Any way you want. The end.
Well, yeah, but in leu of some disappointing endings recently, let’s think a little bit more about it. Most simply:
You have to know it. Figure it out when you’re plotting, or or in your first two drafts if your a pantser (like me). If you don’t know where your finish line is, you’re going to be running zigzags all over the place. Like I said: fine for a first draft, but once you’ve figured out ‘oh, this is how it ends’ then you can make a much straighter line from point A to point B.
This goes double if you’re writing a series. Yes, that means if your a pantser, you might have to write out the entire trilogy in its first-draft-entirety before you go back and start editing. Yes, that means if you’re a plotter you should probably plot out the entire series, at least loosely. It will be worth it. I think we’ve all ready a trilogy that has a huge amount of build up, only to be disappointed in the last book because there was no payoff.
If you’ve done nothing but talk about the great and terrible war that the characters have been preparing four books for, you should probably give them that great and terrible war.
OR, if you want to subvert your readers expectations, you need to give them something with equal pay off to it, that doesn’t come entirely out of left field. So if you want there to be a diplomatic solution to this war, it needs to be just as intense, breathtaking, and suspenseful as that battle would have been. Give us witty arguments, sudden allies being made, betrayals being felt, players rising and falling from power the same way they’d win or lose on the battlefield.
But if you just stop the battle from happening and everyone goes home? Then all of the readers’ excitement was for nothing. Their heart was pounding, their fingers shaking, riding that roller coaster going up only to find there is no drop, you just have to get off and walk down the stairs back to ground level. Disappointing.
Know who your characters become.
Just as important as plot pay off is character pay off. Have we seen the character go through 6 books of slow redemption? Have you been framing them as more and more relatable, have the readers been cheering on their improvements? Then maybe don’t have that character revert back to their old ways in the last ten pages of your final book (at least, not without warning-we’ll talk about that next).
Just like you should know the end of the plot from the beginning, you should know who the characters are going to end up as. Having big, important events shape your characters is good, but also important is the slow and steady changes that they’ll make over the course of the book or series. Not every character needs to change drastically from start to finish, but for those that do, have a clear image of who they become and how they’re going to get there. Again, the last ten pages isn’t the time for a sudden shift in character. Draw it out, don’t rush, and let them be true to who they are.
Hints! Give the readers hints! Did they get the hints? Good! That means they like your book enough to read it carefully and analyze it! Don’t punish them for guessing right by changing your mind and dropping all the buildup to what you were foreshadowing.
Throw in cryptic prophecies. Give the characters dreams of the past they don’t want to talk about but will definitely come up later. Talk about past events that will mirror future events. But when you do this, know that you’re making a commitment. Once the clue is in there, it’s in there, and observant readers are going to take note. Especially if there are multiple clues to an event/reveal/etc., there really isn’t going to be a clean way to back out of it. Which, again, is why it’s so important to know your ending.
Last but not least: decide what the tone of your ending will be. What’s the taste you want to leave in your readers’ mouths? Hopeful? Tragic? Warm and fuzzy? Unless this is what you’re explicitly going for, bitter probably doesn’t belong on the list. But bitter is what a lot of endings end up being, if they’re not thought through from the beginning.
Well, that’s all I’ve got. If anyone has any other ending advice, feel free to add it on.
