On Writing: The Sense of an Ending
Can novels just randomly stop? Or should endings be carefully designed?
So this is the last ‘On Writing’ Post for a while. Beginning on Tuesday next week ( May 2) I will instead be starting a series of Zoom talks and discussions on the subject of character and plot, which are the twin themes of my new book on writing.
The first lecture on character I have already delivered, and that is available here:
https://us06web.zoom.us/rec/share/mfGHSnZYiwKM82LMU9ihAyLuWje3p60CZlNkH4voOKEolyeMj83m0sVFjS8QALvn.aoi6BEOykntVw7ck
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All subsequent lectures will be recorded and made available for paying subscribers.
Endings:
Henry James said tartly of the typical ending of the Victorian novel that it was: “ a distribution, at the last, of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions (of pounds), appended paragraphs and cheerful remarks’.
We have moved way beyond this template. Novels can end in almost any fashion, even mid-sentence, or more commonly, just run out of steam. Nobody much seems to mind. Endings, like plots in general, are somewhat out of fashion.
What is an ending though - other than the last full stop in the book?
The ending is not necessarily the same as the climax. Most good stories, for instance, do not end with the climax. Often after the plot’s maximum velocity is reached, it carried on for several minutes and ties up loose ends, tidies up the whole room so to speak. In my novel ‘Under The Same Stars’ the book climaxes 3/4 of the way through, but the ending comes on the last page, and is equivocal rather than definitive.
In classic storytelling, the climax is the ultimate moment of test for the protagonist, the emotional heart of the story, the apex of the central character’s emotional struggle, the moment when the antagonist and protagonist clash for the final time.
The ending, however, comes after the resolution, when mysteries are finally explained, consequences are played out, and maybe a final choice is made. The end of each primary character’s story arc comes together. There may be reconciliation, a wedding, or a funeral…which gets all the main players together in the fictional room so to speak. Never one to turn my nose up at a well-worn trope, I used both a wedding and funeral at the end of ‘Under The Same Stars’.
In a perfect story, the options narrow and narrow until only one possible outcome can ( with hindsight) be imagined, because all the forces of causality, push the story in that direction right from the first chapter. Causality drives the story from beginning to end,
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