How to Write a Great Ending for Your Book

​Today I’m going to be talking about what makes a great ending for a book. The typical folk-wisdom for how to write a great ending is that great endings leave the reader satisfied but wanting more. And I would say that this is 100% correct, although I will add that great endings should also always involve an element of twist.
 
(If you’d like to view this post in video format, click here. It’s part of our “Advice from an Editor” series on YouTube.)

​Let’s go through these elements: First of all, what makes an ending satisfactory? Well, at its very basic level, a satisfactory ending is simply one that successfully fulfills all its narrative promises. It completes its character arcs and its plotlines sufficiently for the reader to be satisfied. But there’s also a specific type of narrative promise that determines what type of ending (happy, tragic, ambiguous, somewhere in between) a book should have in order to be satisfactory. This specific narrative promise is simply the tone—whether the narrative has a tone of hope, a tone of despair, an ambiguous tone, or something in between. Books that have a hopeful tone should always have a happy ending. Books that have a despairing tone should always have a tragic ending. Books that have an ambiguous tone should always have an ambiguous ending. And, of course, since this is a spectrum, your book can fall anywhere along it. Although, I will say that a very high percentage of books do fall solidly into the “always despairing and tragic” or “always hopeful and happy” categories.
 
For example, Wuthering Heights. Wuthering Heights is a book with a despairing tone and a tragic ending. The biggest difference between a despairing tone and a hopeful tone is not the content of what’s in the book but the idea of whether or not it is possible to fight the inevitability of fate. In a book with a despairing tone, the feeling is “You can’t fight it. Somehow, it will always end badly.” In Wuthering Heights, the characters never fight against their circumstances; they always go along with them. The characters, again and again and again, make the worst possible decision, and they follow their hedonistic impulses, their feelings, their anger, their rage, and they never stop and exert self-control and say, “No, I don’t want this to be my fate. I am going to leave and make a new life, a better life for myself” or “I’m going to refuse to engage in this bad situation.” They never do that. They always just keep making the worst possible situation and, just as in real life, when characters do this, it does not end well for them.
 
But imagine for a second we have the setup of Wuthering Heights, with the characters doing this all the way through, and we’ve gotten to the climax, and we have this tone of despair, and the writer decided, “Oh no, I want a happy ending.” I don’t actually have to imagine it, because I have seen this done. It’s done in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. Great Expectations has a tragic tone all the way through—characters are miserable and they keep being miserable and there is never any impression the reader gets that they could fight back and improve themselves. No. They’re in a bad situation, and there’s no way for them to get out of it, so they might as well just accept it. And sure enough, the original ending for the book was tragic. But before the book was published, someone—I think it was his publisher—said to Dickens, “You’ve got to have a happy ending.” And so Dickens wrote an alternate end chapter, with a happy ending. Except, see, when I read the book, I didn’t realize the ending was meant to be happy. I mean, yes, the characters (I guess) ended up together. Is that happy? Well, in a book with a hopeful tone, it would’ve been happy. But in this book, first of all, I don’t believe it, and second of all, it doesn’t feel happy, because the tone is so ugly and despairing and the characters are so hapless that it just feels miserable. Even though it has what looks like a happy ending.
 
On the other end of the spectrum, can you imagine if a book like Pride and Prejudice ended with “And then everyone was miserable for the rest of their lives. The End.” I would feel so betrayed! I’d be like, “Are you kidding? This is not what I was promised. I was promised a happy, hopeful little romance, and you give me . . . What were you thinking?!” Of course, that’s not how it ends; it does have a happy ending, because Jane Austen’s a good writer. A tragic ending would have been so inappropriate!
 
It is important to have the right type of ending for your book, but just as important is earning that right type of ending. There’s a book—I’m not going to name it—in which the main character is in a horrible situation. His father has turned against him, there’s a supernatural entity against him . . . How can he possibly escape? It seems impossible. Well, uh, a character we met briefly 500 pages earlier shows up and rescues him—The End. They all live happily ever after. . . . That’s not a satisfactory ending. And that doesn’t fit the aesthetic of hope either, because the aesthetic of hope is that you fight, even when the situation is impossible, not that you’ll be handily rescued—that’s actually closer to the aesthetic of despair, because the aesthetic of despair is: you ultimately don’t have control over your own life.
 
