Partial Endings

When writers complain about having trouble with endings, most of the time, they’re complaining about the end of the story – either the grand climax when everything works out or fails miserably, or getting the last few paragraphs or sentences exactly right.

But any story that has more than one scene (and that’s everything except the shortest of short fiction) has loads of partial endings. I call them “partial” because the overall story doesn’t end at the end of a scene or a chapter; something...