Plotting the End of Your Novel

Anyone who has ever watched Gone with the Wind  knows how it ends.  If they remember absolutely nothing else, they remember Rhett Butler’s final words: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”  And so goes one of the most memorable endings in the history of film.

Just as your beginning needs to hook the reader, your ending needs to satisfy.  As a long-time reader of fiction, I have to say that there have been endings that have disappointed me.  I have narrowed the disappointments down to two main categories: the flat and the unrealistic.  

Some endings fall flat because they promise more than they deliver.  Novels that fall into this category are usually ones that have a great deal of build-up.  They hook the reader at the beginning and don’t let go until, well, the end.  And then the end goes splat.  A flat ending doesn’t quite deliver what the story promised.  Don’t create an adrenaline-laced story only to have the ending be anticlimactic.  Always deliver in the end what you promised at the beginning.

In other stories, the problem is not so much a flat ending but one that leaves you saying, “Really?”  Believability is to a story what oxygen is to the human body.  If you can’t make your story believable or plausible, you can’t expect your readers to stick with you.  One of your jobs as a writer is to make the impossible or unthinkable possible.  It is not that you can’t test reality or veer from reality in your stories.  You just need to make sure that the end fits realistically with the rest of the story.  Don’t have your story happen in one reality and then end it in another. 

Successful plotting requires that you have some idea of how you want your story to end.  If you know how you want your story to end, you are less likely to have an ending that falls flat or fails the believability test.