“Take time to work and rework your ending until it’s not just solid, but rather it’s the best single part of your story. Your readers — and your story — deserve no less.”
Ryan G. Van Cleave

“It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”
Yogi Berra

We all know the emotional satisfaction — the sigh of contentment we breathe — when we hit the last page of a book and feel that the ending was just right. Somehow, it seems inevitable — as if it was the only possible way the writer could wrap up the story. And we’ve all had our share of disappointments — stories that fall off a cliff, ending with a whimper, not a bang. These moments create not just disappointment, but also of the feeling of being cheated — as if an author swindled us into reading an entire tale without taking responsibility for seeing that it came to a strong, emotionally satisfying conclusion.

Welcome to the murky land of story endings — it’s not far from the rocky terrain of story beginnings. Both are equally challenging to write — but so important to readers. In a feature story called “And Then What?” in the August 2015 issue of The Writer, Ryan G. Van Cleave, a writing teacher and author of 20 books, offered six helpful tips on how to wrap up short stories, which also seem to apply to longer fiction as well:

1) Create change: Make sure that your main character has gone through a transformation in the course of your narrative’s events. It can be subtle or substantial, but your character can’t be static — otherwise readers will feel that nothing meaningful has happened.

2) Answer the question: Every story with narrative momentum poses an initial question or conflict. Make sure that the question is answered and/or the conflict
resolved in some form by the time the reader hits the last page.

3) Tie it together: A story can have a number of “themes, subplots, and character arcs happening at once. But if they don’t feel meaningfully connected, then it comes across as random. Use the end to bring all those key threads together.”

4) Deliver emotional impact: If you’ve created an appealing, believable set of characters and a change-stimulating conflict, then you’ve taken your readers on an emotional. “Now don’t let them off the emotional hook. Make sure that the ending delivers by offering up lasting emotional impact. Make readers cry, smile, laugh. Make them feel multiple things at once. Just make them feel.”

5) Make sure the ending fits: Some authors who can’t figure out how to end their stories come up implausible, ill-fitting events that don’t require effort on the part of their characters or feel true to the spirit of the story. Avoid this approach!

6) Take readers beyond “The End:” “The future of characters should be different from their past as a result of the story happenings. And while the future is indeed unknown, the general arc of the future should be intuited by readers.”

Engaging beginnings, emotional endings — just what the reader ordered. Write on!