21.43: The Not-Final Word on Endings

What makes a satisfying ending

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0:19This is Writing Excuses. The not final word on endings. Tools, not rules. For writers, by writers. I'm Mary Robinette. I'm Dong Wan. I'm Erin. And I'm Howard. So today, we are going to look at how to wrap up loose ends, decide what things you can leave dangling, and what elements make a strong close. One of the things about talking about endings is that they are so contextual.

0:50And I think that when you are going to take workshops and things like that, people spend a lot of time talking about the opening of a story. But the ending can be just as important. There's a saying in musical theater that you have to nail three numbers. The opening number, the one right before intermission, because that's the one that gets people to come back, and the closing number. And if you can do a really good closing number, a lot of the other problems will just, people will forget about them. So, I wanted us to talk about what makes an ending satisfying.

1:23Like, what are you looking for when you get to the end of a book? I found that looking at the Mice Quotient, not as a list of, you know, story types, but just the idea that opening parentheses and closing parentheses in syntactical order, with the concepts or characters or themes of a story, whether or not they are categorized cleanly with mice.

2:00You know, if in the opening of the book, you know, character says XYZ at the end of the book, I want to hear ZYX or ZXY or something so that I recognize that I have gotten to the end. Now, ZXY as a reordering needs to be surprising and inevitable, or in some way satisfying. This is not a formula in and of itself, but it's a way to help me bracket my outlining

2:35so that I can, just in the outline, figure out where the story might be broken. I'm glad you said the word bracket when you were talking about that, because there's, you reminded me of a quote from Scott Westerfeld that I really like when I'm talking about endings in particular. And it's, it's out of one of his novels, but it's, what did a happy ending even mean in real life anyway? In stories, you simply said they lived happily ever after and that was it. But in real life, people had to keep on living day after day, year after year.

3:07So an ending is an artificial ending. Like it's an artificial bracket. We make that choice about where to stop the story at a point that creates some sort of resonance for the overall story and for our reader. So I think part of what we're talking about here is how to make the decision about where to draw that artificial bracket and what things you are attempting to do with it. Like, why do we stop there? I mean, for me, a satisfying ending is all about change.

3:39You start at point A, and then by the time you reach the end of the book, you have to have a state of things where your character is different from where you started, the world is different from where you started, and the events have reached some kind of conclusion. And I think when I get really frustrated with an ending is when it feels really dangling, right? And this can even be in a linked series, a linked trilogy. Your character still has to evolve and change by the end of your story. And if that hasn't happened, I think that's where I'm starting to feel really frustrated

4:14by the experience of, well, why did I spend all that time if nothing changed? And I think seeing growth, or not necessarily growth, I mean, it can be regression, right? But seeing a question posed and answered over what is this character going to do, who are they going to become, feels really important to me in terms of where to find that breakpoint. I think for me, it's getting a sense of resonance, like a resonant mood, and a sense that the author wants me to take something from the story,

4:46whether I get what they want or not. I think a lot of times when I was teaching, I would run it into stories that were theoretically finished, but I felt like I didn't understand what I was meant to walk away with, or if I was meant to walk away with anything at all. I think that often comes the other way when things are too neatly tied up. There is no, like, it's like ending with the punch. I always tell people, like, if you punch someone in the stomach, you want to wait a second to see how it lands and how they react to it. If your story ends with a punch and no reaction, it feels like, okay, it's over,

5:19but you don't really have a chance to sit in it and to see its effect. And so I like that small bit of unfolding at the end of a story that gives a sense of how the mood has changed, not just how the characters have changed, but how the resonance has changed. And that's often the thing that I'll sit with later, even after I've forgotten the events of the story. It's that feel. You want to see impact, not just event. Exactly. Yeah. And I think that that's, I love you calling it the resonant mood. I often think about and have talked about stories as being, you know, a drug made out of words. And so it's like, what is the effect of the drug?

The weight of the last line

5:53So what I'd like to do is I'd like to actually talk about the very last line of a story, because I feel like that's neglected and it carries the most weight. We've talked before about the recency primacy effect. And the last line is the most recent line. So it carries actually the most weight in a lot of ways. I think it has as much power to shape something as an opening line. So I'm going to read three different closing lines, all from famous works, so we can talk about like why these are, why these work.

