Ending after ending after ending

Stories are full of endings. From the ending of a multi-book plot arc to the ending of a sentence, writers face the same sorts of questions over and over: Have I said everything I need to say? Will this flow better if it’s longer or shorter? Does this have the effect I want? What do I need to say in order to wrap this sentence/paragraph/scene/chapter/section/book/series up? How much transition do I need to the next paragraph/scene/chapter/book?

The questions are the same, but the answers, and the way we go about getting to them, are different. Wrapping up a sentence is something that happens over and over (and over, and over, and over…) in a novel and in everyday life. People have a lot of practice at constructing sentences; by the time we’re eight or nine, we’re constantly composing spoken sentences instinctively, without ever thinking about any of those questions. Novels, on the other hand, take a long time to get to their endings. For some writers, it’s weeks or months; for most of us, it’s a year or several; for some, it’s a decade or more. Even the speediest writers don’t get as much practice at ending novels as they get at ending sentences. Paragraphs, scenes, chapters, sections, and trilogies all provide writers with a different number of chances to practice writing them.

This is important because as a general rule, the more often one does something, the better one gets at it. Most writers don’t have to think hard about where and how to end most sentences; if they have ending trouble, it’s usually with how to end their novels, chapters, scenes, or short stories. For some writers, the difficulty curve is gradual – they never think much about ending sentences or paragraphs, occasionally have difficulty with scenes and chapters, struggle with plot arcs, and spend weeks agonizing about their story endings. Other writers seem to have no trouble all the way up through chapters or plot arcs, but fall off a cliff when it comes to actually putting a satisfying ending on a novel or series.

Also, the smaller the unit is in regard to the finished whole, the less important it is to labor over it in most cases. It is quite reasonable for a poet to labor to get every word in a haiku exactly right, but if one random sentence in a 300-page novel goes on a bit long or stops a bit short, it is seldom a critical flaw worthy of fussing over. Not that any writer wants to get sloppy, but there is a fine line between writing as effectively as possible and obsessing unnecessarily. Or, as James Clear put it, “People who excel tend to obsess over details. People who struggle also tend to obsess over the details. The difference is what details they focus on: Minutiae versus polish.”

Similarly, the larger the unit is in regard to the finished whole, the more delicate the balance is between creating a satisfactory end to something and keeping the reader interested. In the middle of a book, I like being drawn along by wanting to know what just happened (Who is the phone call from? Why did mentioning the goldfish make the businessman go pale? Is the shot that just rang out going to kill someone, or just break a window?) or how the characters are going to get out of the mess they’re in. I want more closure than that at the end of a book, even if it is illusory. This means that I personally loathe cliffhanger novel endings for books in mid-series … but as the ending of a chapter, they almost always work for me.  (Although if every chapter ends on a giant cliffhanger, I frequently start to get cross.)

Book endings aren’t fundamentally different from any other sort of ending (whether sentence, paragraph, scene, chapter). They have more moving parts to wrap up, but that’s true at every level—the ending of a chapter has considerably more stuff to deal with than the end of any single sentence anywhere in that chapter. For some writers, looking at endings this way helps get over their fear of messing up their novel’s ending. Thinking about the ending of the book as a slightly larger and more conclusive chapter-ending is frequently less intimidating than thinking about The End of the WHOLE NOVEL OMG.

For a trilogy or a series, the author has to decide whether they’re writing something like a series of murder-mystery novels, where the central story comes to a satisfactory end once the murderer has been caught (though the detective’s family troubles or budding romance may stretch across multiple novels in the background), or the equivalent of a multi-volume novel, where each book is a section of the whole that doesn’t come to a truly satisfactory conclusion until the end of the last one.