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It's a little is 24 hours. You know, let me call that guy back. Stop turning down work. Start growing. Get the funding you need at capitas.com. That's k-a-p-i-t-u-s.com. This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patrion.com/writingexcuses. Season 21. Episode 43. This is Writing Excuses. The not-final word on endings. Tools not rules. Four writers by writers. I'm Mary Rebunette. I'm Donlon. I'm Erin. And I'm Howard. So today, we are going to look at how to wrap up loose ends. Decide what things you can leave dangling and what elements make a strong close. One of the things about talking about endings is that they are so contextual. And I think that when you are going to take workshops and things like that, people spend a lot of time talking about the opening of a story. But the ending can be just as important. There's a saying in musical theater that you have to nail three numbers. The opening number, the one right before intermission because that's the one that gets people to come back and the closing number. And if you can do a really good closing number, a lot of the other problems will just people will forget about them. So I wanted us to talk about what makes an ending satisfying. Like, what are you looking for when you get to the end of a book? I found that looking at the mice quotient, not as a list of, you know, story types, but just the idea that opening parentheses and closing parentheses in syntactical order with the concepts or characters or themes of a story, whether or not they are categorized cleanly with mice, you know, if in the opening of the book, you know, character says x, y, z at the end of the book. I want to hear z, y, x or z, x, y or something so that I recognize that I have gotten to the end. Now, z, x, y as a reordering needs to be surprising and inevitable or in some way satisfying, this is not a formula in and of itself, but it's a way to help me bracket, bracket my outlining so that I can just in the outline figure out where the story might be broken. I'm glad you said the word bracket when you were talking about that because there's, you reminded me of a quote from Scott Westroffel that I really like when I'm talking about endings in particular, and it's it's out of one of his novels, but it's what did a happy ending even mean in real life anyway? In stories, you simply said they lived happily ever after and that was it, but in real life, people had to keep on living day after day, year after year. So an ending is an artificial ending, like it's an artificial bracket. We make that choice about where to stop the story at a point that creates some sort of resonance for the overall story and for our reader. So I think part of what we're talking about here is how to make the decision about where to draw that artificial bracket and what things you are attempting to do with it, like why do we stop there? I mean, for me, a satisfying ending is all about change. You start at point A and then by the time you reach the end of the book, you have to have a state of things where your character is different from where you started. The world is different from where you started and the events have reached some kind of conclusion. And I think when I get really frustrated with an ending is when it feels really dangling, right? And this can even be in a linked series, a linked trilogy, your character still has to evolve and change by the end of your story. And if that hasn't happened, I think that's where I'm starting to feel really frustrated by the experience of, well, what did I spend all that time if nothing changed? And I think seeing growth or not necessarily growth, I mean, it can be regression, right? But seeing a question posed and answered over what is this character going to do, who are they going to become, feels really important to me in terms of where to find that break point. I think for me, it's getting a sense of resonance, like a resonant mood and a sense of the author wants me to take something from the story, whether I get what they want or not. I think a lot of times when I was teaching, I would run into stories that were theoretically finished, but I felt like I didn't understand what I was meant to walk away with or if I was meant to walk away with anything at all. I think that often comes the other way when things are too neatly tied up. There is no, like, it's like ending with the punch. I always tell people like, if you punch someone in the stomach, you want to wait a second to see how it lands and how they react to it. If your story ends with a punch and no reaction, it feels like, okay, it's over, but you don't really have a chance to sit in and to see its effect. And so I like that little small bit of unfolding at the end of a story that gives a sense of how the mood has changed, not just how the characters have changed, but how the resonance has changed. And that's often the thing that I'll sit with later. Even if there I've forgotten the events of the story, it's that feel. You want to see impact, not just meant? Exactly. Yeah. And I think that that's a, I love you calling it the resonant mood. I often think about and have talked about stories as being, you know, a drug made out of words. And so it's like, what is the effect of the drug? So what I'd like to do is I'd like to actually talk about the very last line of a story because I feel like that's neglected and it carries the most weight. We've talked before about the recency primacy effect. And the last line is the most recent line. So it carries actually the most weight in a lot of ways. I think it has as much power to shape something as as an opening line. So