Writing a great ending for your book is just as important as a dynamite opening that rivets our attention and compels us to keep turning those pages.
A well-written book requires some kind of symphonic climax that resonates in our heads and hearts like the famous 40-second E major chord at the end of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band. Our response may be filled with joy, hope, and happiness, or it may lead us to feel uncomfortable, to frown, scratch our heads, and worry about the unknown mysteries of life.
I’ve worked with many fiction and narrative nonfiction authors to achieve such closure for plot-driven thrillers, mysteries, romances, literary novels, memoirs, and young adult books, but also histories, biographies, travel books, and other stories. I don’t believe there’s a predictable formula for every ending, far from it. But nevertheless, it’s essential to provide an emotional landing place, so the reader can put down the book with a sense that “Yes, it may not have happened to me actually, but my life is richer for having read this. I know more about the world, people, relationships, the way things happen.”
This kind of emotionally satisfying ending is by no means easy to write. If it gets made into a film and makes it on ‘the best upcoming horror movies coming out soon‘ list or a ‘top romance films this month’ post, then the ending needs to be something that will gel with the audiences and create something that can excite and thrill on the page and on screen. Anyway, here are some tips to remember.
Endings are about change
It’s disappointing for a reader to reach the end of the book only to realize that the characters and continuing events are basically at the same point as the beginning. I’ve seen this with many early drafts: not enough has happened.
Endings are about change. Fiction and narrative nonfiction stories are about overcoming major obstacles, quests, and transformations. The changes may not be all good. The story may be upsetting or depressing. But if none of the book’s characters has learned anything and the challenges faced at the outset remain static and identical to those at the end, the story can seem pointless, unsatisfying, and without universal significance.
All writers can look to the Young Adult category for great examples of overcoming difficult problems with courageous changes that lead to fully evolved endings. Judy Blume pioneered realistic stories about sex, racism, and divorce in a teenager’s life with such books as Are You There God? It’s me, Margaret and It’s Not the End of the World. New generations of YA authors have continued this gritty approach to the real lives of preteens, teens, and young adults, from S.E. Hinton (The Outsiders) to Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games).
Find the right moment to end
It’s crucial to realize when it’s time to stop. Authors often send me a draft ending that repeats and churns over previous action, or goes off on a new and irrelevant digression. This kind of treading water can indicate the fear of not having demonstrated or explained everything enough.
I worked recently on an ambitious and complex novel that took four or five drafts to produce an ending that tied up a painful family relationship which had been interrupted for thirty years by historical disasters and personal wrong turns. The trick was to acknowledge mistakes and calamities without reiteration or blame, while at the same time avoiding any saccharine projections into the future. Ultimately the author succeeded in writing just a few short paragraphs with words chosen as carefully as a haiku or sonnet. It’s not always easy to write such a good ending, but in this case the end was exceptionally well crafted.
But don’t end prematurely!
Sometimes the curtain falls with a surprising thud. Beware of premature endings that leave too many threads still unraveled. Most mystery and thriller readers will agree that crimes should be solved and the world saved from political or corporate terrorists and other heinous villains. I’ve worked with several writers to develop mysteries with a strong suspect that turns out to be innocent, or a cumulative gathering of clues leading to one of many potential suspects. Similarly I’ve edited global thrillers (i.e. Robert Ludlum’s The Scarlatti Inheritance) that leave the reader nervous and uncomfortable, but with a sense of some hope for the future. John le Carre is the master of such ambiguous endings, as in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Constant Gardener.
Another frequent cause of a premature ending is the hope this book will launch a series. I’ve learned first hand while working with authors like Clive Cussler on his Dirk Pitt thriller Night Probe, and Ernest Tidyman’s Shaft that a continuing hero or heroine may age and develop in new ways over several titles, but each story needs to be complete on its own. It isn’t fair to demand the reader buy a second or third book to find out what happens.
Romances demand the same respect when avoiding a premature ending. The curtain can descend on either a happy or unhappy couple, but it can’t just fall out of the blue. Even after Rhett said he didn’t “give a damn” about what happened to Scarlett O’Hara, Margaret Mitchell kept going until her plucky heroine declared with signature fortitude: After all, tomorrow is another day.
Similarly, a successful memoir can’t either go on unnecessarily or stop precipitously. Memoirs focus on a discreet thread of the author’s life that makes a point, has a theme, and therefore requires an enlightened ending, even though the life itself isn’t over. Again, it doesn’t have to be happy, successful or inspiring, though that can help. What’s more important is a coming-of-age or the resolution of obstacles overcome, with experience and wisdom for anything that might follow.