6:27The very last line of Christmas Carol is, and so as tiny Tim observed, God bless us, everyone. And there's like, to me, there's a built-in hopefulness to that. Great Gatsby, so we beat on boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. There's like a weariness there. And then where the wild things are. Max stepped into his private boat and waved goodbye and sailed back over a year and in and out of weeks

6:57and through a day and into the night of his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him and it was still hot. And for me, there's this sense of being loved. So are there other things that you think about, like when you think about a really amazing closing line? For me, it is, a lot of times it is, even without the rest of the book attached to it, this line has a lot of, it has that emotion baked into it. There's a TV series on Apple called Bad Monkey with Vince Vaughn as a detective.

7:37And in the opening episode, his buddy comes over and says, I need you to do a favor, do me a favor. We come look at what's in the trunk of the car. And what's in the trunk of the car is a body part. And we have a whole adventure around this. And the meta of that detective story is a lot of fun. Final episode, you know, we have a little epilogue. And for our main character, things haven't really changed that much. He solved the mystery, but things haven't really changed that much.

8:07And his friend comes over and they're sitting on the back patio drinking. And his friend says, so, you want to come take a look at what I got in the car? And that is just glorious to me because even if we never get another series of that, I get to headcanon myself a whole nother set of detective adventures for these people. And that's a space where these characters are comfortable. They grew during this adventure, but they didn't actually get to move very much.

8:40But I'm okay with that. Yeah, I think what all these endings really do to me, what I think a great ending, great ending line does, is it works both in the immediate content and the immediate moment of the story and also within the greater context of the story. So it resonates on two levels. Like if you just want to take it as like, and then this happened, you can. But a lot of times they'll use words that like work in both the broader and like we were born onward, like onward in which way? Onward physically, onward mentally, onward spiritually.

9:12And so a lot of times I find those kind of things are very beautiful because it's you get a chance to open up and see the story again as a whole. You know, you're experiencing the story as a series of moments and a really good ending kind of propels you back and allows you to take a 10,000 foot view where you can say, here's what this experience was like for me as a whole. Yeah, I mean, what strikes me about all three of the examples you gave is it's a statement of this is what this book was. And when you reach the end of a story, somebody's like, well, what the hell did I just read? Why did I read that?

9:43And each of those tells you why, right? Like the Gatsby one in particular really stands out to me because it's like these are people who are trapped in a moment who cannot escape their past, who are beating ceaselessly against this current. Another example that comes to my mind is Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, which ends with, it is Clarissa, he said, for there she was. The entire book is a portrait of this woman and her life. It opens with Clarissa said she would buy the flowers herself. It ends with, for there she was. That's the whole book. You're told this is what you're getting from the very first line.

10:17And at the very end, this is what you got. And I think that makes it feel such like a closed circuit in a way. This kind of goes back to, Howard, what you were talking about with the brackets. It's a way of explicitly ending it, right? Like when you're first taught how to write an essay, it's like you have your introduction where you say what this essay is going to be about. You say the stuff the essay is about. And at the end you say, this is the stuff the essay was about. And I think sometimes a last sentence is that too. I think sometimes you can do that more poetically, more elegantly, but it's important to tell people, hey, this is what you just got.

10:48How do you feel about it? Yeah. I really like that way of thinking about that. The Baroque and classical music forms, we used to try to analyze these based on melodic structures and in a valley quetzits. And the math got hugely complex and there were too many, more exceptions than rules. And then somebody figured out, oh, it's kind of just this circle of keys that they walk through. And then we had to understand that the audience at the time was not going to get to listen to this music maybe more than just once in their whole lives.

11:26And yet, the music survived because the audiences loved it and there's power in that. Why did they love it? Because of this circle, because of this closure where they could hear when it was getting to the end. And they could, there are crescendos and there are callbacks and recapitulations and all that. And at the end of it, everybody comes away satisfied. Did I study music in college? Yes, I did.

