Writing Blog Number 2 (continued)

20251212 Endings To Avoid

Endings To Avoid

BookFox recently had a video about bad endings to books, and it came up on one of my Discord Servers, and we came up with 5 bad endings. BookFox mentioned the “it was all a dream” ending, but we decided everyone knows that ending sucks and that anyone who uses it is taking away all the character growth the reader has invested in, and is just bad on every level. One book works – Alice in Wonderland – but the whole story reads like a dream… or drug trip.

Now, an ending is important because it what the book leads up to and what the reader has invested time into. The ending is also the thing remembered most because it is the last thing they read. So make your endings good ones.

1) Rushed Ending
This is where there has been a whole lot of build-up… and then the ending is over in a page. So much build for so little payoff! Think the final battle between Harry Potter and Voldemort. Give us some tension, let it breathe!

2) Deus Ex Machina
This is when an outside entity, force, whatever, comes in and saves the day. The characters we have lived with and been invested in have nothing to do with the ending. We feel cheated. Think the Hand of God ending of The Stand by King.

3) The Fundamental Change
This is when the ending changes one of three things – genre (Picnic At Hanging Rock where the unpublished final chapter turns a chilling mystery into a UFO abduction); message; and theme. These need to be consistent or else the reader feels like they’ve experienced mental whiplash. Some books change genre well, but to do it at the end feels like a cheat.

4) An Unearned Happy Ending
If the ending is happy because it is expected and so a coincidence or chance makes the end happy when the rest of the book does not lead to that, or the ending is inevitable and there are no twists or turns or doubts, the happy ending can feel unearned and flat. The characters need to work for happiness to make the reader become invested. Think the Tom Cruise version of War Of The Worlds when the son miraculously just appears unscathed at the end.

5) Untied Loose Ends
Yes, sometimes this is done because it is sequel bait, I get that. But in a stand-alone book, having loose endings left open – unless, as in the case of the published version of Picnic At Hanging Rock, that is the whole point – can just annoy a reader. If there is a mystery, solve it, or have it explained why it can’t be solved. If there is a third character in a love triangle, have them explained out of said ménage a trois (but don’t have them fall in love with the child of the other 2… icky Twilight books). Don’t have characters suddenly disappear (Ready Player Two, are you listening?). Tie up as much as possible within the confines of the story you are going to tell.

So, five endings that a bunch of us (published) writers and publishers all feel do not really work, especially in longer works.
         Rules are made to be broken, sure, but you need to do it really well to break it. So the HG Wells book War Of The Worlds has the PoV characters, the humans, the army, ineffective, but microbes defeat the aliens. Is this a cheat ending? It certainly follows from 3 of the five endings here, if not all 5. But it does work because it was done well, as if the Earth itself was saving the world from the ravages of the red weed, et al. The Earth was being harassed, so of course it sent in its most formidable troops.
         These are not rules, as such, and you can ignore this, of course. It is just a list of the endings we felt do not work.