In The Glass Castle, for example, Jeanette Walls takes pains to tell the story of her profoundly dysfunctional family in a sober and straightforward manner. Walls keeps her focus steadily, without judgment but rather compassion for her parents and siblings, and ends the story with a message of survival and redemption, leavened with affection and good humor.
Outlier endings
Not all endings are neat or tidy.
I’ve also worked with several writers whose last page leaves various threads of the story still tangled. The inimitable Tom Robbins comes to mind, since Jitterbug Perfume can hardly be described as having a tidy ending but rather drifts off into thin air: The lesson of the beet, then, is this: hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown. Once you’re brown, you’ll find that you’re blue. As blue as indigo. And you know what that means: Indigo. Indigoing. Indigone.”
Or the late Hunter S. Thompson, whose Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ended in a frustrated rant, brought up short in order to make our overdue deadline: I hung up and drank some more gin. Then I put a Dolly Parton album on the tape machine and watched the trees outside my balcony getting lashed around in the wind. Around midnight, when the rain stopped, I put on my special Miami Beach nightshirt and walked several blocks down La Cienga Boulevard to the Losers Club.
The last pages of Toni Morrison’s first book The Bluest Eye are also disturbing and uncomfortable to say the least, and I remember when Toni first brought me her manuscript, how shaken I was by the ending: The soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn’t matter. It’s too late. At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it’s much, much, much too late.
Dozens of conservative school and community libraries disapproved of the book and it was banned in many places. But it launched a career that led ultimately to the Nobel Prize for Literature.
What about you?
Are you working on the ending of a book? I’ll watch for any questions here in comments.
I want to be a writer when i get out of highschool but i don’t know how. This infomation will really help me, I try and write short stories on different types of websites to see what feed back i get. I would love to show you my work in the future, it would be a real honour. (I hope i spelled atleast half of this right)
I’ve been having the hardest time trying to write an ending to my book. This article has helped tremendously with the tips provided. Thanks so much for sharing!
The ending concept comments are interesting. For my novel, SEARCHING, which has a racial theme, plot
points, back and front story involvement, and an ending that echos the early chapters. And what was most interesting to me, I had the ending line first, before I wrote the book. So I had to write the entire story to get to that last line. And when I got there, I added two words to the original line, and it worked beautifully. But I found it amazing that I could write an entire novel with my target last line looming over the creative horizon beckoning me toward it. I have to admit, I have never written another novel where I had the last line already written. I think it had something to do with my subconscious mind, because the theme of the novel came to me after I heard a fellow worker’s comment about another fellow worker that I thought was perceptive and fascinating. And my subconscious mind must have been working overtime on the subject area and beamed the last line to me first. Good thing I wrote it down and kept a file of all the other “goodies” my subconscious mind beamed into my conscious mind for reference keeping in that file. Never discount the power of your subconscious mind. Let it do most of the “donkey” work for your conscious mind. It’ll make a writing star out of you, and you won’t have to share the credit.
Carla
I can’t be sure without reading it, but from what you’ve said it seems like the end of the first story provides stand-alone closure while at the same time sustaining the mystery of the book’s magic. Sound fine and your critique volunteer agrees. So when submitting your work to agents, publishers, or readers don’t change the ending, but rather wait to see what kind of responses you get.
Good luck!
Thanks so much for this piece, which speaks to a problem I’ve been thinking a lot about.
I wrote a (magical realism) novel for kids (upper middle-grade that may be able to cross into YA) as a creative counterpoint to my writing day job and as a gift to my daughter. Whether I ever sell this first one or not, I have known from early on that the story of these characters would carry on past the first book. I’ll keep writing that story even if it’s just for my daughter and me.
However, the ending of the first book, which feels instinctively right to me, does not tie up all loose ends or answer all the questions about the source or reasoning behind the MC’s mysterious and unpredictable magic; it gives the reader one more bit of information (a hint) .. but it is a mysterious hint and one that I would hope leaves the reader’s gears turning (in a good way).
When I broached this to one of my kind critique volunteers, he said he didn’t have any problem with the manuscript as a standalone book; that the ending worked for him either way. But when I consider trying to send out queries, I wonder if I will have to rewrite that ending? (I do make sure it’s clear that my MC has reached her own/personal resolution, making peace with the uncertainty of the magic in her life.)
Any thoughts?
Thanks so much.