I'm going to read three different closing lines all from famous works. So we can talk about like why these are why these work. The very last line of Christmas Carol is and so is Tiny Tim observed. God bless us, everyone. And there's like, to me, there's a built in hopefulness to that. Great Gatsby. So we beat on boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past. There's like a weiriness there. And then where the wild things are, max stepped into his private boat and waved goodbye and sailed back over a year and in and out of weeks into a day. day and into the night of his very own room where he found a supper waiting for him and it was still hot. And for me, there's this sense of being loved. So are there other things that you think about, like when you think about a really amazing closing line? For me, it is a lot of times, it is even without the rest of the book attached to it. This line has a lot of, has that emotion baked into it. There's a TV series on Apple called Bad Monkey with Vince Vaughan as a detective. And in the opening episode, his buddy comes over and says, "I need you to do a favor. Do me a favor. We come look at what's in the trunk of the car." And what's in the trunk of the car is a body part. And we have a whole adventure around the, and the, the meta of that detective story is a lot of fun. In the last episode, you know, we have a lapillogue and for our main character, things haven't really changed that much. He solved the mystery, but things haven't really changed that much. And his friend comes over and they're sitting on the, sitting on the back patio, drinking and his friend says, "So, you want to come take a look at what I got in the car?" And that is just glorious to me because even if we never get another series of that, I get to head can and myself, a whole other set of detective adventures for these people. And that's a space where these characters are comfortable. They grew during this adventure, but they didn't actually get to move very much, but I'm okay with that. I think what all these endings really do to me, what I think a great ending, great ending line does is it works both in the immediate content and the immediate moment of the story and also within the greater context of the story. So it resonates on two levels, like if you just want to take it as like, and then this happened, you can. But a lot of times they'll use words that like work in both the broader and that like we were born onward, like onward in which way, onward physically, onward mentally, onward spiritually. And so a lot of times I find those kind of things are very beautiful because it's, you get a chance to open up and see the story again as a whole. You know, you're experiencing the story as a series of moments and a really good ending kind of propels you back and allows you to take a 10,000 foot view where you can say here's what this experience was like for me as a whole. Yeah. I mean, what strikes me about all three of the examples you gave is it's a statement of this is what this book was and when you reach the end of a story, somebody's like, well, what the hell did I just read? Why did I read that? And each of those tells you why, right? Like the Gatsby one in particular really stands out to me because it's like these are people who are trapped in a moment who cannot escape their past, who are beating ceaselessly against this current. Another example that comes to my mind is Virginia Wolf's Mrs. Dalloway, which ends with it is Clarissa, he said, for there she was. The entire book is a portrait of this woman in her life. It opens with Clarissa said she would buy the flowers herself and ends with for there she was. That's the whole book. You're told this is what you're getting from the very first line and at the very end, this is what you got. And I think that makes it feel such like a closed circuit in a way. This kind of goes back to how do I, you were talking about with the brackets. And it's what you've explicitly ending it, right? Like when you first taught how to write an essay, it's like you have your introduction where you say what this essay is going to be about. You say the stuff the essay is about that at the end you say this is the stuff the essay was about. And I think sometimes the last sentence is that too. I think sometimes you can do that more poetically, more elegantly, but it's important to tell people, hey, this is what you just got, how do you feel about it? Yeah. I really like that way of thinking about that. The broke and classical music forms, we used to try to analyze these based on melodic structures and in-evalic quatsits and the math got hugely complex and there were too many exceptions than rules. And then somebody figured out, oh, it's kind of just this circle of keys that they walk through and then we had to understand that the audience at the time was not going to get to listen to this music maybe more than just once in their whole lives. And yet the music survived because the audiences loved it and there's power in that. Why did they love it? Because of this circle, because of this closure where they could hear when it was getting to the end and they could, there are crescendos and there are callbacks and recapitulations and all that and at the end of it, everybody comes away satisfied. Did I study music in college? Yes. I did. And I apply that to my writing all the time. There's got to be the writing equivalent of the dominant pedal as I'm winding into that final moment and there needs to be the recapitulation, the return to tonic, whatever that says the piece is done. Yeah. This is because as humans, we respond extremely well to symmetry. One of the things when