11:57And I apply that to my writing all the time. There's got to be the writing equivalent of the dominant pedal as I'm winding into that final moment. And there needs to be the recapitulation, the return to tonic, whatever, that says the piece is done. Yeah, this is because, like, as humans, we respond extremely well to symmetry. One of the things when you're looking at another human being, one of the things that makes someone beautiful is not actually the individual features.

12:33It is how symmetrical their face is. But we respond to this in a lot of other ways, too. And one of the things that often happens, like with your Miss Dalloway example, is that there's a symmetry there. We start and we stop. And so that's something that you can deliberately deploy. It doesn't mean that it's a flaw if it's not there. It's a tool that you can pull out to kind of pump up that ending line just a little bit more. I mean, you can use asymmetry to unsettle people. Yes. Because we want symmetry. If you give them something that feels deliberately asymmetric, then you'll leave people feeling uncomfortable, which is sometimes what you want to do.

13:08Yeah, exactly so. And actually, we're going to explore that in just a couple of weeks. We will talk all day about symmetry. Mwahaha. But now we're going to take a slight break. When your mental health is suffering, therapy can help. But sometimes it's not the whole answer. Talkiatry gives you access to real psychiatric care with licensed clinicians who can diagnose and prescribe medication if it's right for you. It's a simple way to get effective treatment right from home. Talkiatry is a 100% online psychiatry practice that provides comprehensive evaluations, diagnoses, and ongoing medication management for conditions like ADHD, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, OCD, PTSD, insomnia, and more.

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Using beginnings to shape endings

16:56Okay, so I want to back us up. We've talked about the last sentence, but now I want to back up because I feel like many of the tools that we use in the opening we can use in the closing. And it's about grounding the reader at the beginning so that they understand how the story is going to unfold. And I think at the end, we're also grounding the reader in understanding what things have changed. So when we're looking at the last paragraph in a short story, the last page in a novel, some of the things that I think that we're looking at is much like we have in the beginning.

17:29Like, who is the character now? Where are they? Like, if we're doing, you know, a big event story where everything has changed, they may not be in a different physical location, but the relationship to it may have changed. And what mood lingers after the book? How does the character feel about it? What are some other elements that might go in that last little bit there? I come back to the symmetry in my opening chapters if I have used, for instance,

18:02ocean metaphors for the character to describe, you know, how they're feeling. Then, however they have changed, I want to return to some ocean metaphors at the end. Now, it may not be that overt. It may be that at the end of the book, the scene is actually on a beach and we are having a different experience, but I always go back to the beginning and dig through the middle and look for the elements that I can morph and pull forward and work into descriptions

18:38or senses or settings. They don't need to be the actual, you know, key, twisty elements. They're just the descriptors, the framing, the context, as you said at the beginning, that help couch whatever my last sentence is going to be in something that feels like that sentence is exactly where and what the beginning and middle of this book promised me it would be. I also think two other things that I really like, one is to take a word or an object or

19:12something that has minimal context at the very beginning, but a huge amount of weight that it has gained over the course of the story and bring it back. I think the trunk thing that you were talking about, like, see what's in the trunk means nothing, but now that you've gone through this entire adventure, by saying yes or no or even thinking about that question, they're thinking about something much broader. And I think similarly, I love to have characters make a choice with limited information at the very beginning of a story and have to make a similar choice now that they know more about

19:43the world, about themselves at the end. Sometimes I'll have them make the choice. Sometimes I'll just have the choice exist or be ambiguous about what their choice was so the reader can sort of decide what happens next. But I love the idea that it's like the things around us, the choices we make don't change. What really changes is our understanding and our context. And that is like something that makes the story seem bigger. It has made this person's world bigger and your understanding as a reader bigger as well. I think that's a really great way to show character growth or world changes.

20:17I've heard that called an avatar.

20:21Liza Palmer called that an avatar. Hitchcock sometimes calls it a MacGuffin. Um, uh, but it, it's basically, I, I would, I used to call it an emotional resonance item. Um, but an example of this, uh, using, citing a film from last century is, um, uh, Dirty Dancing. And in Dirty Dancing, one of the, the, Baby, the main character is on many journeys, but one of them is, can she become a dancer, a professional dancer? And there's this lift that she has to do, which is the iconic lift.

