Never Say You Can't Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories

by Charlie Jane Anders

7 OTHER THINGS ABOUT ENDINGS THAT I’VE LEARNED THE HARD WAY A good ending doesn’t have to be a surprise, or a twist. The most gut-punchy finales are often the ones that you can kind of see coming, which only lends them more power when they arrive. If you do use a twist ending, the reader should still feel as if they should have seen it coming, because the clues were there all along. You don’t have to answer every last question, as long as the characters find some resolution. We don’t care about the solution to every tiny mystery nearly as much as we do the emotional stakes that the characters have been chasing—and in real life, there are always a few things you’ll never fully understand. Likewise, you don’t have to tie off every conflict with a bow, especially if the reader can easily see how things will turn out. Sometimes leaving a little imaginative work for the reader to do can make them feel more invested, not less, in the story. A denouement gives you a chance to wrap up more of the emotional questions in the story, after the main conflict has been put to bed. You can also drop some hints about how the characters will go on after the last page—and the denouement can pack more surprises, if the big plot resolution was more or less what people had expected. An ending “pays off” if it addresses the things that you’ve told us, over the course of the story, that we should care about. If a character spent a hundred pages obsessing about learning the truth of her mother’s d...