On Writing Satisfying Endings in Fiction
What it comes down to and how to achieve them
When working with writers as either an editor or ghostwriter, the question of how to end a story comes up A LOT. What I always try and remind my clients and writers who come to me is that the idea of a satisfying ending is all about the story idea and characters. For many of these writers, what they have at the beginning is a simple idea and a basic character.
That leads them to write unsatisfying or cliche endings because the hard work of rooting around in the story idea and characters isn’t being fully tended to.
It can be hard to understand the difference between the characters you craft in your head and the necassary development that happens behind the scenes to make those characters more than stock images on the page.
Without doing any of that work, writers will try the many tricks out there to create meaningful and satisfying endings. They’ll do parallel endings where they have the story end in the same place it began to show how the characters and world have changed or not changed throughout the course of the story. Or they’ll follow their story idea and characters to their…
