Relationships & Partners and Writing Skills Tips. (A Writing Advice Guide Book

Lecture 14: How To End A Plot

Lecture 14: Happily Ever After (Except For Series) How To End A Plot

As noted earlier in the course, literature is the creation of order out of chaos— the creation of meaning and structure out of reality, which is otherwise meaningless and without structure. We've already seen several ways in which fiction imposes order on chaos: When we evoke a person, a scene, or a situation, we select the details that best get across what we want the reader to see and understand. When we write dialogue, we suggest real speech without actually reproducing it, thus imposing purpose on speech. But perhaps the most obvious way that fiction imposes order on chaos is through the creation of stories and plots, which will be the subject of this and the next five lectures.

Believability And Satisfaction
In part, believability depends on what we as readers bring to a story, specifically our own individual understanding of how the real world works and what real people are like.

This doesn't mean that the rules of the real world can't be bent: Your readers are willing to accept that the laws of nature can be altered, broken, or ignored in fantasy, horror, and science fiction, as long as you provide an alternative set of rules for your fictional world and stick to them.

Readers of any genre, however, are less likely to buy into a character whose final actions violate their beliefs about human psychology. Different readers have different ideas and expectations about how human beings think and behave or how they ought to think or behave. An ending that strikes one reader as completely plausible and even admirable may strike another as preposterous and even offensive.

Consider the ending of Jane Eyre. The brooding, sexually magnetic Mr. Rochester persuades Jane to fall in love with him without bothering to tell her that he's already married and that he keeps his first wife locked in the attic. At the end of the novel, after a series of plot twists, Jane happily marries Mr. Rochester.

Most readers accept this ending, given the narrative conventions of the time and because Jane is such an admirable character that we want her to be happy. Still, it's possible to imagine a reader who just can't believe that someone as smart and independent as Jane would give someone as manipulative and self-serving as Mr. Rochester a second chance.

If you believe that character is more fundamental to fiction than plot, then the key to crafting a believable ending is staying true to the nature of your characters. You can make an ending believable if you can get the reader to play along with the premise and if you play fair with the reader by obeying the rules of your own world but especially by respecting your own characters.

Just because an ending is believable doesn't mean it's satisfying. In the terminology of philosophy, believability is a necessary condition of a satisfying ending, but it is not a sufficient one.

As we've seen, believability isn't an absolute quality, but satisfaction is even more dependent on taste and personal experience.

We can conceivably make a case for the believability of an ending, but we can no more convince a skeptic to be satisfied by an ending than we can make people change their minds about foods they don't like.

Resolution
In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner says that there are two ways a narrative can end: "in resolution, when no further event can take place .. or in logical exhaustion." Of course, there are other types of endings, but these two definitions probably cover most possibilities. Let's start with resolution, which is what we've termed a binary ending one that resolves an either/or situation or answers a simple question posed at the beginning of the narrative.

Plots with binary endings are often dismissed as mechanical and contrived, and many of them are. We could even argue that the ending of some simple binary narratives is the least important thing about them; the real reason we enjoy them is that we enjoy the setting or characters. This is often the case with well-written genre narratives: The journey is interesting, even if the destination turns out to be unmemorable.