20:53Even if you haven't seen the film, you have seen the meme of the lift. And that lift represents, when she gets it, that represents her coming into her own. So that's, that's her avatar of success. Um, and earlier in the movie, it's just, this is a difficult dance move that she can't do, but then it becomes this huge celebratory thing. There's a couple of other things, like her dad hugs her at the end, and he had hugged her at the beginning of the film. But when they are estranged, he stops doing that. And so at the end, when he hugs her, it's again, this, these, now, Baby is an adult.

21:27He sees her, he sees her for who she is, and he accepts what she's doing. The first hug is, uh, I'm, I'm hugging you because I'm your dad. And the last hug is, I'm hugging you because I love you. And those are such different messages, and it's so powerful to have them reflected off of one another.

Breathing room and epilogues

21:46Yeah.

Breathing room and epilogues

21:47Well, one thing I also want to bring up here is breathing room is really important in a conclusion. There's so many books that I've read that I've loved the book, and then the end of the book feels like running straight into a brick wall. And where events simply stop, and then the book is over without a lot of space to breathe for a moment to process what just happened. You know, this really kind of goes to what you were saying, Aaron, of like, you see the punch, but you don't see the impact. You don't see it land, and you don't see the effect on it. And I think giving space for your character to breathe for a second, or even just the reader to linger in a moment and absorb what just happened before you give us that closing line.

22:26And then the closing line can be that, not necessarily quiet, it can be quite intense and impactful, but give us that final summation of what it is that we're encountering. I think this is a thing that happens for a lot of people who begin as short story writers and then transition to novels. It was something that I had an issue with all the time, because as a short story writer, you were taught to stick the landing and get out. And novels, because I think that proportionally, you're actually spending about the same proportional amount of time in both in the, now we've ended and here's our nice little denouement, but in a short story, it's like, it's a paragraph.

23:02And in a novel, sometimes it's in a whole other scene where you need to give them that breathing room. I think the other reason that we will often see that sometimes is that novelists just want to be done with the book. Yeah, totally. And just rush some stuff. Yeah. I can't remember the name of the book. And the ending was one of my least favorite endings of all time. And yet I can tell it was one of the most artful. The story was essentially an adventure story about exobiologists on a planet, studying it and whatever.

23:37And one of the characters, our main character, is kind of wondering why we're doing this. You know, this is dangerous. We're on this adventure, but what are we really learning? This is, and the book ends, we're in that character's point of view the whole time. The book ends before they've reached the point where they were saying they were going to go. This character basically gets killed by a monster. And as he's dying, he's like, I think I understand what we were doing.

24:09And then the book ends. Now, I am confident that the author went into this saying, life doesn't put endings the way narratives put endings. I want to write a book where the ending is the end of the life. And here we go. And so that's why I think it's artsy. But it also helped me to look at it and ask, I wish I could remember the name of the book, and ask, how could this ending actually be satisfying? Because there were elements to it that were satisfying. And a smarter version of me reading the book now might see what the author intended.

24:45This is why often a book needs an epilogue in order to give space for the reader to sit and to know that, yes, status quo is actually stable now. The character really has made this change. In the first Avengers movie, the other thing that an epilogue can do is say, look, this is what they earned. And so at the very, very, very end of the film, there's this scene where the Avengers are sitting around eating shawarma. And at the beginning of the film, they were all individuals who were dealing with extraordinary events.

25:20And at the end of the movie, they are a group of friends, team, and they are having, what they have earned is mundane. It is a just normal New York shawarma spot. It's not a fancy dinner. They've earned ordinary. And that is the kind of thing that, Aaron, you were talking about, about bringing something and recontextualizing it. Because shawarma had been mentioned earlier. Well, what's really important about that, I think that's relevant in this, is the shawarma line from Robert Downey Jr. was an improv line. It was not in the script. He just said it.

25:52And then they decided to, as a reshoot later, to shoot the shawarma scene. So throughout the scene, you can see Chris Evans is sitting there with his hand in front of his face the whole time because he has a beard because he's shooting Snowpiercer at the time. And so he's covering his face through the whole scene because it was the thing that was added later, significantly after the fact. But you're right, it's an important beat. Avengers doesn't end as well if you don't have the shawarma scene. And one of the beats before that was what I really don't love as an ending.

