Endings: How Do You End Your Novel?
By Kimberley Allen McNamara
I’m sure you will agree, June is quite a month! Beginnings, celebrations, and endings: the start of summer, graduations, weddings, Juneteenth, and Pride Month, the NBA and NHL Championships--all are prominent in the month of June. Ooh, and don’t forget the ice cream socials at those end of the school year celebrations. The beginnings and celebrations aside, I’ve been thinking a great deal about endings.
Endings
I am in my revision process, nearing the end. Although I’ve carried an idea of the ending, I am exploring the ways to craft an ending in a way that best fits my novel's voice and pov (the pov has changed since I originally started).
Long ago, the line: they lived happily ever after was considered a simple but effective summation for fairytales. But good endings are more than a simple summation. Endings require you to think about what the narrator meant by telling the story, what thoughts did the writer want to elicit? Beware, what you think may vary largely from what your best friend-who-also-read-the-book thinks. Often book clubs will volley around the critique: I didn’t care for the ending or the ending didn’t make sense or the ending really wasn’t earned. Online critics posting in Amazon’s GoodReads may make similar comments and then there are the critics, the reviewers, how does the ending measure up to their expectations.
Endings–your novel needs one. But how do you End your novel?
Rebecca Makkai in her substack offers a six part series on the subject of Endings for a novel. If you don’t subscribe to Makkai’s substack you should. SubMakk (Makkai’s substack) is similar to reading a craft book in palatable sections; sometimes the craft topic newsletter may be followed by one with another writerly discussion: as in The Word You Want is Spelled Y-E-A-H, or other grammatical and structural topics and there is a sidebar of Zillow oddity sightings. Makkai is a consummate teacher and her posts are always instructional and I truly recommend you subscribe.
Another article I stumbled upon:
Allegra Hyde in her article for LitHub: Exit Strategies: So How Are You Supposed To End A Story? Opens with a quote from Sam Shepherd and how he hates endings. Hyde, who also teaches writing and is a writer, examines what an author might do with the ending to avoid the critique of ‘falling short’ and to create an ending that resonates with the reader. She took to Twitter to ask what endings resonated with readers; she quickly came to the conclusion that powerful endings elicited powerful emotions as responders continually cited endings which stayed with them because of the strong emotion evoked. But after culling through all the responses, the element that garnered the MOST resonating effect centered on the element of Time. Read Hyde’s piece for her close examination of this element and its impact on ending. And consider becoming a LitHub member.
Both Makkai and Hyde provide excellent examples for each type of ending they cite. Some types of endings: with dialogue, with a coda (as in music) the ending words taper down as musical notes would, with a lyrical repetition, an image, a bookend, a loop.
Additionally, both authors also spend time (pun intended) examining the use of Time itself. Hyde’s article as previously noted explores Time because of the pattern she found in her responses from readers.
Makkai’s second installment on Endings focuses on Time & Structure, but her sixth installment focuses on Time and the types of Time that are available for the author to employ.
The best Endings are like ice cream sundaes with right amount of toppings.
Sometimes, as noted by Makkai, an author will employ many of the types of Time in one spectacular ending, rendering a perfect sunset to a novel. She gives an excellent example found in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. Read it and if you are like me, you will be astonished by the various types of Time Egan used effectively in this ending. The ending is a glorious sunset, or a delectable sundae, take your pick, it is after all, Summer.
