Endings

Every editor and writing instructor will tell you how important the beginning of a book is. It sets the stage, draws the reader in, and likely influences whether the reader will buy (and read) the book at all. Lately I’ve been thinking about the importance of endings. My thoughts were drawn there partly because I’m finishing up a book myself. Another reason is that lately I’ve been reading how the public’s interest in the latest Game Of Thrones spin-off may well be dampened by the fact that so many people hated how the original series ended. (In fairness, that ending wasn’t written by a novelist, but by a group of TV writers who, under intense pressure, seemed to have completely lost their way in terms of the overall story arc.)

Endings are crucial to the reader’s sense of satisfaction with a book. The ending doesn’t necessarily have to be happy (unless you’re writing a romance, when they really do), but they should be gratifying in some way. Most readers need some sort of resolution and closure to the story. What constitutes a satisfying ending is related to reader expectations. When readers start a book, at least genre fiction, they generally have a sense of what sort of experience they’re going to have. They want twists and turns and surprises, but not ones that deviate too sharply from what they have anticipated. At the end, their overall expectations need to be met, or there is a very good chance they won’t ever buy another book by that author.

When they start a romance, they expect the couple to end up living happily ever after. For a mystery, they want the central puzzle to be solved. If it’s a suspense novel, they want the main protagonists to have survived the threats they faced, even if the villain or villains escape to torment them another day in another book. For fantasies, even if you don’t resolve the overall story arc at the end of the book, readers want to close the cover and be left with some sense of meaning, even if there still dark forces to be defeated and deep questions to be answered. About the only time you can get away with a distressing, nihilistic ending is if you are writing literary fiction, which is meant to imitate real life, with all its challenges and messiness.

A satisfying ending means the reader closes the book and feels mostly content. They may have questions. If you’re writing a series, they should have questions. But they shouldn’t feel frustrated or angry. Most readers hate cliffhangers. They feel cheated, as if they didn’t get their money’s worth. They paid for a full story, and they didn’t get it. They feel manipulated, as if they worked hard for a payoff they never got.

A few years ago, I self-published a historical fantasy. Knowing I had no track record in the genre and I needed to somehow convince readers to give the book a chance, I decided to make the first part free. The first part, while not a true cliffhanger, doesn’t answer lot of the story questions. In a sense, it is a teaser, to get people to buy the complete book. But I was still amazed by how many readers complained. They got it for free, but they still felt cheated that they had to purchase the complete book and keep reading to find out what happened.

There are lots of thoughts on how to end a book. A friend of mine goes so far as to try to have the ending parallel the beginning in some way. I prefer an ending that is a little more ambivalent. I don’t like for books to end too neatly and perfectly. I prefer to leave a few things hanging out there. But I can be as cranky as any other reader if I don’t get my payoff at the end of a genre story. When I read literary fiction, my expectations are much different, so I’m more easily satisfied.

If you have any doubts about your ending, get the opinion of your critique group or some beta readers. For the most part, readers have remarkably consistent feelings about what constitutes a satisfying ending. Some years ago, there was a huge best seller called The Horse Whisper. It was a remarkable hit, but I was working at my job in a public library at the time and I can’t tell you how many patrons mentioned they liked the book, but that it ended “wrong”. That was the actual word they used. I wasn’t surprised that when they made a movie from the book, they altered the ending. The producers were responding to this almost universal sense readers had of what constituted the “right” ending.

Most of us are aware of the requirements of the genre we’re writing in and aren’t going to make a huge mistake and end our books “wrong”. But even so, endings are worth thinking about. They are the last pages read, and they should to be crafted with the same thought as the rest of the book.