After you lay out the plot in order, determine how to travel from the last point back to the first.Every pivotal scene should add to the transformation.
Remember that your character must grow somehow.This ending requires planning far ahead, so you’ll need to consider how each event leads to the next.Like two slices of bread cradling the meat of a sandwich, a circular ending holds the story together. “Oh, Aunt Em, I’m so glad to be at home again,” she exclaims, revealing that her perspective has changed.Īuthors often harken back to their opening chapters to show character development or create irony. But when she returns home at the end, she recognizes that it’s a beautiful place because of the people who love her. Kansas is portrayed as bleak and gray in contrast to the colorful land of Oz, where Dorothy spends most of the story after a tornado sweeps her away. Frank Baum’s classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a prime example. You can approach an ending from any number of directions, but I’m going to outline three of my favorites that can help you brainstorm a memorable one.Īn ending that revisits a theme or a setting that appeared in the beginning leaves readers with a deep sense of satisfaction and closure. One captures readers’ interest for a few hundred pages while the other captures their hearts forever. How a story ends is as important as how it hooks readers in the beginning. And now their feelings have melded with your own. You’ve lived an experience through the characters, watched them resolve an issue, explore an idea, or pursue a goal. The surprise, challenge, curiosity, or inspiration in the final words becomes part of you. Afterward, outrage hovered over me for days.Ī powerful ending doesn’t stay sealed inside a book once you close the cover. With the unsettling image of a woman’s disgrace and a man’s duplicity, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter concludes. It bore a device, a herald’s wording of which may serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend so somber is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow-on a field, sable, the letter A, Gules.” “All around, there were monuments carved with armorial bearings: and on this simple slab of slate-as the curious investigator may still discern and perplex himself with the purport-there appeared the semblance of an engrave escutcheon.
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