Writing tips: loose ends and endings
How much do you need to tie up at the end of a story?
And they all lived happily until they gradually died.
It’s hard to know where to end a story. This week I’ll share my view on how much we should wrap up in an ending.
When to finish a story
As fast as possible.
That’s the end of this newsletter.
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Okay, maybe there’s more to say.
How do you know your story is finished?
Once the internal and external objectives and the story’s key questions are resolved, FINISH IT!
A typical story will have a clear external objective, such as saving a prince from a dragon. Once our armoured princess has swung into action, defeated the dragon, and strapped the prince onto the back of her noble steed, the ‘main’ story is done.
Except…
Fairy tales don’t end there.
The couple needs to get married or, at the very least, share true love’s kiss.
This is because, alongside the external objective, there are also internal motivations.
Internal motivations are things that the person needs to learn or overcome inside themselves, such as learning to embrace love, or overcoming grief at the loss of a parent.
If the concept of internal and external motivations isn’t familiar to you, check out my in-depth explainer of these:
In that previous post, I shared a quote from Lisa Cron’s book Story Genius (US link, UK link affiliate links).
Cron succinctly describes what a story is:
A story is about how the things that happen affect someone in pursuit of a difficult goal, and how the person changes as a result.
Returning to our brave princess, we can see that rescuing the prince doesn’t fundamentally change who she is: that’s simply a thing that happens. However, if she falls in love with the prince then this is a change in her internal state (‘not in love’ to ‘in love’).
Or, perhaps she might decide the prince is a loser and instead start dating the dragon. That works too.
(Clifford, a charming dragon, wooing a young woman was the plot of a long running advertising campaign in the 1980s for Listerine mouth wash. There’s something about ‘fragile masculinity needing metaphors to approach bad breath’ here, but I can’t be bothered to unpick it.)
Either way, rescuing hapless nobility isn’t enough of an ending because it only addresses the external ‘things that happen’ part of a story, and not ‘how the person changes’.
Endings aren’t explanations
In our fairy tale scenario, we don’t go into the reasons for a dragon deciding to hold a royal personage hostage. We don’t explain the biology of dragons. We don’t get the story of what happened to the noble steed (clue: sugar-lumps and carrots).
We only need the key ‘why’s for a story to be satisfying. The external and internal changes are more important.
This isn’t the same as saying that nothing needs to be understood. For example, in a detective story, the whole purpose of the story is to find an explanation. Here, the external motivation is the ‘why’ and the ‘how’, so leaving these off would disappoint the reader.
Check your genre before deciding to leave explanations untold! However, do we need the childhood of Hannibal Lector for him to be a compelling character? Of course not.
We could try to explain everything at the end of our stories, but it’s simply not needed.
It’s enough for us to get the story’s key questions resolved, and the rest we can leave to the reader’s imagination.
The story’s key questions
Let’s look more at The Silence of the Lambs. What are the key questions?
Can Agent Starling prove her worth to others as a young woman in the FBI? (external change)
Can Agent Starling prove her worth to herself as a young woman in the FBI? (internal change)
Will Agent Starling’s lines between good and evil become blurred? (internal change)
Can the killer ‘Buffalo Bill’ be caught before he kills again? (external)
Will Agent Starling’s bosses be shown up as ignorant? (external)
Will Hannibal escape? (external)
Each of these key questions is decisively answered.
Let’s look at what isn’t answered in Silence of the Lambs:
Will Hannibal kill after his escape?
Will Hannibal be re-caught?
How do Agent Starling’s experiences shape the rest of her life?
How will the kidnappee of Buffalo Bill process the trauma of her experiences?
What happens in the hierarchy of the FBI after the events of the plot?
What happened next to Precious (Buffalo Bill’s dog)?*
… And many more.
The audience can make their own assumptions. The story doesn’t need these resolved.
Your ending only needs what happened and how it changed the character. Everything else is optional.
To give a different example, in slasher movies, there is the tradition of ‘the final girl’ (i.e. the one young woman who survives—she has the biggest character growth arc, typically starting meek but turning out to be smarter and more resourceful than others).
At the end of a slasher movie, do we need to see the therapy she goes through to cope with the things she’s seen? Nope.
Do we need to see the legal system tidying up the bodies? Nope.
Do we even need the full life story of the killer? Probably not.
Do we need to see a hint of the trauma/personal growth she’s experienced? Typically ‘yes’. Why? Because this shows how the story changed the character.
*Precious was played by Darla the dog. She went on to appear in Batman Returns, and has her own Wikipedia page.
Respect the medium, genre, and audience
Novels typically give a closer perspective of character’s thoughts and feelings than a film. We bring prose to life with senses of smell, taste, and touch, alongside cinema’s vision and sound.
Novels give a great sense of intimacy, sometimes literally they happen inside the heads of our characters, but they also have greater duration than a film. Unless you’re a fantastically fast reader, you won’t usually get through a novel faster than Halloween’s 91 minutes. It’s only fair to give a few more answers in a novel, and we often have more space to do this, than in a film.
Short stories give much greater freedom for leaving loose ends. It’s part of the genre that we dive into the story in the middle of the action, then dive out as soon as some clear change has occurred (external, internal, or both). They’re bite-sized morsels of delicious and vivid fiction. You can just say:
As the bus teetered nose-first on the edge of the cliff, I inched back along the aisle.
… And you’re good to go. We don’t need to know the name, profession, gender, or anything much. We just need to know: will they get out? In a short story, answering the key question (usually the external objective) is often enough for a gripping ending which leaves the audience wanting more.
As mentioned above, some genres have different expectations of explanation:
Action films typically have characters drawn in broad strokes: the baddies are greedy and power hungry, the heroes are misunderstood underdogs. Eventually the underdog saves the day (external resolution), they kiss the love interest (visually representing internal resolution), and they sail off into the sunset. We don’t need anything else. Note: this is pretty much the same ending as fairy tales.
Horror films give most of their back story during the 50-75% part of the film. This is the point where the threat has been shown to be real (usually via a death) and a first attempt at understanding the threat was revealed to be flawed. After the mid-point, we then get the scene(s) where the heroes research the threat and the true source of the danger’s power is identified. This means that the end of the movie can be kept incredibly simple: the evil is defeated (external change), and the hero has realised their true potential (internal change).
Detective and crime genres are also called a ‘whodunnit’ story, but more often they are a ‘why-dunnit’. Understanding the ‘why’ of a killer is typically the key to solving or stopping the crime. In these, the powerful external objective often overrides the need for strong internal objectives, but revealing lots of detail of the ‘why’ at or before the end will be important. Solving a crime without understanding the crime betrays the genre.
If you don’t respect the medium and genre you work in, your audience won’t be satisfied.
Explanations and exposition
As writers, we’re told at great lengths to avoid heavy exposition. Explaining things at the end of a story can feel just as heavy handed.
When it doubt, go for a light touch. If you’ve not said enough, your early readers will let you know, but you might be surprised how little you need to explain about your story so long as the action, change, and key questions are all clearly addressed.
Beyond those things, there’s rarely need to say anything else.
Take away tips:
When finishing your story, ask yourself:
Is the external action of the story clearly resolved?
Has the internal impact of facing these challenges on my protagonist’s internal state been clearly shown (albeit briefly)?
As you write, keep a note of key questions that emerge from your story (I do this per chapter) and at the end check ‘have I left any key questions unresolved?’
That’s it for this week! I hope this was helpful for the writers among you.
Next week I’ll be back with something fun. I don’t know what yet, so it’ll be a surprise for all of us!
Have a good one, go be excellent to each other!
Mata
xxx