personally, I prefer a settled end that leaves the novel open for the next book. For instance, Aden, the MC goes for a unicorn ride, with his love interest, Lydia. They investigate something unusual and wind up getting playfully dumped to the ground by the unicorn. Lydia's brother shows up and they end up watching the unusual but welcome thing unfold. I left a lot of questions, like what happened to the villain, who was helped by Aden, will Aden snag Lydia and a number of other questions. If I wanted to I could have left the story all tied up with a neat little bow, but this one wound up having one plopped on and easy to tie into for the next book. But it just didn't seem natural for the story. In short, find the natural ending. Don't be set on happy, sad, or neutral endings. If the ending seems forced then try again.
Shrek sat on it. I'd tell you my genre if I had any idea of what it was. General fiction, I guess. And the ending is happy enough, considering the story stops before we have to get into the mental implications of everything that happened. Also, the story isn't meant to be heavy. Funny was the goal, and if a gruesome demise would have been amusing, that's what would have happened. But I didn't feel I needed to put my characters through that. I'm now writing a little story that's absolutely gonna have an unhappy ending. But it's not gonna feel like one when you're done. I have no problem with an unhappy ending, if the story lends itself for it, fuck 'em all up.
Most of mine are bittersweet. I have a few that end happy, and a few where the MC dies. It depends on the characters and the story. I've had a few characters where their death was the only ending I could give them that was fair, and another where death was the only realistic outcome. A lot of my stories involve dealing with trauma, and true happy endings are hard to create in such circumstances because real life rarely turns out the way we want. For context, I write historical fiction and high/epic fantasy, but for the sake of bring simple I'll stick with the historical fiction as nothing in the fantasy is ready to be shared. The MC of my standalone novel dies just after the end. This is realistic based on his physical condition, if nothing else. That story has a great deal of historical context, and I tired to give him and ending parallel to those he was inspired by. It's sad, but fitting, and I feel like it brings a satisfying conclusion to the last bits of plot. My other historical fiction is a series of interwoven novels that take just after WWI. It's a lot of bittersweet endings. Jesse and his love interest Lois get a happy ending, but after everything I did to Jesse the alternative was extremely bleak. I felt like of all of them, I'd bent the rules for Jesse and gave him happiness. Adrain is free of his family and no longer stuck in a mental institution at the end of his story, but that's not really happy. He can't see his children, and the life he'd once hoped to have is gone. It's bittersweet. Charles and Catherine have reconciled, but both still have a lot of trauma and I don't know how things will end for them in the long run. Ida's is hopeful, but still sad, and Lester and Anna's well happy, is temporary as Lester's health is poor. I tired to make the ending real, as the characters themselves are meant to be. I love ending like this! It's satisfying, but still leaves questions.
I think Happily Ever After is mostly only for chilren's stories and romances, isn't it? And not even all of them. Well, and of course fairy tales and the like. A hero's journey story usually ends on a positive note, but only at the end of a long and devastating series of events ending with successful self-transformation. Even a lot of children's stories and romances are more bittersweet, if they're aimed at realistically depicting what it takes to learn life's important lessons. The term Happily Ever After of course came at the ends of fairy tales, and I think it was designed to set the listeners at ease again, after the strange and often revelatory dreamlike events of the story. It served the same purpose as that group chuckle at the end of every 70's sitcom, where the whole gang gets together and somebody tells a dad joke and everybody laughs and smiles, to show that everything is fine now no matter what happened in the episode, and to reset everything to normal for next week's episode. It's to put you back into everyday life mode, and bring a sense of satisfaction and normalcy and a pleasant feeling. And I think it's only used in those kinds of entertainment that are aimed at making people feel good. Or, in the case of fairy tales, bringing them back to feeling good after what's usually some pretty harrowing nightmare stuff involving giants, witches, transformations, and all the other stuff coming straight from mythology. The more realistic fiction gets, the farther it strays from Happily Ever After. Or, in some cases, the more intense it gets, the more it needs to bring things back toward something positive at the end or risk losing any audience it might have had.
I write futuristic science fiction. Books 1 and 3 ended happy with my main characters hopeful for the future. Book 2 was more of a grim ending with the main characters demoralized, their dreams appearing to be crushed. One of main dragon character's young is born healthy, but the fate of the other is uncertain. My current project will end with main character dead along with his crew (a lot of whom have already died during the course of the story). I was going to have an epilogue, jumping ahead to the end of the current crisis, with the main character's son reflecting on his father's sacrifice.
Heroic. There are two ships. My characters are in one, drawing enemy fire to buy time for the other ship to get away.
I have worked on short stories with a big variation on how they end. A number of those were entered in competitions, with word count parameters that affected what I had ultimately and submitted, I am not satisfied what I had that ended those were what I would have ended with them otherwise. And I have several long works I am doing that I have not yet reached any ending. So there is not a lot of positive experience with endings I can speak of. One long work though I want to try to have published soon and just look over for any needed editing I would want, when I can. I ended it with the main character having moved on to something that apparently advances his progress, but it is from a perspective of friends who were involved with him and did not continue with him at that point, and they express doubts about him and his choices in the end. He sends information back to them that will confirm what he says, and it ends with last words of the story saying those things were not wrong yet. Maybe I can still develop better endings to other long works from me.
I do think quite a bit on ways everything I put in my writing that remain loose threads will be tied up. There are ways to overdo that, such as resolving everything in a few remaining paragraphs of the story. I don't want to give endings like that, but things that could be resolved in the written story, that are significant, I think should be.
