Ask any agent , publisher, editor, or movie producer. Of my nearly published books, more than two-thirds have been novels that started as ideas, so I know what most everybody in the business knows:. I know. Need help writing your novel? Click here to download my ultimate step guide. How you expect the story to end should inform every scene, every chapter.
It may change, evolve, grow as you and your characters experience the inevitable arcs , but never leave it to chance. Give it a few days, a few weeks if necessary. Take a long walk. Think on it. Sleep on it. Jot notes about it.
Let your subconscious work on it. Play what-if games. Be outrageous if you must. Force that ending to sing. Make it unforgettable. This goes without saying. But I say it anyway, why? Obviously, this is one of the easiest endings to write. This is achieved by holding back information or leaving multiple logical explanations up in the air, allowing the reader to make up their own mind. The audience is refused a fully informed outcome.
They may be left thinking a range of questions:. In this story, there are two explanations for the reader to consider at the end. One is more implied than the other, but both are feasible. Lehane has written so masterfully that he effectively teases the reader, leaving them uncomfortably torn between the two. Personally, it took me a couple of months and a conversation with my mother, who had also read the book, to settle on one ending over the other.
In theory, a story that ends in this way catches the audience by surprise with a completely unexpected turn of events.
As a result, the whole story is usually turned upside down, with a previously believed fact turning out to be false. You can bring them up quickly or send them crashing down, depending on what route you decide to take with your story. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk is a novel and film that quickly comes to mind here.
The revelation towards the end of the story will have you replaying every previous event in your mind and will completely change your understanding of the novel. To put it simply, a story written in this fashion will begin and end in the same way. The ending is revealed first before the author fills in the details of how that ending came to be.
While this may take away some of the suspense for a reader, a clever author is still able to introduce twists and surprises.
The Star by Arthur C. Clarke is a nice short example of a tie-back ending; the beginning shows a main character in pain, and the ending ties back to the cause of his pain. Cliffhanger endings, as their name suggests, leave the hero dangling in the jaws of some unsolved danger. These are often seen on TV and movies and are used often at the ends of a chapter , though the Goosebumps books, if anyone remembers, are good examples.
Open endings, the ones where the hero's true fate is left to the reader's imagination, can also be argued to fall under this classification. The Shocker. These endings leave the reader thinking, "Oh, Gods, no way!
Horror , crime , and thrillers make use of these endings a lot, and if you're looking for great examples, look no further than the fiction of Roald Dahl. The Philosopher. Occasionally, a story ends with an invitation to wonder and keep exploring its themes. The hero's journey concludes, but not quite : the reader is still left to wonder about the hero's fate, though not always in a cliffhanger or shocker sense.
I call this type of ending the Philosopher. The Terrible Ending. Avoid the Terrible Ending. Famous Last Lines Take a look at these last lines. Did they work? And all that, cal.
If you do, you start missing everybody. Salinger "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which. All was well. About Alex J Coyne. Related Articles.
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