the importance of endings

(This is a longish post on the craft of writing – feel free to skip if it doesn’t interest you.)

The final novel of a popular series came out today, and while I haven’t read it, I know a few people who have, and it has been interesting to watch their sheer rage over the ending. This reflects, I think, a very important rule about the writing of fiction. Namely:

Under no circumstances can your ending leave the reader feeling cheated! Furthermore, an ending must not betray the story that preceded it, and it absolutely must provide emotional resolution to the story. It doesn’t matter whether or not you have a happy ending, a sad ending, or some mixture of the three – there has to be emotional resolution that does not leave the reader feeling cheated.

Now, there are people who argue that such endings are unrealistic, and that fiction must be as realistic and gritty as possible. But that’s nonsense. Fiction, by definition, is unrealistic. Storytelling is like stage magic – it’s an illusion, a trick, but like stage magic, the audience wants to be fooled.

To continue the metaphor, having a “realistic” ending that cheats the audience is a bit like a stage magician performing the “sawing a woman in half” illusion – only that he actually does saw in her half. And as the audience stares at him in shock and dismay, the magician informs them that in real life, women who are actually sawed in half die of shock and/or blood loss, and furthermore, if they are not intelligent enough to appreciate the ending, well, that is their problem.

I’m sure you can think of a few books or movies like that – stories where the writer killed off the entire cast or wrecked the setting out of spite, or betrayed the story to make a heavy-handed political point with the ending. There was a remarkably lame sitcom from the 90s called DINOSAURS, which ended with the cast freezing to death to Teach A Valuable Lesson about environmentalism. Another good example is M. Night Shymalan’s film THE VILLAGE, where all the mystery and horror of the story only turns out to be a humbug. Or THE SOPRANOS series, in which case the ending simply didn’t make any sense whatsoever.

A good counter-example is the BREAKING BAD television series. While I was not a fan of it (too nihilistic for my taste), it was nonetheless an excellent example of the craft of storytelling – the ending, while partially tragic and partially hopeful, provided excellent emotional resolution to the crisis of the story. Hugh Howey‘s SILO saga (of which I wholeheartedly approve), or Brandon Sanderson’s MISTBORN books (which I enjoyed greatly) both had tragedy and hope in equal measure in their endings, but they had endings with emotional resolution to the conflicts of the story.

There is a lesson for writers in all of this. If you are a writer, you can get away with a lot during a story, but only if you have a properly satisfying ending.

-JM