Tying Loose Ends: Types of Endings For Writers
I’ve been getting questions about endings, and how to write them, forever. This seems like as good a place as any to begin sharing my thoughts, though I also have plans for a post on “the dos and don’t of writing endings.”
For further reading on the matter, check out these articles, here, here, and here – they were most helpful in compiling this post. As a disclaimer, some of these categories will overlap.
Happy writing, everybody!
In a Resolved Ending, loose ends are tied. Protagonists and major characters are assigned to their fates.
You know this ending from Austen novels, from Jane Eyre (hence the title), from most fairy tales and Shakespearian plays, from Legally Blonde. These endings don’t leave you to speculate on what the characters do next – they spell it out for you. Lizzie marries Darcy, Jane marries Mr. Rochester, Cinderella and her prince live happily ever after, the Little Mermaid (in the original version of the tale) does not. Elle Wood becomes best friends with Vivian, leaving Warner with no job prospects and no girlfriend. Either way, we know.
Subsequent authors can speculate on alternatives – “What if Beauty preferred the Prince as a Beast? What if Emma and Mr. Knightly went to marriage counseling?” – but there is a canon, which we can choose to accept and/or diverge.
The Resolved Ending can be incredibly satisfying. The conclusion to Pride and Prejudice? One of the most satisfying, and comforting, of all time. The conclusion of Legally Blonde is without a doubt the best ending in cinematic history.
Contrariwise, some readers can find it frustrating when things are too neatly tied up. Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the mostly teen and young adult readers of Harry Potter rebelled at the prospect of the protagonists having babies ever after and becoming just like their parents (I personally didn’t mind and found it satisfying enough, but Harry Potter was never a huge source of fixation for me.)
Like any ending, there are risks that accompany a Resolved Ending. If you are going to give your story a Resolved Ending, it’s best to either go in with a clear vision of what your ending will be, or decide on one that makes sense for your characters and tone of the story.
Regardless of how you choose to end your story, there will likely be readers who are displeased with the ending – people almost always have strong and very specific opinions about how their favorite stories should end – so it’s best to focus on the quality and integrity of the ending.
I’m lumping two types of ending together for this one, since they can overlap: the cliffhanger, and the ambiguous ending. Possibly three, if you consider the open-ended ending its own category.
This class of ending embraces ambiguity, and the fact that life itself can be more of a continuous streamline than episodes with definitive conclusions. This doesn’t mean that the Unresolved Ending is worse than the Resolved Ending – as I said, many of my favorite stories conclude with Resolved Endings. But it’s a distinction that often goes a long way in determining how your story is remembered, and should fit the tone of the story.
Unresolved Endings aren’t inherently less happy or satisfying than Resolved Endings. Unresolved Endings are oftentimes incredibly hopeful and optimistic. For example, the conclusion to Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book ends with Nobody leaving the graveyard in which he grew up. We don’t know what the rest of his life will be like, what he’ll do or who he’ll become, but we know that he goes into life “with his heart and eyes open.” The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets, one of my favorite spiritual successors to Pride and Prejudice, has a much more ambiguous but still optimistic ending – it doesn’t say when and how its main characters get together, but it implies that they will.
More bittersweet – or less definitively happy – ambiguous endings include I Capture the Castle, which doesn’t confirm whether the protagonist’s puppy love will blossom into anything more, but nevertheless leaves most of its main characters on optimistic notes. A Tree Grows In Brooklyn sends its characters off into a brighter future, without diminishing the trauma of their impoverished upbringing.
For non-literary examples, people are still steaming about The Sopranos’ refusal to give its viewers the resolution they craved – and I, personally, am fine with that. I would argue that BoJack Horseman’s ambiguous ending also fits perfectly with the tone of the show, which, despite its sitcom-esque formatting, firmly refutes the notion that life has any definitive conclusions. Planet of the Apes answers the question the audience hadn’t realized they’d been asking – where and when are we – but doesn’t say what happens to its characters.
There’s a trend I’ve noticed in well-regarded short stories: most seem to have Unresolved Endings. I recently finished the Best American Short Fiction of 2020, and I noted that almost every story had an ambiguous ending. Some of these were frustrating for me – I wanted to know more, damn it! – but they left me contemplating the stories for days afterwards, and the authors were predictably masterful at knowing the most powerful place for the conclusion.
Of course, proper cliffhangers are a little different than any of these endings – unless you consider The Sopranos’ conclusion to be a cliffhanger, which I think is arguable. Cliffhangers most frequently appear in episodic or serial stories, to get you hyped up to read/watch/listen to the next one, but cliffhangers can also serve as a conclusion in and of themselves. Inception, anyone?
