When Your Novel Ending Isn’t Working — What Might Be Wrong And How to Fix It
Endings are harder to write than beginnings, for all these reasons
“This is the way the world ends,” poet T.S. Eliot said, “not with a bang but a whimper.”
You can usually rely on poetry to say it best. (This was from his poem, “The Hollow Men”.) He was talking about London more than anything, in 1925 after the devastation of World War 1.
This is not an article about the world ending, however. Regardless of whether it’s the planet or a marriage, a person dying of cancer or the death of a friendship, we know that in life it tends to be drawn out, messy and feels never-ending.
None of that works for a novel.
In fact, writing the ending of a novel can be the hardest part of the whole thing. Yes, harder even than the beginning. Because in the beginning, you are making promises to the reader. You’re setting out on this glorious journey, juggling your characters who are arriving with baggage, setting the plot in motion and establishing your tone and point of view and a dozen other things.
At the end, you have to wrap all of those things up. Not necessarily in a neatly tied bow. But in a way that satisfies the reader. That completes both the plot and…
