Partial Endings

When writers complain about having trouble with endings, most of the time, they’re complaining about the end of the story – either the grand climax when everything works out or fails miserably, or getting the last few paragraphs or sentences exactly right.

But any story that has more than one scene (and that’s everything except the shortest of short fiction) has loads of partial endings. I call them “partial” because the overall story doesn’t end at the end of a scene or a chapter; something continues until the final wrap-up. Still, the scene ends and the chapter is over.

Even within a scene, things can end. The conversation finishes in mid-scene, but the characters have a few more things to do before the scene itself ends. The fight ends with a knock-out early on, but the scene continues when the bartender comes over to yell at the protagonist.

All of these partial endings have a dual function: they need to let the reader know that something – the conversation, the fight, the scene, the chapter – is over and finished, but they also need to pull the reader further on into the story.

Some writers have a lot of trouble with this. I remember one, years back, who ended every chapter with the viewpoint character either falling asleep or being knocked out, and another who finished every conversation with someone (usually a minor character, but occasionally the protagonist) asking a question that changed the subject, and then adding a narrative line something like “So then they talked about that for twenty minutes/an hour/three hours more.” Both of those techniques work, if all one wants is to get out of the scene, but they don’t do anything to coax the reader to keep reading.

What keeps most readers reading is a desire to find out what happens, and the problem with simply shutting down the scene/conversation/chapter/whatever is that doing so looks backward to what has happened, with nothing there that looks forward to what might happen next. If the writer has set up something earlier – there’s a vital meeting in the morning that’s quite likely to ruin the protagonist’s plans – then having the character go off to bed can work, because what has already happened that day is over, but the reader knows that everything might go south at the beginning of the next chapter. A steady diet of shut-down endings, though, quickly gets boring or irritating.

The opposite of the shut-down scene ending is the cliffhanger – the scene or chapter ending where something of major importance is deliberately left unresolved. This ending only looks forward. The protagonist is, figuratively or literally, hanging off the edge of a cliff by their fingernails … and of course the only way for the reader to find out whether they fall or not is to keep reading.

The cliffhanger ending works splendidly in a lot of action-adventure stories, but again, a steady diet of cliffhanger endings gets exhausting and annoying.

The middle road is to remember that partial endings are partial – something is resolved or ended, but something else isn’t. The action ends, but the emotional situation is even more fraught than it was before. The emotional situation seems to be resolved, but the character is heading out into danger. The conversation is finished and has revealed one important clue, but it also left the protagonist (and the reader!) with even more unanswered questions than they had when they started.

It doesn’t actually matter what level of the story is pointing forward – the pull can come from the emotional level, the physical-action level, or the intellectual level. Ending a scene with the POV character sitting alone in a dark room thinking, “What do I do now?” can be as forward-pointing as having a character throw open the front door and stride confidently out to confront a serial killer. Even reminding the reader of a previously-established mystery or question can create enough forward momentum, especially if there’s an implied promise that the writer is finally going to reveal something about it in the next scene. (“Tony never did explain why he had that aluminum hubcap balanced on his computer monitor. George nodded decisively and reached for his phone. Time to settle that question once and for all.”)

To put it another way, until you get to the end of the story, every partial ending in the middle is also the beginning of something else. Even going to bed is the beginning of the next thing, whether that’s a nightmare, bolting awake at midnight to find a prowler in the room, or waking up the next morning. The writer just has to remember to look forward to the new thing, as well as back at finishing up whatever just happened.

The other thing to keep an eye on when reviewing one’s scene or chapter endings is variety. It’s easy to fall into a pattern of ending every chapter or scene in the same kind of way – the POV always falls asleep, or always is in physical peril, or always is musing on the emotional fallout of the current scene, or always is heading off to Do Something. Ending every scene with the protagonist saying “Let’s meet at the coffee shop in two hours” is just as irritating as ending it with the POV shutting off the lights and hunkering down in bed, or falling into a pit of snakes from which he/she will inevitably escape in his/her next scene.