you're looking at another human being, one of the things that makes someone beautiful is not actually the individual features. It is how symmetrical their face is. But we respond to this in a lot of other ways too and one of the things that often happens like with your Dalai way example is that there's a symmetry there. We start and we stop. And so that's something that you can deliberately deploy. It doesn't mean that it's a flaw if it's not there. It's a tool that you can pull out to kind of pump up that ending line just a little bit more. I mean, you use asymmetry to unsettle people because we want symmetry. If you give them something that feels deliberately asymmetric, then you'll leave people feeling uncomfortable, which is sometimes what you want to do. Yeah. Exactly. And actually, we're going to explore that in just a couple of weeks. We will talk all day about symmetry. But now, we're going to take a slight break. Thank you for calling 1-800-GOT-Junk. We make room for possibilities. We've loaded the moving van and we're leaving a ton of stuff at our old address. Can you make it disappear? All you have to do is point. Can you come right now? We're on our way. We make space for hope. We make space for dreams. We make space for what matters. We are 1-800-GOT-Junk. Let us make room for your possibilities. We can make your house happier. And your future brighter. Call 1-800-GOT-Junk. Or visit 1-800-GOT-Junk.com. You know those days when you're non-stop busy, but by the end, you've got nothing to show for it other than a ton of open tabs and another mislunch break. You can ask it to draft something, summarize a long thread, pull up a file, or even prep you for a meeting. Hello. Sorry, another one you have to turn away? Got any ideas? Get business financing through Capitus, easy application, no hidden fees, and really fast funding. Oh yeah? How fast are we talking here? As little as 24 hours. Start growing. Get the funding you need at capitus.com. The Amics Gold Card, you can earn rewards across dining and travel. Find out your welcome offer, which could be as high as 100,000 points. Apply today at americanexpress.com/explored-gold terms-apply. OK, so I want to back us up. We've talked about the last sentence, but now I want to back up because I feel like many of the tools that we use in the opening we can use in the closing, and it's about grounding the reader at the beginning so that they understand how the story is going to unfold. And I think at the end, we're also grounding the reader in understanding what things have changed. So when we're looking at the last paragraph in a short story, at the last page and a novel, some of the things that I think that we're looking at is much like we have in the beginning. Like, who is the character now? Where are they? Like, if we're doing a big event story where everything has changed, there may not be in a different physical location, but the relationship to it may have changed. And what mood lingers after the book? How does the character feel about it? What are some other elements that might go in that last little bits there? I come back to the symmetry in my opening chapters, if I have used, for instance, ocean metaphors for the character to describe how they're feeling, then however they have changed, I want to return some to some ocean metaphors at the end. Now, it may not be that overt, it may be that at the end of the book the scene is actually on a beach and we are having a different experience, but but I always go back to the beginning and dig through the middle and look for the elements that I can morph and pull forward and work into descriptions or senses or settings. They don't need to be the actual key twisty elements, they're just the descriptors, the framing, the context, as you said at the beginning, that help couch whatever my last sentence is going to be in something that feels like that sentence is exactly where and what the beginning and middle of this book promised me it would be. I also think two other things that I really like, one is to take a word or an object or something that has minimal context at the very beginning, but a huge amount of weight that it has gained over the course of the story and bring it back. I think the trunk thing that you're talking about like see what's in the trunk means nothing but now that you've gone through this entire adventure by saying yes or no or even thinking about that question they're thinking about something much broader. And I think similarly I love to have characters make a choice with limited information at the very beginning of a story and have to make a similar choice now that they know more about the world about themselves at the end. Sometimes I'll have them make the choice sometimes I'll just have the choice exist or be ambiguous about what their choice was so the reader can side what happens next but I love the idea that it's like the things around us the choices we make don't change what really changes is our understanding in our context and that is like something that makes the story seem bigger it has made this person's world bigger and your understanding as a reader bigger as well. I think that's a really great way to show character growth or world changes I've heard that called an avatar lies a Palmer called that an avatar Hitchcock sometimes calls it a MacGuffin but it's basically I would I used to call it an emotional resonance item but an example of this using citing a film from last century is dirty dancing. And in dirty dancing one of the the drink baby the main character is on many journeys but one of them is can she become a dancer professional dancer and there's this lift that she has to do