of the personalities of the characters. Make sure your climax is not only plausible for your characters, but pretty close to inevitable.

The Right Ending: A Litmus Test

A successful ending must be tied not only to the author’s implicit promise and the forces dramatized in the middle, but also to the protagonist’s nature.

A test for your ending is this question: If my protagonist were a radically different person, would this story still end the same way? The answer should be NO. If it is YES—if the events of your book would be unaltered no matter whom they happened to—your ending will not feel convincing.

The ending must grow out of the character’s deepest self.

A Final Word on the Climactic Scene

The climax must be in proportion to the length of your story.

In novels, the climax usually occupies at least a chapter; it may take up several chapters.

Consider your story as a jewelry setting, and your climax the diamond. The diamond may not be as large as the gold around it, but it should be large enough to not seem insignificant by comparison.

The Denouement: “Marryin’ and Buryin’”

Everything after the climax is called the denouement, whose function is to wrap up the story. The denouement shows us two things:

The consequences of the plot
The fate of any characters not accounted for in the climax

If your story leaves questions unanswered or characters dangling, you might consider adding a denouement to satisfy reader curiosity.

A successful denouement has three characteristics:

Closure
Brevity
Dramatization

Closure means you give your readers enough information about the fate of the characters for them to feel that the book really is over. Show just enough of your characters’ futures that the reader doesn’t feel that he’s been left hanging.

Readers don’t want to decide for themselves what happened. They want you to decide, based on the dual grounds that you’re the writer and they just read four hundred pages of your prose anticipating this very information that you are now withholding.

Brevity is important to a denouement because if it goes on too long, it will leach all emotion from the climax. End while your reader is still affected by your big scene. Anything else will feel anticlimactic.

The more subtle and low-key the climax in action and tone, the briefer the denouement should be.

Dramatization ensures that your denouement feels like part of the story, not a chunk of exposition tacked on after the story’s over. Try to show what happens to your characters by showing them in action. Whatever action you choose to dramatize, your denouement should be fairly mild. Otherwise it may compete with the climax.

To Epilogue or Not to Epilogue

Novelists generally set the denouement apart in an epilogue only if it differs significantly from the main narrative in time or place, or if it’s going to be in a radically different style.

If the events in your novel require wrapping up in a different place, time, or narrative style, consider calling the wrap-up an epilogue. This alerts the reader that something different is coming up, softening the sense of discontinuity from the main narrative.

The label “epilogue” can also shift reader expectations about tone, from the immediacy of the climax to a longer, more contemplative view of what the climax might mean.

The Special Case of the Series Book

Every book in a series bears a special burden . In addition to standing on its own as a satisfying reading experience, it must also leave the door open for the next book. This means things can’t be too thoroughly wrapped up.

There are three kinds of series books, and what you write about depends on which kind you’re creating.

· Sue Grafton’s “alphabet mysteries” feature the same protagonist in every book.

o This means Kinsey Millhone must finish every book alive, still willing to be a detective, and enough unchanged that readers who enjoyed her in one book won’t find her with a different personality in the next book.

o If you write this kind of series, you need to make sure your protagonist ends up in roughly the same professional and emotional place she started.

o You’ll have to emphasize plot over character development.

· The second series type allows more freedom because the books don’t feature the same character but only the same setting, or the same family, or maybe just the same universe.

o The protagonist in one book doesn’t necessarily appear in the next.

o Only the conceptual framework—a chain of descendants or a future controlled by the predictive genius of “Psychohistory”—remains the same.

o Characters can change, die, or exit the story.

o When the author finishes one story within the framework, he shifts focus to another protagonist.

· The third kind of series also permits characters to change, but without shifting focus from the initial protagonists. These don’t allow readers to expect that the protagonist will return to essentially unchanged circumstances in the next installment.

o Both circumstances and protagonist evolve.

You need to know which kind of series you are writing:

· If it’s the first type, you simply invent a new problem for your permanent protagonist.

· If it’s the second type, leave something in the plot situation unresolved, to be taken up in later book(s) by different characters.