Pros of the ambiguous ending: they allow the reader to use their imagination about what happens next. Cons: you really have to think about how much information you want to reveal, and where the most powerful cut-off point will be. They can also be quite frustrating, but this can be a good thing! It all depends on the quality.
A tragedy, in its original sense, is a sudden reversal fortunes, usually leading to the moral or literal demise of a protagonist. Sometimes, they can just mean that the protagonist doesn’t achieve their objective, which is often representative of a larger trauma or form of grief.
The Greeks had a huge fetish for tragedy, to the point where Perseus is the only human Greek hero who didn’t meet some kind of tragic demise (thank you, Percy Jackson series, for bringing that to my attention at age fourteen.)
For the record, I’m a big happy endings kind of gal. My favorite characters – both my own, and those I’ve adopted from other authors – deserve happy epilogues, preferably after a lot of tribulation and a conflict. Hopeful endings are a second favorite, followed by bittersweet, as long as they leave room for hope and better days ahead. I’ve been known to avoid stories if they’re too tragic, hence why I could never bring myself to read Cujo or watch The Mist.
But culturally, I can acknowledge the importance of tragedies. Take Oedipus, for example – an admirable man, who remains oblivious to his misfortune until it’s already too late. In the words of Disney’s much-sanitized Hercules, “And I thought I had problems.”
And, on the subject of Hercules (or Heracles, the Greek version of the name), his status as the most quintessential Greek hero did not save him from a whopping portion of tragedy: among other things, he was driven mad and killed his family, for which he had to perform his famous twelve labors as penance. His mortal life concluded with being burned alive, though once his mortal parts had been obliterated, he was rewarded with becoming a full-fledged immortal. So, whether or not Hercules’s story actually is tragic remains up for interpretation, but the point still stands.
Tragedy reminds us of fallibility, and the fact that the seeds of our downfall can arise in unexpected places. Tragedy endows us with compassion.
Oftentimes, tragedy is the result of the incompatibility of individual and circumstance: others have pointed out that Hamlet’s scheming nature would have suited him perfectly for Othello’s situation, but Othello’s action-oriented personality would have immediately solved Hamlet’s problems.
Interestingly, the only tragedies that don’t fill me with total despair are Shakespearian tragedies – specifically, Macbeth and Hamlet. Probably because their aesthetic absolutely slaps.
I am an absolute sucker for a good happy ending, particularly if the characters have been through the ringer to get there.
To be absolutely clear, there is nothing childish about happy endings. Even if they were unrealistic – and I insist that they’re not – stark realism can compromise the strength of a story. Not that sad endings are inherently bad, but you shouldn’t be dissuaded from writing happy endings out of a commitment to realism.
Instead, think about which kind of ending would best convey the message of your story.
Would Shawshank Redemption, for example, be rendered more powerful if its protagonists had died a miserable death in prison? No, because that would have undermined the message of hope and perseverance. To use an even more iconic example, would The Lord of The Rings have been more iconic if the dark forces had overtaken Middle Earth? I think the answer to that is somewhat obvious.
Just as we need tragedies, we need happy endings to demonstrate that love and goodness are worthwhile, that hope and effort and faith aren’t a waste of time. That good can prevail.
Now, getting off my happy endings soapbox: different kinds of happy endings.
I’ve seen happy endings defined as “the protagonist achieving their goal,” but I think the truth is a bit more complicated than that. After all, what we think we want often differs wildly from what we actually want.
For example, in Neil Gaiman’s Stardust, the protagonist spends the entire story pursuing the hand of the girl he thinks he wants, hoping to present her with the titular, anthropomorphic star. Along the way, he realizes that love should be unconditional, and falls in love with the star instead. He doesn’t get what he wants, but he gets what he needs, and is significantly happier for it.
It can be similarly satisfying if a character achieves their goal, however, particularly if it’s well-earned, and has character-driven significance behind it. The original Rocky remains the most iconic of the series because Rocky achieved his goal – to remain standing for the entirety of the fight. Not to win, mind you – just to remain standing, and to prove to the world that he has integrity.
To me, happy endings are the most significant if the character had make sacrifices to achieve their goals and learn unexpected things about themselves in order to do so. Oftentimes, even when the character achieves their goal, it’s not the goal itself that gives them the most satisfaction, but the relationship and character development they achieved along the way. In Mad Men, Don coming up with the iconic coca cola jingle is a byproduct of him finally finding piece after a lifetime of disconnect.