which is the iconic lift even if you haven't seen the film you have seen the meme of the lift. And that lift represents when she gets it that represents her coming into her own so that's that's her avatar of success. And earlier in the movie it's just this is a difficult dance move that she can't do but then it becomes this huge celebratory thing there's a couple of other things like her dad hugs her at the end and he had hugged her at the beginning of the film but when they are strange he stops doing that and so at the end when he hugs her it's again this. This now baby is an adult he sees her he sees her for who she is and he accepts what she's doing the first hug is I'm hugging you because I'm your dad and the last hug is I'm hugging you because I love you and those are such different messages and it's so powerful to have them reflected. Off of one another yeah well one thing I also want to bring up here is breathing room is really important in a conclusion there's so many books that I've read that I love the book and then the end of the book feels like running straight into a brick wall and where events simply stop and then the book is over without a lot of space to breathe for a moment to process what just happened you know this really kind of goes to what you're saying Aaron of like you see the punch but you don't see the impact you don't see it land and you don't see the effect. And I think giving space for your character to breathe for a second or even just the reader to linger in a moment and absorb what just happened before you give us that closing line and then the closing line can be that's not quite it can be quite intense and impactful but give us that final summation of what it is that we're encountering. I think this is a thing that happens for a lot of people who begin a short story writers and then transition to novels with something that I had an issue with all the time because the short story writer you were taught to stick the landing and get out. And novels because I think that proportionally you're actually spending about the same proportional amount of time in both in the now we've ended and here's our nice little day no mom in a short story it's like it's a paragraph. And in a novel sometimes it's a whole other scene where you need to give them that breathing room I think the other reason that we will often see that sometimes is that novelists just want to be done with the book. And just rush some stuff. I can't remember the name of the book and the ending was one of my least favorite endings of all time and yet I can tell it was one of the most artful. The story was essentially an adventure story about exo biologists on a planet studying it and whatever and one of the characters are our main character. Is kind of wondering why we're doing this you know this is dangerous we're on this adventure but what are we what are we really learning this is. And the book ends we're in that character's point of view the whole time the book ends before they've reached the point where they were saying they were going to go this character basically gets killed by a monster. And as he's dying he's like I think I understand what we were doing and then the book ends now I am confident that the author went into this saying. Life doesn't put endings the way narratives put endings I want to write a book where the ending is the end of the life and here we go and so that that's why I think it's artsy but it also helped me to look at it and ask I wish I could remember the name of the book and ask. How could this ending actually be satisfying because there were elements to it that were satisfying and a smarter version of me reading the book now might see what the author intended. This is why often a book needs an epilogue in order to give space for the reader to sit and to know that yes status quo is actually stable now the character really has made this change. In the first Avengers movie the other thing that it that an epilogue can do is say look this is what they earned. And so at the very very very very end of the film there's this scene where the Avengers are sitting around eating Shorma and at the beginning of the film they were all individuals. Who are dealing with extraordinary events and at the end of the movie they are a group of friends team and they are having what they have earned is mundane it is a just normal New York Shorma spot it's not a fancy dinner they've earned ordinary. And that is the kind of thing that Aaron you were talking about about bringing something and recontextualizing it because Shorma had been mentioned earlier. Well what's really important about that I think that's relevant in this is the Shorma line from Robert Jenner was an improv line it was not in the script just said it and then they decided to as a reshoot later to shoot the Shorma scene. So throughout the scene you can see Chris Evans is sitting there with his hand in front of his face the whole time because he has a beard because he's shooting snowpiercer at the time. And so he's covering his face with the whole scene because it was the thing that was added later significant after the fact but you're right it's an important beat Avengers doesn't end as well if you don't have the Shorma and one of the beats before that was. What I really don't love is an ending Maria Hill talking to Nick Fury saying you know how do you know how do you know they're scattered to the four wins how do you know they're going to come back. And he says because will need them to well that's not an answer that satisfies me but them eating Shorma that satisfies me because it needs to end on this idea of them together right because the whole movie was about