There are a lot of times, I’ve seen in person, people staying in horrible situations because they think, “I have no choice, I’m financially dependent, I’m obligated, I’m emotionally tied to this person; I can’t give myself a happy ending.” Really? Let me tell you a real story. This is a story about a friend of my grandfather’s who was a Jew in Nazi Germany:
 
He was a teenage boy, and his parents set up a secret, hidden closet in their house and they said, “If anyone comes knocking, you run, and you get in that closet, and you stay there and do not leave, no matter what you hear.” And someone came knocking. So he ran to that closet, where there was food and water, and he stayed in that closet no matter what he heard. He stayed in that closet for seven days. When he finally came out, his parents were gone, he was alone, and he had nothing. There’s an impossible situation for you. So what did he do? He walked across Europe alone to get to the coast. At the coast, he convinced a ship to smuggle him to America, along with another Jewish boy who was there. The captain let them onboard the ship and smuggled them, but before they reached America, Nazis caught up with the ship. The captain said, “You two need to jump overboard—listen, Cuba is four miles in that direction. Swim for it. Maybe you’ll make it.” . . . Four miles. I don’t know about you; I’m actually quite a strong swimmer, but I’m not sure I could swim that. In fact, I’m really not sure.
 
And so the boys jumped and they swam. The other boy didn’t make it, but my grandfather’s friend swam through four miles of choppy ocean, and he got to Cuba. When he got there, he got a job, but he was basically an indentured servant. They garnished pretty much the entirety of his wages for his room and board, so he was just surviving. He was there for years, and he was able to put aside essentially no money. This is an impossible situation. If he leaves, he’ll starve, right? He has nothing. He left anyway. He left, managed somehow to smuggle himself to America, and got a new job at a button factory, stringing buttons onto a device. An awful job. He could have despaired and thought, “I guess this is just my lot” and stayed there the rest of his life, like all the other workers at the factory, but he didn’t. He invented a device to speed up his work by a factor of four, and this was so strange that the manager came and said, “You must be cheating somehow. This is physically impossible.” My grandfather’s friend showed him the device he’d invented, and the manager took him to the owner, and the owner said, “This is fabulous—you are promoted.” He eventually became a co-owner of the company, and here’s where the story gets a little fuzzy, but since my grandfather knew him, it’s also entirely possible that he eventually went on to be a doctor in America like my grandfather was.
 
The point is: This man was in impossible situation after impossible situation—situations you can’t possibly win against, and you might as well just give in to your fate, but he didn’t. And because he didn’t, his story ended happily. He ended up in a wonderful situation . . . and that is what the aesthetic of hope means. But you have to earn it. You have to fight for it. You can’t just bring in a deus ex machina at the end, because that is cheating, and that is letting down your reader.
 
I know I’ve gone on a bit, so let’s move on to the next portion, which is: Books should leave readers wanting more. At a very basic level, this simply means that if you write a really good book with a really satisfactory ending, readers will want to read more by the same author. But there’s more to it than that. And, of course, if this book is part of a series, the ending can promise a sequel. It depends what sort of series it is. If it’s episodic, it can say, “Hey, want more adventures with my characters?” Or if it’s basically one book in multiple volumes like The Lord of the Rings or the Secret Country trilogy, it can say, “Here’s the next piece of the story. I have completed smaller character arcs and plotlines for this story to make it satisfactory, but there is more of the story to come.” It is, by the way, quite a disservice to the reader to do this if you do not intend to write a sequel.
 
However, this is also not what it means to leave your reader wanting more. What it means to leave your reader wanting more is giving your reader something to take away with them. There are a lot of different ways you can do this. You can, as with the earlier examples, say, “Hey, want more adventures with my characters? Think about what sort of hijinks they might get into next.” Or you can leave the villain behind, like in The Haunting of Hill House. The Hill House had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. “What might happen in those next eighty years? Will there be another eighty years? What will happen next?” Or a book can leave you with a concept to take away with you. As with Hill House, the concept of a house that’s born evil and that is lurking and waiting . . . now, isn’t that an interesting idea to take away with you? Regardless of what sort of thing you give the reader to take away, they just need something to really dig their teeth into.
 
To aid both this and satisfaction with the ending is the concept of twist. I talked about this a bit in my video / double post on action. At its very basic level, “twist” simply means: Don’t make your ending exactly as the reader could have predicted. Don’t make it obvious. Have other factors come in. Bring back material from earlier in the book. Have your protagonist come up with an unlikely solution, or have something terrible that totally makes sense in the book’s universe but that the reader didn’t think might happen, happen. Regardless of how you do it, bring in a little creativity. It will make your reader want more and make them feel satisfied and also give them that little frisson of delight that comes from an unexpected turn.
 
The folk wisdom is to leave your reader satisfied but wanting more, with a twist. But I’d like to rephrase this to say: Fulfill your narrative promises appropriately, give your reader something to take away with them, and do it in an unexpected manner. Or to put it another way: Your ending should be the inevitable, but not necessarily the expected, outcome of the events and the tone of the book.
 
Do you have any other advice, comments, or questions about writing a great ending for a book? Leave them in the comments!
 
For more writing tips, check out our Advice from an Editor YouTube series, or this set of blog posts.

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Deborah J. Natelson

​​Deborah lives with a fluffy member of fauna named Flora and two pretty black kitties. She is the author of Bargaining Power, a smart, twisty fantasy thriller; and various other books. Her author website is www.deborahjnatelson.com.