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Ask a kid to write a story, and then ask them to read to you how it ends. In my experience, they’re likely to go in one of two directions; either: ‘Suddenly there was a nuclear bomb and bam! Everything blew up! The end!’ or: ‘And then I woke up and it was all a dream! The end!’
Even as they say it, you can see they’re not satisfied with this themselves, yet can’t muster all the pieces together in their complicated story to make things resolve in a way which feels right.
Conversely, if you’ve ever read to a child a book which they know off by heart, watch out if you skip a page or two, or devise your own abbreviated ending that diverts from the baked-in satisfying resolution they are waiting for. It has to be right: first this, then this, and because of that, THIS.
Only then can they leave that imagined world, happy in the knowledge that some kind of crucial balance, however threatened or precarious it all had seemed, has been restored. Even if they know the story so well they are practically reciting it to you—maybe especially then—the internal logic of the story must be satisfied.
George Saunders, in his book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, likens this readerly instinct to watching a juggler throw bowling pins into the air, then waiting to see when and how those pins come down. ‘The rest of the story,’ he writes, ‘is the catching of those pins. At any point in the story, certain pins are up there and we can feel them. We’d better feel them. If not, the story has nothing out of which to make its meaning.’
When they do land, magically back in sure hands, there’s a surge of something. A measurable endorphin hit, perhaps; a sense of balance or a moment of suspended possibility, where our brain wavers in some pleasurable liminal state. We know this is all an invented illusion, but at the same time, we long for it to be real, and to feel recognisably so.
We want to step into that suspended state of make-believe. So an ending can’t let us down—it must be a skilful catching of all the pins.
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Sometimes it feels like our creative imagination is like a muscle. We try to stretch our capacity, go beyond our perceived limits, and it can feel like getting a stitch, or straining a tendon. Never is this truer than when, as writers, we reach the home stretch in a story and are struggling to bring it to a resonant close. We’re often limping along out of breath and out of inspiration by then, wondering why we ever started.
‘A good ending, really, is a taking-into-account of everything that came before,’ says Saunders. ‘Sometimes—not enough has come before. No bowling pins are up in the air, or not enough of them. The fabric from which a rich ending gets made is supplied in the earlier portions of the story.’
A good resolution can’t be made out of thin air—a bomb out of nowhere, a sudden convenient lottery win which saves the day, a hasty explanatory wrap-up allowing you to draw the curtains on this unwieldy, never-ending thing. It needs to be formed from the elements you have already introduced in the story, and precipitate something which ‘solves’ the problem they create, even if the problem is just a psychological one.
A good resolution can’t be made out of thin air—it needs to be formed from the elements you have already introduced in the story.
Plot makes a breadcrumb trail—because ‘plotting’ is a verb, and suggests points on a map, the writer steering a course to some destination which is dependent on the journey’s particulars.
Cinderella, for instance, can’t turn out to be an lizard alien—she needs to be the only person whose foot fits the shoe she accidentally dropped at the ball. The prince needs to come to her house last of all, after he has almost given up hope. We are left waiting, in a teetering moment, to see whether everything is going to come right, and the only way out of that uncertainty is by turning the page.
However subtle, ambiguous or open-ended your creation is, there’s an interior logic to getting to the ending, and crafting it: it can’t do what your story has failed to do, because it needs to catch whatever pins have already been thrown up. A reader co-creates the story with the writer—if a story feels like it’s ‘gone nowhere’, it’s probably a sign that you haven’t ‘taken’ the reader anywhere that feels worth their investment.
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It’s a pity the ‘It was all a dream’ ending is so universally acknowledged as a cop-out, because for me, the spell cast by a good story is very much like being hypnotised into a kind of dream. We enter into it, and imagine its parameters, its details, the people who live in it. We feel we can watch and listen to these uncanny strangers we suddenly care about and want to find out more about. We dislike the feeling of being jolted rudely awake by a garbled phrase or anachronism, wooden or stagey dialogue, or anything else that makes us question the conjuring trick.
That’s a trick I know I’ll be trying to perfect for as long as I keep writing: how to make you forget you’re looking at marks on a page, and instead fall willingly and eagerly, mesmerised, into the story. I want that world to feel more satisfying, more compelling, than the real world, so I make a demand on you—I want your attention for a certain amount of time, and I want you to willingly buy in to the illusion I’m conjuring.
If a story feels like it’s ‘gone nowhere’, it’s probably a sign that you haven’t ‘taken’ the reader anywhere that feels worth their investment.
Critic John Gardner calls this process an invitation to share a ‘vivid and continuous dream’, and they are words I find myself returning to. My story builds towards a climactic point, and then a changed state. It is vivid, in that I am trying to light up my reader’s brain with imagery and metaphor, and dialogue and action which feel real and dynamic. And it is continuous, in that I am asking my reader to spend time in this sequence, staying with me as I direct their attention towards what I am building.
Can I make it worth their time? Only by a kind of unspoken promise that there will come a key point in the story after which things take a turn, or shift to a new and altered state. There must be a sense, Gardner says, of ‘profluence’, that we’re ‘getting somewhere’. After this crucial thing has happened, nothing can be quite the same again; we can’t go back to the state before it happened. Irish writer Frank O’Connor described the process as: ‘An iron bar must be bent, and be seen to have bent.’
A reader, whether they’re a four-year-old listening to a fairy tale, or you—smart, alert, and unnervingly well-read—is reading to see this change occur, to see a character reach breaking point, and then break, and be seen to have been broken.
The more I try to focus on writing towards an ‘earned’ and compelling turning point after which nothing can be the same, the more likely it is that an unexpected possibility for an ending will present itself to me which fulfils those tricky criteria of feeling both ‘inevitable and surprising.’ I am beholden to show how things are not the same—which is often all an ending needs to do.
I don’t think most readers are reading hoping for a stress-free, low-stakes ‘happy ending’, either. Maybe we’re more invested in watching characters struggle to make this shift—because it reminds us of our own real-life struggles and resistance to difficult change, and what it asks of us.
I want my writing to work implicitly rather than explicitly, and trust the reader enough to absorb and reflect on what I have shown them.
The details used to signal this can be extremely small, specific and subtle.
As a reader, I also feel irritated when I’m given some explicit ‘moral of the story’, or some character gives a little lecture about what’s been learned. I want my writing to work implicitly rather than explicitly, and trust the reader enough to just…leave them with it, to absorb and reflect on what I have shown them, on their own terms.
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I often think about the time a group of students told me what they really liked about my stories were their ‘butler’ endings. Their what? ‘Oh,’ said the students, ‘We just like the way you’re like a butler: you appear quietly at the end with some little thing which is just what the character needs, and you place it there and then just…back discreetly away.’
I can’t tell you how delighted I was by this metaphor—I remember it every time I try to create subtle, image-rich and resonant endings. Like a butler, these endings don’t necessarily draw attention to themselves, but just show an altered state or psychological landscape through something small—an object reappearing but charged with new significance, or, as Flannery O’Connor commented in 1963, ‘some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies.’
That’s the terrain I’m trying to conjure—the one which points, without explaining, to where the heart of the real story lies, then just backs discreetly away.
Then, when their eyes greet the quiet white space which follows those last words, it is the reader, not the character, who finds themselves in that slightly altered state of waking up, rising back up out of the story, to find it’s all been a dream.
Learn more about the importance of a good ending, and how to develop your short story from start to finish with Cate Kennedy’s new Crafting Endings in Short Fiction writing course—Between now and midnight 5 March 2023, KYD Members can enjoy $50 off this course!
We asked some of our favourite writers what they wish they’d known about writing endings.