them coming together so they needed that Coda and so the reason I bring up the production detail is because I think for writers there can feel like a lot of pressure to get that ending right right out of the gate right and it's kind of like opening lines this way you can be several drafts into it where you until you finally figure out. How does this book actually need to end do I need a time skip do I need an epilogue do I need to give it another beat here what's my what's the final image I want to end on it's okay if that comes later right there is a lot of process between you finishing your first draft in the book hitting shelves that ending maybe found somewhere in there so try a lot of different stuff is one thing I'm going to say like we're talking a lot about the mechanics of what makes a good ending but the process can be a really messy one. Yeah, I think that it's like you're when you're writing it's not so much that you know that what that perfect last line is sometimes you get lucky and you do know. But most of the time you are aiming after a shadow in the dark or shadow in your aiming after a shadow and you don't know the shape of the thing that's casting the shadow but you know the shadow is there and you're aiming for that and then you get there and when you finally get close enough sometimes it takes a little while before you can really see it. But you can still aim for that shadow. Yeah, and I was thinking about actors adding things to movies I was thinking about the moment in sinners were Delroy Lindo. I was telling this like really horrible story and he ends it by like breaking into song which was improvised. And I think it's interesting because I think sometimes we have a gut instinct for like what feels right as an ending but it might not be the thing that fits perfectly within the structure you have created for yourself. So I say like also it's good to think like if the ending doesn't feel right maybe there's a good moment to write down like what is it that you think you're trying to capture there? That you haven't captured and maybe this doesn't do it but when you find it later it gives you permission to continue seeking as opposed to feeling like I have to figure it out immediately and put a perfect button on it because I don't think things always end in a perfect button. - No, I don't think they do. And I think sometimes when they do end in a perfect, perfect button where the hero gets all of the things that they're aiming after it can feel contrived. So one of the last things that I want to talk about before we end the endings is that idea of sequencing. So you can the goal that you end with and this goes back to Avengers is the goal that you end with is the one that sets the tone that's the one that the reader is going to walk away with. So I have two examples here and all I'm changing is the order. So we have they had each other as one goal and the other goal was they were trying to save a city but the city was destroyed. So they had each other but the city was destroyed is a totally different ending than the city was destroyed but they had each other. And that's all about which beat your landing on and that's not necessarily while I'm using a single sentence that's also in terms of the sequencing of scenes. Again, this is with the Avengers part of the reason that that Coda works is that is the thing that we end with. That is the thing you take away with you. Whereas the, because we'll need them again. We, because we'll need them again. It says they are never going to get rest. This is always going to be an exhausting thing that continues to come after them. All right, with that, I think it's time for homework. Okay, so your homework and I'm going to encourage you to swing by the website because all of these are going to be written down. I have a series of questions for you that you can ask yourself about your ending. I want to be very clear that the absence of any of these things are not a flaw. These are just things that you can ask that might deepen your ending, might enrich it or opportunities, that's what these are. So does your ending match the promises of your beginning? Do you have an avatar of success? What did your characters earn? Is there any symmetry with your opening? And does the closing line underline the tone or theme of the story? Again, these are not things that you're doing something wrong if you're not doing these. But these are opportunities for you to ask yourself and interrogate your own story. - This has been writing excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go right. - Writing excuses has been brought to you by our listeners patrons and friends. For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Coal, Dongwan Song, Aaron Roberts, and Howard Taylor. This episode was engineered by Marshall Carr Jr. Mastered by Alex Jackson and produced by Emma Reynolds. For more information, visit writingexcuses.com. - You know those days when you're non-stop busy, but by the end, you've got nothing to show for it other than a ton of open tabs and another mislunch break. Go handles the busy work without you ever leaving the page you're on, so you can focus on the work only you can do. Why rent when you can buy? Are you tired of paying your landlord's mortgage? Home start brokerage helps first-time buyers go from renting to owning. Contact us to learn about down payment assistance programs in the DFW area, plus builder incentives that can make your first home more affordable than you think. Our team is standing by. Take the first step today at homestartclub.com. Again, that's homestartclub.com. Home start brokerage. 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