Types of Endings: Twists, Reveals, and Final Battles

​This post originally appeared in Deborah’s blog and is used here with permission.
 
As part of my “Advice from an Editor” YouTube series, I made a video on how to Write a Great Ending. In case you haven’t seen it, I’ll summarize it first:

A good ending will fulfill all of a book’s narrative promises without beating you over the head with them.
 
The three promises I highlight are plot, character, and tone: plot arcs should be sufficiently wrapped up; character arcs should be completed; and the tone of the ending (happy, tragic, ambiguous) should match with the rest of the book. 
 
A great ending will add an unexpected (but fitting) element to the ending.
 
This doesn’t necessarily mean a “twist” ending or “big reveal,” which can be great but can also ruin your book. It simply means that your ending isn’t exactly what your reader could have predicted. Your protagonist may need to come up with an unlikely solution, or something might change that 100% makes sense in context, but which the reader didn’t see coming from ten chapters ago.
 
That’s as far as the video goes, but I’d like to discuss further the types of endings:
 
Twists, Reveals, Final Battles
 
I recently watched a rather famous anime that is often cited as having one of the best anime endings ever (except for the few people who say it has one of the worst endings ever). Personally, I think the ending is very solid: it fulfills its narrative promises, fitting the story and wrapping up the plot lines and character arcs, and it didn’t do it in quite the way I expected. 
 
Without spoilers, it goes somewhat like this:
 
Throughout the series, the protagonist has emphatically spouted an extreme philosophy regarding how to fix the world. When all else fails, he takes up a new mantle and engages in extreme but unexplained actions. Then at the very end, an explanation for these extreme actions is shown, and it exactly matches and is the culmination of his philosophy.
 
This ending fits the show in every way: it fits the philosophy, it finishes the character’s arc, and it follows the show’s format of having the protagonist plot secretly before revealing his strategies as he carries them out. To be clear, this is not a twist ending.  
 
TWIST ENDING: an ending wherein you’re given a piece of information you didn’t have before, didn’t realize you didn’t have, and couldn’t reasonably have guessed, which recontextualizes everything that came before.  
 
Example: The film The Sixth Sense does this flawlessly.
 
Pros: impressive when it works.
 
​Cons: ruinous when it doesn’t work (which is at least as often as not).
 
This is why I say the anime I watched didn’t have a twist ending: throughout the final arc of the series, the viewer knows very, very clearly that the protagonist is up to something and the sorts of things he gets up to and what his goal is. The only thing the viewer doesn’t know is the exact details of his plan. When that plan is revealed, it shouldn’t come as a shock to any viewer who has been paying any attention for the past fifty episodes. This is a reveal ending.
 
REVEAL ENDING: one in which you’re finally given the details you were waiting for in order to understand the evidence that’s come before.  
 
Examples: most mystery and heist stories. Think of it like this: In a mystery, when the detective reveals the murderer, the reader doesn’t sit back in shock because, gasp, someone was murdered! Obviously, because they’ve been following the detective around for the past 200 pages / 45 minutes. They know all that; they’re just waiting to have the details filled in. 
 
Uses: mysteries and heists or any story in which the protagonist has figured out the ending but isn’t going to share it until the reader can experience it alongside him.
 
Pros: a far safer option than the twist, especially as it is more likely to stay enjoyable even when the reader figures it out ahead of time. 
 
Cons: can be frustrating for readers who don’t like being purposefully kept in the dark.
​
By far the most common type of ending on my shelves, however, is what I’m going to call “the final battle”—“battle” here not necessarily being literal:
 
FINAL-BATTLE ENDING: you experience the outcome of the climactic sequence simultaneously with the characters. If there was a plan, you knew about it beforehand, and it went wrong. 
 
Differences: Unlike in a twist, the entire story before now is not recontextualized in a single shocking moment. Unlike in a reveal, you were not being kept in the dark about key facts known by any of the protagonists.  
 
Pros: works great for almost every type of story and is typically the appropriate choice.
 
Cons: unlikely to cause shock and awe in your reader, so you might not make it onto many “best (or worst) ending ever” lists.

 
. . . Do please leave a comment if you have another type of ending you’d like to add that isn’t included in these. I don’t mean this to be an all-inclusive list; only what I happened to be thinking about for this blog post. 
 

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 in Montana with 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.