26:24Maria Hill talking to Nick Fury saying, you know, how do you know, how do you know they're, you know, they're scattered to the four winds. How do you know they're going to come back? And he says, because we'll need them too. Well, that's not an answer that satisfies me. But them eating shawarma, that satisfies me. Because it needs to end on this idea of them together, right? Because the whole movie was about them coming together, so they needed that coda.

26:55And so the reason I bring up the production detail is because I think for writers, there can feel like a lot of pressure to get that ending right out of the gate, right? And it's kind of like opening lines this way. Like, you can be several drafts into it until you finally figure out how does this book actually need to end? Do I need a time skip? Do I need an epilogue? Do I need to give it another beat here? What's the final image I want to end on? It's okay if that comes later, right? There's a lot of process between you finishing your first draft and the book hitting shelves.

27:26That ending may be found somewhere in there. So try a lot of different stuff is one thing I'm going to say. Like, we're talking a lot about the mechanics of what makes a good ending. But the process can be a really messy one. Yeah. I think that it's like when you're writing, it's not so much that you know what that perfect last line is. Sometimes you get lucky and you do know. But most of the time, you are aiming after a shadow in the dark. Or a shadow in the light. You're aiming after a shadow. And you don't know the shape of the thing that's casting the shadow.

27:56But you know the shadow is there. And you're aiming for that. And then you get there. And when you finally get close enough, sometimes it takes a little while before you can really see it. But you can still aim for that shadow. Yeah. And I was thinking about actors adding things to movies. I was thinking about the moment in Sinners where Delray Lindo was telling this, like, really horrible story. And he ends it by, like, breaking into song, which was improvised. And I think it's interesting because I think sometimes we have a gut instinct for, like, what feels right as an ending.

28:32But it might not be the thing that fits perfectly within the structure you have created for yourself. So I say, like, also it's good to think, like, if the ending doesn't feel right, maybe there's a good moment to write down, like, what is it that you think you're trying to capture there that you haven't captured? And maybe this doesn't do it, but when you find it later, it gives you permission to continue seeking as opposed to feeling like I have to figure it out immediately and put a perfect button on it. Because I don't think things always end in a perfect button. No, I don't think they do. And I think sometimes when they do end in a perfect, perfect button where the hero gets all of the things that they're aiming after, it can feel contrived.

Sequencing and final takeaways

29:10So one of the last things that I want to talk about before we end the endings is that idea of sequencing.

29:22So you can, the goal that you end with, and this goes back to Avengers, is the goal that you end with is the one that sets the tone. That's the one that the reader is going to walk away with. So you have two examples here. And all I'm changing is the order. So we have, they had each other as one goal. And the other goal was they were trying to save a city, but the city was destroyed. So they had each other, but the city was destroyed is a totally different ending than the city was destroyed, but they had each other.

29:55And that's all about which beat you're landing on. And that's not necessarily, while I'm using a single sentence, that's also in terms of the sequencing of scenes. Because, again, this is with the Avengers, part of the reason that that coda works is that that is the thing that we end with. That is the thing you take away with you. Whereas the, because we'll need them again. Because we'll need them. Because we'll need them again. It says, they are never going to get rest.

30:26This is always going to be an exhausting thing that continues to come after them. All right.

Homework and concluding questions

30:32With that, I think it's time for homework. Okay. So your homework, and I'm going to encourage you to swing by the website because all of these are going to be written down. I have a series of questions for you that you can ask yourself about your ending. I want to be very clear that the absence of any of these things are not a flaw. These are just things that you can ask that might deepen your ending, might enrich it, are opportunities.

31:03That's what these are. So does your ending match the promises of your beginning? Do you have an avatar of success?

31:15What did your characters earn?

31:19Is there any symmetry with your opening? And does the closing line underline the tone or theme of the story? Again, these are not things that you're doing something wrong if you're not doing these. But these are opportunities for you to ask yourself and interrogate your own story. This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

31:47Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Kowal, Dong Wan Song, Aaron Roberts, and Howard Taylor. This episode was engineered by Marshall Carr, Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds. For more information, visit writingexcuses.com.