How Does It End?
Dear Horace Greeley,
I have a problem that I believe has to do with my mother, or perhaps the mother of one of my childhood friends. It feels maternally rooted and has to do with commitment.
The problem is that I don't know how to write endings that do justice.
Let's pretend a story is a plane. I have no problem getting the plane off the ground. I keep it aloft okay, too. But when I try to land the plane, I rush and scramble and end up diving perpendicularly toward an end that does no justice to the beginning or middle.
Losing the metaphor, I think that my characters feel real and authentic. My dialogue isn't utter garbage. I make enough moves that are novel and interesting that my readers stay engaged. But every time I seek to finish a story, my conclusions end up abrupt at best. At worst, they're hackneyed schlock not fit for '90s late nite soap operas.
Why are my endings so pat, somebody? What happens in my brain, that I can do a job decently until the end and then absolutely jack up the dismount?
Please help me.
With omnipresent low-grade ending anxiety,
Can’t Get to the End
Dear Can’t,
Let me start by saying that you’re already well ahead of many writers by recognizing that you have a problem! We see a lot of stories with endings that don’t feel well thought out, either ending too abruptly (our Editor in Chief says these stories “stop” rather than “end”) or that go on past the point of resolution.
Neil Gaiman has a great piece of advice on fixing problems in your writing: the root cause of many issues is usually many pages before where you think it is. In this case, if you’re having a problem with an ending, it might be because you haven’t identified your conflict well enough.
Let’s talk about your metaphorical plane. You’ve gotten your plane off the ground. You’ve kept it aloft. Now you have to land it smoothly. But what’s at stake with this particular plane ride? Is one of the passengers a heartbroken man flying out to beg his beloved for another chance? Is the pilot new at the job and afraid to tell anyone that they cheated during their training and don’t actually know how to land? Does one of the flight attendants have a communicable disease that will kill half of all people infected?
In each of these scenarios, a satisfying ending will look a little different. In the first case, it might end with the plane going down in a fiery crash, leaving the beloved to spend years regretting their behavior (remember, “satisfying ending” does not equal “happy ending”). In the second, it might look like a heroic flight attendant landing the plane and exposing the pilot as a fraud. In the third, it might look like an emergency landing in the only town in the world where a lone scientist is hard at work on a cure.
You’ve mentioned that you think your characters feel real and authentic. Once you’ve gotten your characters into a good conflict, you should let them do the heavy lifting. As you move through the story, what would your character’s reaction to each situation be? If the beloved in the above scenario mourns forever, the reader might think about the nature of lost opportunity, or the perils of playing silly emotional games. Maybe the beloved in the above scenario is selfish and shallow, and ends up glad that they had already broken up with the man before he died, in which case the reader can walk away with an understanding that not everyone is worthy of our love. It all depends on what kind of people the man and the beloved are.
The short answer is that before you even start writing, you need to understand who you’re writing about, and what’s at stake. If your characters are sufficiently real and your conflict sufficiently compelling, you should be able to follow your characters through a situation to a natural-feeling conclusion, rather than a perpendicular dive.
Your humble servant,
Horace Greeley