Great advice. I’m reminded of the recent Captain America film. Despite the best costumes, sets and effects money can buy, it was let down by getting to the end of the movie and finding out that Cap was… exactly the same nice chap as when he had started. He hadn’t learned a bean, except that it’s nice to be nice. Gah! I’m still angry at the price of the cinema ticket.
Endings are TOUGH though!
RCO
I can’t provide any specific advice without reading your manuscript, but generally speaking happy endings are never required, provided you do have closure for the story. Be sure to indicate at the end of the first book, however, that your cop off the force is still determined to go on with his life and believes justice will ultimately prevail, thereby setting up the second book in the series.
This is really great advice. Thanks! I’m so glad someone is against the whole make-the-ending-sound-like-the-beginning-of-a-series thing. Trilogies are great, but some books need to be standalone.
Alan
Thank you for this insightful post, I always find your blog to be a true value add to my thinking and writing process.
I am near completion of the first draft of a book that began as a backstory for a book that will now be the sequel. A backstory that is up to almost 570 pages in length, before it goes through a stringent revision in which I expect page count to drop under 500.
My challenge is that the first book sets up the second book, so that the protagonist (an Atlanta cop who is put on trial) ends up in a situation where his life has been derailed, while the “bad guy” in the book (a politically ambitious DA) ends up with his life about to take him and his family to a better place.
Specifically, the cop, who gets rung through the justice system’s ringer, ends up off the Force and on probation, while the prosecutor who put him on trial ends up elected to Congress.
Events will bring them back into conflict in book two, which will began after a ten year gap. I don’t leave any of the story lines unresolved in book one, however, the book doesn’t have what might be considered a happy ending. Although all of the major characters do change throughout the story, and many of them do end up in a much better place.
I have taken solace from some of the John Le Carre books I have read that similarly end with endings that have left me with ambiguous feelings. (Spy, Most Wanted Man)
I have struggled with the dynamic, but have decided to be true to the story and end it a way that is honest to the story, instead of attempting to contrive a happier ending for the novel.
There is definite closure at the end of the book, it’s just that when you’re a cop put on trial for illegitimate reasons sometimes the end result puts you in a place that is worse off than where you began in the book–near the end of a stake-out looking forward to finally being promoted to Lieutenant.
RCO
Hi Alan,
You were very kind to review my novel “Teatime for the Firefly” last year and you gave me excellent feedback which I have taken to heart, coming from someone enlightened and experienced as you. Your comment was that my ending was too hurried and left the reader feeling dissatisfied. I have modified it since and stretched it out so that the story settles more gracefully.
Are you still drinking Assam Tea? Suddenly the world wants to know all about Assam Tea, what it is, where to buy it etc. I have posted a supplier source on my blog, incase you are interested. Here it is:
http://teabuddy.wordpress.com/in-this-blog/
Wishing you wonderful things this year and I hope we meet again.
Warmly,
Shona Patel
Thank you for the advice, Mr. Rinzler. Will do.
Annette,
Sustaining the reality of a historical period you’re writing about is important, but as a fiction writer you can create a female character true to the times who also has an exceptional spirit of independence and bravery. Such women have appeared in history and in literature, from Homer to Virginia Woolf. Your character may face obstacles and struggle against oppression, but the end of her story can also be courageous and hopeful, as a marker for future women.
As for length, don’t try to keep down the page count by sacrificing the ending. Look instead for any other digression or repetition that’s not essential.
Good luck.
This is a topical post for me as well. I’ve been struggling with the ending to my novel for months now. (Well, on and off) My story is based in ancient Sparta and is historical women’s fiction following the life of a young woman. I think one problem has to do with trying to write a satisfying ending to my character’s arc, yet staying within the confines of her ancient society. I’m afraid my modern readers might find the ending I have written thus far not satisfying enough in this time of feminism. And the other problem lies with pressure about word count. My story is already at 132K, with the last 2 scenes still to be written. I know another revision pass will tighten at least a few thousand words(hopefully more), but that still has me up there and makes me want to get my ending down with as few words as possible. But I don’t want to cheat the story or the readers. Your paragraph here:
I worked recently on an ambitious and complex novel that took four or five drafts to produce an ending that tied up a painful family relationship which had been interrupted for thirty years by historical disasters and personal wrong turns. The trick was to acknowledge mistakes and calamities without reiteration or blame, while at the same time avoiding any saccharine projections into the future. Ultimately the author succeeded in writing just a few short paragraphs with words chosen as carefully as a haiku or sonnet. It’s not always easy to write such a good ending, but in this case the end was exceptionally well crafted.
struck a very close chord with my current experience and gives me hope that the right words will come. In the meantime, I will don my warrior’s persona and not be intimidated.
