This is the End!

This is the End!

I’ve been thinking about endings. If there is one thing readers complain about with my stories, it’s the end- or rather, the suddenness of the ending. Someone diagnosed me with SES- Sudden Ending Syndrome! I write the sort of ending I like. I suppose most writers do- and I end the story when the story tells me it has come to the end.

Almost always, I have planned and plotted more than I end up writing. But there comes a point where the major conflict is resolved and my fingers are hovering over the keyboard, and the story just says, “Nope, we’re done.”

Not always resolved completely, but nothing ever is—I feel like the key to the ending is when some sort of redemption occurs, or is possible. That’s the sort of ending I like to read and write, and the sort of ending that causes the occasional reader to howl for my blood, tear hair by the roots, and such.

So since I believe in studying and working at writing, and I love it so much, I am indulging myself by studying how other writers end their stories.

Michael Perry is one of my favorite writers. He writes humor and memoir, and I recently finished his books Truck: A Love Story, and Coop. He uses a particular structure for his books that makes the ending seem just right. He usually structures the books around the year, and sometimes has chapters as months or seasons. The end comes with the end of the year. But even better, he ends his books by having the narrator go to bed at the end of the day and fall asleep. These are very happy, rounded, peaceful endings that seem right because they are following the natural end of the day.

Tim O’Brien wrote the endings of a couple of the stories in The Things They Carried in a way that is very powerful, and seems quite right for the stories- the characters soldier up and march off into the future. Here’s the ending to The Things They Carried:

“He might just shrug and say, Carry on, then they would saddle up and form into a column and move out toward the villages west of Than Khe.”

Here’s the end of the story In the Field: “Maybe he would just take a couple of practice swings and knock the ball down the middle and pick up his clubs and walk off into the afternoon.” For these sorrowful stories, the endings are perfect.

Denis Johnson ended his short story Car Crash While Hitchhiking, from Jesus’ Son, like a punch in the face. The whole story has a voice like a gasoline fire, and ends with “And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.” This ending is all about the extraordinary voice. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road ends with a powerful voice as well- “I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.” I listened to Kerouac reading the end of this book on Youtube- that was a real gift.

My favorite ending in all of fiction, though, is the end to Norman McLean’s A River Runs Through It. His language is tender and beautiful, but what he did was he used the last lines to open the story up, from his particular story of this man and his brother and his father, and he made it eternal and everlasting. It was like this story left you staring into the night sky, at a particular star, when you suddenly realize you’re staring into the night sky, and there are billions of stars right above your head. This way of making a story that is particular connect with the universal is, I think, perfect.

“Eventually, all things merge into one...and a river runs through it.
The river was cut by the world's great flood...and runs over rocks from the basement of time.
On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words.. and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.”