There are interesting ways to subvert happy endings. Sometimes this means making them “less happy,” and other times this means demonstrating that happiness takes unconventional forms. The book version of A Princess Bride subverts the happy ending, where the protagonist re-reads the book as an adult and realizes that the happy ending is more ambiguous than his father lead him to believe. The movie, on the other hand, plays the trope straight. Shrek – and yes, I’m unironically referencing Shrek in this Serious Post About Literature – completely subverts the traditional fairytale ending while still making it, unequivocally, an extremely happy ending. The Last Unicorn rejects happy endings, not out of pessimism, but because “nothing ever ends.”
But of course, few things in life are clear cut, and the same is true for endings. So let’s talk a bit about endings that are neither 100% happy, nor terribly sad…
5. The Bittersweet Ending
The Bittersweet Ending is a spectrum, and can skew more towards happy OR sad.
A lot of the aforementioned endings could be argued to fall on the spectrum of bittersweetness. In Lord of the Rings, the characters achieve their goal, but Frodo is left mentally and physically scarred by his trauma with the Ring. The ambiguous nature of the book version of Princess Bride could also be argued to be bittersweet.
Other prominent Bittersweet Endings include Gaiman’s – and jeez, I’m referencing him a lot today – Ocean at the End of the Lane, which concludes on a purposefully ambiguous note about the grief of childhood trauma and the ambiguous nature of what constitutes a worthwhile life. In Mathis’s Twelve Tribes of Hattie, the eponymous Hattie devotes herself to nurturing her granddaughter, after becoming alienated from many of her children. In Ng’s Everything I Never Told You, the surviving characters repair their relationships and move towards a brighter future, but continue to grieve Lydia. Her absence will be felt at every milestone.
BoJack Horseman is one of the most famous examples of a recent Bittersweet Ending, in which the titular horse seems to have faced a reckoning with his past and is moving towards something better, but many of his closest friends have outgrown him or opted to put some distance between them – including Diane, who has been his greatest confidante over the course of the series.
A Bittersweet Ending can be a beautifully emotional conclusion to any story, and sits in the reader’s mouth like dark chocolate: not too bitter, not too sweet, but the taste of which can linger long after the story concludes.
The most famous twists don’t merit a spoiler warning, because everyone and their mother knows about them. In the Sixth Sense, Bruce Willis’s character was a ghost the whole time (I was able to predict that twist as a child, which I’m quite proud of.) The Planet of the Apes was actually Earth in the distant future. Tyler Durden and the Narrator are actually the same person. Pretty much every episode of The Twilight Zone. M. Night Shyamalan wants what The Twilight Zone had.
There are components to a good twist ending. It has to answer a question, which the viewer may or may not have known they had. How did Willis’s character survive the attack on his life at the beginning of the film? Where, and when, is the Planet of the Apes? Who is this mysterious, charismatic man who represents everything the Narrator thought his life was lacking?
One cannot simply baselessly retcon the entire plot and call that a twist, as I’ve seen a lot of narratives do. The story must be a question mark, and the twist must be an answer.
Also known as the Full Circle Ending, this is the conclusion to the Hero’s Journey in which the narrative comes full circle. This can be represented by the hero literally returning home, or with a narrative that metaphorically returns to the place where it begins.
Think of Dorothy returning to Kansas, or Frodo and Sam returning to the Shire. The characters return to their lives, but they’ve been changed by their experience. They’ve learned and developed and grown, and/or suffered trauma which they’ll have to reconcile.
Similarly, the story can be “bookended” by similar events. In Bad Monkey, (SPOILERS AHEAD) the book begins with a supposed murder-victim losing his right arm. He actually chopped it off purposefully to achieve his own goals, but the book ends with him getting devoured by sharks. After which, all that’s left of him is his LEFT arm.
The Big Lebowski offers up a comical version of the Hero’s Journey, and has an appropriately Tied Ending, in which Lebowski goes back to living exactly as he lived before. Also appropriate for a Static Character, who remains set in his ways as the world changes around him.
My favorite example of a Tied Ending in recent history is probably Jojo Rabbit, in which it begins with a caption reading that Jojo is eleven years old, and ends with a caption reading that he is eleven-and-a-half years old. This hammers home how much Jojo, and the world, has changed and developed in just half a year.
Another iconic example? Futurama. Anyone who’s seen it knows exactly what I mean.
A tied ending is an excellent way to bring your reader back to where it all began, and remind them of what they’ve all been through together.
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