How To Win More Readers With A Powerful Close

[Ingrid, Just another writer.]

Here are three simple ways to end a story so the reader feels rewarded rather than cheated.

1. Close on an ambiguous note – deliberately.

Told cleverly, a story can end upon a note of deliberate vagueness or ambiguity. The reader shakes the kaleidoscope and sees a different story.

Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw closes with a maddening question: Has the protagonist killed a child? Or did the ghosts do it? Or has the whole tale been a fraud, the hallucination of a deranged woman?

Whichever interpretation we choose, the tale works.

In another short story, a racist woman tortures a young negro child. The last line of the story has the woman saying: “I wonder how that child felt.”

At first, it reads like a malicious chuckle. Then we shake the kaleidoscope. Has the bigot finally discovered compassion? And become horror-struck by her own cruelty? Either way, the story works.

To succeed with a story like that, it’s best to write the last line first. Then you know where your story is heading, even if the reader doesn’t!

2. Introduce a twist that the reader didn’t expect.

Another way to shake the kaleidoscope is to close with a twist that the reader could not see coming.

For example, a man jilts his bride on their wedding day. Why? He has fallen for the bride’s mother. That’s a twist but it’s a cliché. The reader can see it coming.

Suppose instead the tale ends with the mother and daughter happily drinking the wedding champagne and laughing. The mother has saved her daughter from a doomed marriage to a brutal man – by seducing him. Now she has dumped the man in her turn. Duly enlightened, the daughter is grateful. The mother is entertained by her romantic weekends – and by organizing the spoof wedding!

The reader thinks ‘That’s clever. I didn’t see it coming at all.’

Michael Cordy shakes the kaleidoscope in a similar way. At the end of The Crime Code, the hero marries the heroine after predictably saving the world. Jubilation! Then in his last line, Cordy reveals that, uh, they have not saved the world after all…

3. Echo the first paragraph in the close.

Perhaps the most popular form of closure is the ‘echo’.

The kaleidoscope returns to the pattern it showed at the start, but meanwhile, everything has been shaken. The simplest way is to do this is to present a strong theme, emblem or phrase in the very first paragraph and then repeat it in the closing lines, perhaps with a new ironic meaning.

For example, a story might open with an elderly gentleman skating on a village pond. He is ‘very good on the blades’. The tale closes with his arrest as a brutal killer. In the closing line, a detective remarks with unconscious irony: ‘he was very good on the blades’.

Once again, the easiest way to structure an ‘echo’ story is to write the last paragraph first. Then embody some aspect of it in the first paragraph. At once, the story acquires a satisfying sense of form.

Adapt any of these three kinds of closure creatively in your fiction writing, and you will have a powerful close – that stays with your readers and keeps them coming back to you.

What kinds of closure have you found effective in the stories you read or write? Which closures just don’t work for you?

[Elaine M.]

I found these on Quora, hope they help
illustrate your point. ( Delete if no use) They all work for me!

Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is. –Russell Banks, Continental Drift
(1985)

She sat staring with her eyes shut, into his eyes, and felt as if she had finally got
to the beginning of something she couldn’t begin, and she saw him moving farther
and farther away, farther and farther into the darkness until he was the pin point of
light. –Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood

It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing
children, only found another orphan. –Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the
after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her
riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood; and how she would gather
about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a
strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago; and how
she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple
joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days. –Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

and this to ensure a second reading .....genius.

'Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating
on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.' –Samuel Beckett, Molloy
(1951, trans. Patrick Bowles)

[Tara ♪]

Well, in out of my mind by Sharon m. Draper, the first page or so is repeated at the end, and everything has changed. Plus, you realize, BAM! It was the first page of her autobiography all along, and it mights make the reader think "how sweet" or it might make them think "so we've been reading the autobiography that's she's writing for school all along. How cool. It brings a new life to it."

Just an example. ;-)