Endings for Writers: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

L. Frank Baum created it and Elton John sang about that iconic road. You’ve just travelled your own long, wonderful and difficult highway as you finish a book, or even more challenging, a whole series. Now it’s time to wrap it up. When it comes to endings, whether of a relationship, an experience, an ability, or a great story, some people cry, some rejoice, others take selfies and move quickly on to the next.

Personally, I’m an endings avoider. I just finished the final book in a 6-novel thriller series. As a pantser, or rather an organic/stream of conscious-type plotter, I found crafting the ending as excruciating as writing the first page years ago. But we writers have a solemn obligation to deal with the grief of endings and properly bid the characters and the readers a satisfying final au revoir (note the avoidance), as well as plant the teaser for our next book.

Following are common types of endings in crime fiction or any fiction for that matter.

·         Resolved/Tied in a Bow No loose ends, all questions answered and the fate of the characters is known. I’ve recently been watching Death in Paradise on Brit Box/Prime Video, which is a terrific example of a mystery that neatly ties up everything in the end. Carolyn Keene’s beloved Nancy Drew novels do the same.

·         Happily Ever After More often in cozies and romance novels. In Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott, Mrs. March’s finals words are: “Oh my girls, however long you may live, I never can wish you a greater happiness than this!”

·         Tragic This ending offers the inevitability of sadness and despair, foreshadowed from the beginning of the book. Dennis Lehane’s brilliant thriller, Shutter Island, is a classic example of a tragic ending.

·         Open-Ended The open-ended finish lets readers use their imagination to spin the tale further in any direction they find interesting. In Tess Gerritsen’s I Know a Secret, the protagonist muses: “She knows I am guilty and she’ll be watching me…I am who I am, and nobody can watch me forever.”

·         Twist The Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk is a twisty story where the two central characters turn out to be the same person. The ending leaves readers to reevaluate everything they’ve read. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, with their unreliable narrators, accomplish a similar end.

·         Epilogue The author gives us a peek summary of what happens to the characters after the close of the story. William Kent Krueger’s epilogue in Spirit Crossing is a great example.

As you conclude a project, honor your own sense of grief. You’ve worked for years with the story and characters. Although you may feel a sense of relief or even glee at letting them go, there is inevitable sadness and anxiety as well. What’s next? Opportunity or abyss? Something meaningful has ended but as writers we are fortunate to be able to shape how the next adventure unfolds.