· If you’re writing the third type of series, prepare for the next book by leaving your characters some unsettled personal issues—what psychiatrists call “unfinished business.”

o If your characters are realistic human beings, there will always be unsettled issues, because as the characters age, they react to new circumstances with old psychological equipment.

In the first and second types of series, you don’t wait until the end of the book to set up the next book.

If the plot situation will be left unresolved enough to spawn many stories with many characters, it has to be large-scaled and complex.

If the characters will be able to support additional stories about them, they too will have to be multi-layered and complex. The place to create complexity is not at the end of the book but in the middle. That’s where characterization is deepened, situations complicated. That’s where you leave doors open for future volumes.

Checklist for Successful Endings

Check your proposed ending against the following list:

· Does the climax grow logically out of the specific experiences that this character had in the middle of the story?

· Has the character change (if there is one) been prepared for by the events of the middle of the story, or is it a come-to-suddenly-realize change?

· Are all the various forces present at the climax also present in the middle of the story?

· Is the fate of each secondary character in the climax or the denouement consistent with how these people were portrayed in the middle?

· Does the ending deliver on the promise implicit in the middle of the story—that is, does it fulfill reader expectations you developed by the events, tone, and world view of the middle?

· Is your climax in proportion to the middle of the story—neither too different from it in level of drama nor too short in terms of total page count?

If the answer to all of these questions is “yes,” you’ve got a viable ending—and a good middle.

Chapter 8: “The Very End: Last Scene, Last Paragraph, Last Sentence”

Resolution Versus Resonance

Short stories divide into two broad, overlapping categories:

The traditional plotted story
The contemporary literary short story

The traditional plotted story is easy to recognize.

The plot complications are resolved for better or worse
The fates of all major characters are made clear
When the story’s over, there are no loose ends

The contemporary literary short story

May not seem to resolve anything or account for what happens to the characters
Nonresolution of situation and plot is actually deliberate.
These stories aim at examining a situation but not resolving it because the situation is ambiguous, interesting in and of itself without resolution, or impossible to resolve.
The story resonates—it sets off in the reader a complex intellectual and emotional reaction to the skillful rendering of a meaningful situation.
“Literature is the question minus the answer” (Roland Barthes)
The ending is dependent on symbol and nuance rather than resolution

Resonance is that which strikes chords of recognition and meaning in the reader: I too have felt that, or I’ve always thought that but I never had words for it before.

For this resonance to work, you need a sensitive reader—one capable of making subtle connections between the world of the story and the world he lives in. Not all readers can or want to do that.

The Ending of a Traditional Plotted Story

At the end of the story, something must have changed in a meaningful way from the beginning.

This change should be embodied in an action. It’s not enough to just show that a character realizes something she didn’t know before; she must do something about it, or at least resolve to do something about it.

When you choose an action to dramatize whatever has changed from the beginning of your story, consider one additional criterion.
The end of a story often delivers a dose of emotion—a rise in the emotional temperature of the narrative.
Whatever emotion your story as a whole seeks to convey, try to choose a final action that will evoke it to the reader.

The Ending of a Contemporary Literary Short Story

The ending of the contemporary literary short story may or may not be identical with the climax.
The story usually makes its point through symbol rather than resolving anything through action.
The symbols evolve throughout the story, frequently turning up as early as the first paragraph.

The Very, Very End: The Last Paragraph

The last paragraph of a short story is the power position—and within that position, the last sentence is the most powerful of all.

Often, the last sentence or paragraph evokes the theme of the entire story. Effective final paragraphs use action, symbol, or a character’s thoughts to seamlessly comment on the story’s meaning while also bringing the plot to a close.

The last sentences of novels, too, tend to imply the theme of the entire work.

Rewriting: Looking for a Few Good Sentences

Rewriting your ending is just as important as rewriting your beginning, and repays the effort just as strongly.

A good beginning gains your reader’s initial interest; a good ending makes your story linger in his memory after he closes the book.

Notes from Nancy Kress Book: Endings