Your Guide to Writing the Perfect Story

Effective Endings

So you've planned out your plot, the characters, and the events. You know, for the most part, how your story will go and now you've gotten to the point in your planning that you need to decide what your stories ending will look like. Enter me. Today I will be talking about the very general different types of endings that you can choose and then I will top it off by giving you some of my best tips on ending all stories. 

For many writers, an ending is a point to work towards and you have to make sure it counts. Hopefully this chapter will help you with that.

Part One: Types of Endings

1. Happy Endings

In a happy ending, everything goes well for the protagonist. Despite the rough spots, they get through everything and solve the conflict. Usually they tie up all the loose ends in the story and have a good life path set out for them. Everything is just dandy.

Contrary to popular belief, most stories do not end this way. The reason is, perfectly happy endings just aren't realistic in life. Readers turn to stories to feel an emotional connection, one that happy endings tend to take away from readers. For this reason, I would suggest you take caution when writing a perfect ending. In fact, the only time I would even consider it acceptable would be in teen-fiction or romance, and even those are a bit iffy.

The reason I said those two genres, however, is because those tend to be the ones that people go to when they are in search of reassurance. Something to show them that life can get better. It is usually a put-down to those people when the story ends poorly. That being said, even happy endings need to follow a few simple rules.

The first being that the ending shouldn't be unimaginable. The reader should have been at least able to suspect that the ending could have happened the way it did. If they couldn't have, your ending would be unrealistic. My second point is that the conflict would need to have been resolved in a way that would not result in the protagonist losing anything dear to them. That would turn the ending into a bitter-sweet ending, which I will talk about later. The third point is that your protagonist, or another important character, should have gone through a change that allowed them to have that happy ending. The fourth thing for you to think about is your theme; was the happy ending effective or necessary to convey your theme? My last pointer is that you need to make sure your readers care about the characters and what happens. The readers should believe that your protagonist deserves to have that happy ending.

2. Tragic Endings

In a tragic ending, usually there is a lot of death, the problem is not resolved, or the character changes for the worse. Like happy endings, tragic endings should be done with caution. I don't say that because your readers might hate you for them. I say that because a lot of the time people just do them because they want to create a lasting impact for no reason at all. I'm telling you now that that won't win you any friends. You should always have a reason for writing a sad ending. I'll give you the three main reasons where it would be acceptable to do this.

a) The ending was unavoidable. In order to solve the conflict your character had to become a terrible person or someone had to die, etc. Or sometimes this means that your character didn't have what it took to solve the conflict. There was no way around it.

b) A tragic ending was the only way to end the story realistically. For example, your character had gone through so much it would only be realistic for them to suffer mentally after the conflict had been solved. Another example would be if it were not realistic for no one important to die at all in your story, with so much violence going on. 

c) You had to have a tragic ending to convey the theme. You wanted to show that by doing or not doing certain things, it wouldn't end well for you or anyone else.