Thank you for this post.
Very topical post for me. I have been wrestling with my ending off and on for nearly a year. A hard task indeed, gone through several drafts and only now does it feel almost ‘right’. As my novel is part of a larger story, some character and plot threads do still need to be left unresolved, but with a satisfying enough feeling for a reader that they have reached some conclusion. I agree with some of the comments that it felt right to return to a key theme of the story. For one of my characters it’s about honesty, facing the truth, the punishment for their crime.
Thanks for a thought provoking post!
Carolyn
Going back to add foreshadowing so an ending will resonate is a very interesting idea. Thanks for adding this valuable contribution to the conversation. That’s just what we hope for!
Guilie
Glad to hear you’re coming to the San Francisco Writers Conference, and hope you find it useful. Many editors, agents, and publishing entrepreneurs will be there, leading workshops, panels and trainings, and also available for formal and informal face-to-face sessions.
I look forward to meeting you and hearing the pitch for your new and improved ending.
An editor once told me that he likes to have the ending echo in some way what was going on thematically in the beginning. At that time, for that particular story, what I did wasn’t to tweak the ending, but to go back and tweak the beginning to plant the seeds of the ending.
Sometimes, for some writers, the theme isn’t fully developed until the end. So, for some of us, we have to go back and add in that foreshadowing and any references that will give the ending additional resonance.
Thanks, as always, for a very thought-provoking post.
I’m currently fine-tuning the novel I’ll pitch in the SFO conference next month (Alan, you’re the reason I chose that conference, my first ever), and a lot of what you said here rang so true. Oh, if only you’d written this post six months ago when I wrote the first draft… No matter, it’s here now. The novel is of a literary/women’s fiction bent, and the ending is of that somewhat ambiguous kind, the one that leaves optimists hoping, cynics despairing. Most of all, the ending needs to bring home the theme of the story (“There is no worse nostalgia tan to yearn for what never happened”), and I’m afraid I might have ended too soon. Based on your advice here, I’ll go back and make sure to provide resolution, wrap up loose threads, so that the ending is organic, even if some find it disappointing.
Thanks for this, Alan!
This is good advice. I’m always brainstorming for ways to end the current novel I’m working on. I think it’s getting better, but it’s nice to find more advice and different points of views to add to the mix of ingredients. Thank you.
It’s tempting for the writer to leave some things open-ended but most readers want resolution. I already know the ending of the novel I’m working on now, and it’s not going to be ambiguous.
In Good Faith by Jane Smiley (one of my all-time favorite books) the final plot point is resolved in the last phrase of the last long sentence: ” … and I followed her, as fast as she could go.”
Like all great fiction, it has compelling characters, interesting details, a plot that surprises us but remains believable. Maybe that’s what’s lacking in the books Mike doesn’t like.
Vera,
I can’t say without reading the story if what you’ve done works or not. Being in another world at the end is fine, but what about the various challenges or problems the character was facing? If you want to build loyalty and future sales, I’d recommend finishing story number one or risk not having readers for the rest of the series.
Mike,
There’s been an an astronomical increase in the cost of paper over the 20 years, so book publishers have struggled to keep down the retail price by using a more affordable but lighter stock. So it’s not so much about counting beans, but rather surviving as an industry. As for the number of superior books overall, it’s always been hard for acquisition editors and readers to find truly great books. Nevertheless, check out The NY Times Bestseller list for January 1, 2012, which includes such titles as IQ84 by Haruki Murakami, The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein, The Help by Katheyrn Stockett, and The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, and others.
I’m a YA writer and I like stories that run into a series. The one I’m working on now ends with the character being thrown into another world which happens to be his own. I leave it there for the next book to pick up where it left off. Is that a wrong thing to do? I know other authors do this but I guess they have sold the series.
More often than not I never get to the end of current books, even pretty good ones. Most books are so poorly edited that anything interesting has been said by half to three quarters of the way through. Seems as if the only reason for the last sections are to pad the manuscript to the contracted length. Fiction or non-fiction, the majority of books published are screaming for an editor. This makes me less likely to buy books, rather than take them out of the library, or forget about them if the library doesn’t get the book. If you think of a book as a cheap, poorly produced ephemeral product, why lay out $18.00 or more on Amazon to own it? If you look back twenty years or more, books were vastly superior, not only in being well edited, but even the printing ink, quality of the paper and binding of hardcovers from the major publisher were far superior to what we are getting now. The American publishing industry, like our car industry, cheapened the product when it became dominated by bean counters with a bottom line mentality.