Nail Your Story's Ending
Nail Your Story’s Ending
By Julie Tollefson
Outgoing MWA Midwest President Kristen Lepionka knows the importance of an impressive ending. Her Roxane Weary novels never fail to leave the reader wanting more — the next scene, the next chapter, the next book.
How does she do it?
Here, Kristen shares five tips for nailing endings that will turn satisfied readers into devoted fans.
1) Know where you’re going before you start — Whether you’re a plotter or a pantser, having the end of your story in mind from the beginning can guide the drafting process.
“When I’m thinking through ideas, an idea isn’t complete and ready for actual writing until I can summarize what’s happening,” Kristen says. “I like to know where I’m going, but I don’t always know how I’m going to get there.”
Having a destination from the outset helps her recognize when she’s arrived, no matter how long or short the journey.
“A story should be exactly as long as it needs to be. The end is the end,” she says. “Writing the actual final scene, not only is it my favorite because it means it’s done, but it’s a part of the writing process that feels incredibly natural to me.”
2) Play fair with your reader — You have a few lines in Chapter One to really hook your reader, but what are they going to remember when they put the book down?
“The ending is what’s going to shape the readers’ impression of the book,” Kristen says. “It doesn’t have to be happy. I love ambiguous endings. I love when writers can do that really well, but it still must be a satisfying conclusion to the story you’ve told.”
Kristen lists a number of elements that can make or break your story:
Don’t tie everything up too quickly in a way that insults a reader’s intelligence.
Don’t rely on huge twists of logic.
Make sure your villain has played a central part throughout the story. Don’t make the fall guy a character you’ve barely mentioned.
Plant enough bread crumbs along the way that readers have a fair chance to figure out whodunnit. “But not too fast,” Kristen says. “Make the reader work for it.”
3) Bookend your manuscript with your first and final scenes — “There’s the very common writing advice that you don’t know the first line until you’ve written the last,” Kristen says. “In a lot of ways, I think that’s true.”
Think of your final scene as, in some ways, the opposite of your first. “Not in a super-literal way, but thematically. They bookend the story,” she says.
When she looks back at her own work, she recognizes when she’s accomplished that without meaning to. Often, though, tying the two scenes together means revising.
“Obviously, the beginning is hard. You don’t know the characters yet as well as you’re ultimately going to know them,” she says. “After you’ve gone through the process of writing, you need to make adjustments to the story or the character to make sure everything fits together properly.”
4) Tailor the ending to fit the format — Are you working on a short story? The third book in a series? A standalone? Each type of story requires a different type of ending.
For standalone novels, Kristen says, there’s a bit more pressure to resolve the troubles you’ve heaped on your characters. “That’s the end for these characters. Period. I know there isn’t going to be anything else for them,” she says.
But in a series, you can leave some threads open. In fact, you want to make sure backstory, secondary plots, and personal drama continue from one book to the next in a series. Although each book has its own story and character arcs, the series overall has an arc, too.
“If every character’s personal issues were wrapped up, there wouldn’t be anything exciting about picking up the next book,” Kristen says. “You need to see some sort of evolution with characters across books in a series. Otherwise, it’s very stagnant."
Short stories pose very different challenges for you as a writer.
“Everything about writing a short story is so much harder than writing a novel,” Kristen says. “You have to think about things differently and have to be so much more economical.”
Though the same general rule applies — the ending must satisfy the reader — “I think short stories in the crime fiction genre can get away with having a much more abrupt ending, where things aren’t resolved but they’re implied,” Kristen says.
5) Trust the reader to follow your lead — As a writer, you want your story to make sense. But check your endings, specifically your scene or chapter endings, to make sure you’re giving your readers just what they need and nothing more.
“My editor in the UK almost always cuts the last one or two sentences from my chapters because I have this tendency to go on slightly too long,” Kristen says. “I’m sort of pulling along all of the threads that I have going in my mind and maybe adding too much detail about them in the middle.”
Now, instead of waiting for her editor to trim the excess, she examines every scene and chapter ending herself to find those extra, unneeded sentences.
“Instead of putting in one more witticism, one more detail, one more line, actually it’s better to hold back,” she says.
Likewise, not every chapter needs to end with a breathless cliffhanger, but give your reader a reason to keep reading.
“Any opportunity the real world has to distract the reader from going back to the book, the world will take that opportunity,” Kristen says.
Julie Tollefson's short fiction has appeared in Life is Short and Then You Die: Mystery Writers of America Presents First Encounters with Murder, as well as other anthologies and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. She is editor of the Mystery Writers of America Midwest newsletter.