For me, it kinda depends on whether or not the character manages to do the right thing or not. If they sacrifice something important to them but become a better person in the process, I don't necessarily see that as a tragic or even necessarily sad ending. It's strange--I haven't written any bad endings for my characters yet, but many of the movies and short stories I enjoy have quite dark or brutal endings. I think it depends on the genre and themes of the work. If a character keeps making foolish or evil decisions (for logical reasons of course), then watching them die or lose a part of their soul should be a natural outcome for their story.
All most all of my stories start with the ending, the story is how you got there. I found it to be the best way to have a real hook to make a reader continue or at least give them an easy out as a reader if they don't care. The art of storytelling is always the journey to the end or conclusion. I still think of any good short story in joke format. There has to be a reason to identify or be concerned with what is going on. Key words and phrases that build on that let the reader picture what is going on and put them in the mindset of the teller. This lets them be anxious and caught up in what is going on. The punch line is what ties it all together. While I tend to do things in reverse, just cause most don't, the formula seems to work with the handful of people who read work.
My writing is not dark, other than it winding up dark in submitting something in competition with parameters that left me with that to fit for it. I generally try to have the writing leave positive possibilities still, after things the stories involved that I see needed to be tied up are then, with character development going somewhere with that.
Usually, the main character realizes that his goal (this isn’t the generic masculine, all my perspective characters are male) was never realistic to begin with, and he settles for something lesser or walks away from the whole thing. He misses his dream, but forces himself to be content with his new life.
I don't see that I can start with the ending of the story I would then write to get there. I don't have any ideas for an ending until a story I work on is forming. It then needs a good ending for it, with things, or one thing that is significant, resolved. But a good ending without a story already defies my level of creativity.
I agree. I think when people say "Start with the end in mind" they mean what you just said. I don't see any way to come up with an ending before you have ideas for the beginning and a few other parts.
out of my 8 published shorts.... 3 end in death, 2 end in uncertainty (did they die? were they dead all along?), 1 has a Happy Ever After (though the scene directly before that was a mass murder), 1 ends with a broken/unresolved relationship, and the last is a slice of life that ends with a little girl begrudgingly coming to accept that pigeons are just "ok" I have 2 other finished pieces. One was for a contest that i'm waiting to hear the results of and the other I'm submitting. 1 ends in an implied death (one of the MC's that was introduced in the beginning turns on the other MC at the end and watches as he escapes into the woods where the "bad creatures" are). The other ends with an existential Frankenstein-esque android (not the phone) coming to the conclusion that he's a cruel caricature of a human and what it means to be alive, but hey, cogito ero sum! I dont know that I plan the endings. I plan it around a mood or an idea and wherever that takes me, it takes me. The slice of life one was a college assignment, though. It was after reading Paddy Clark, Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle. We had to write a story from the POV of a child, or something like that. But other than that criteria, everything else was "whatever happens, happens" We talked about it before, too... even though like 2 of these ends "happily," its not all doom and gloom. Even though they die or are surrounded by death, there is a reason and there is also peace. 2 of the death endings are peaceful (one spends his last moments on earth staring up at the sky with his family. another is a release from a decades-long curse).
At least twice I thought of fine endings and and aimed the stories directly at the final line. I enjoyed the process of "how did the characters get here?"
If I write it well, and I so often think I do, I don't like bringing stories I invested myself in at length to an ending. I am creative enough, and could keep those going. Yet stories do need an ending, and so if I am to use those I invest myself so much in I necessarily have to think, how will I end the story well. It is doable, but this is harder for me then use of creativity in making the story.
Oh yeah, a satistyfing ending is the hardest part to come up with! You might find you need to go back and re-structure other parts of the story to make it work.
I think all of my stories that I have written as an adult are either bitter sweet or sweetly bitter (not sure if the second one is a thing, but let's pretend it is). In the typical progression, as a kid every story ended with a "happily ever after" ending. Then as a teen-ish I would occasionally end on an overly depressing everyone dies (or might as well die, or wants to die) ending. But as an adult I'm in a place of you can have a happy (sweet) ending, but it will come at a cost (bitter), and at the same time if things turn out horrible (bitter) there is probably still something good or hopeful that came from the struggle (sweet). I don't think I am capable of going to one extreme anymore.
Oh man...60k+ words in before I realized I have no ending. A project I've been researching since, really...2005, and writing the book since 2020. It's been sitting dormant for months now as I contemplate the future (and write short stories instead!) Here is my dilemma...it is a fictionalized telling of a true story that has not ended yet. Barring any last-minute Perry Mason-esque confessions, or an exhumation of a 50 years old corpse with a bullet hole in its head, there will not be an ending to this story either. They 'got away with it' and there's not much I can do about it but tell the story. So now I've got to fictionalize an ending to a true story that has not ended yet, or has, but very unsatisfactorily, from a literary standpoint. Getting away with it in this story is not a very pleasing ending. I'm currently considering a fictional exhumation over the fictional confession scenario as it would provide a more definitive ending I think. I really want to avoid courtroom scenes. But something like the MC ending up at the grave in the middle of the night with a shovel, rather than a legal approach and a backhoe. It's probably closer to the truth anyways. Oddly, I often have problems with endings for my short stories as well...I'm sensing a pattern here. Thanks...this thread helped!
Why can't that be the ending? That's how many things end in real life, or is it not that kind of story?
I don't know...I suppose. It just lacks closure for a story that needs closure I think. I do want to tell it as best I can though, so staying close to the truth is always important. Unfortunately, the true ending is just not writable. Whatever the ending becomes it will not be the truth.
We think of it as being true to life. You may not have noticed, but, to use lines from Gustave Nadaud, “I see that life on earth is filled/With perfect happiness for none.” (My own translation.)
