As a parting gift to your readers, Vikki Wakefield talks about the impact a good ending can have on your story.

It’s almost time for me to leave the kennel. This is a good time to talk about endings.

An ending should stay with you when you close a book. To help you make your ending stick, I thought I’d share my Top-secret Private Personal Glossary of Endings from a Reader’s Perspective with you.

The Literary Ending:  The MC repeats a line of dialogue or an action from the first chapter. Word for word. You have the niggling feeling you’re missing something because the second-to-last chapter led you to believe that Everything Has Changed. You Google reviews to find out if anybody knows anything.

The Tragic Ending:  Everybody dies except for the nameless narrator and the one character you hate. You suspect the narrator is the dog, only the dog dies too.

The Ambiguous ending:  Ends with a long wide-pan shot of the open road ahead. The MC pulls up at a crossroad in her beat-up Chevy Impala. Tumbleweeds. A dust-flurry. She spits out her chewing-gum and sticks it on the side-mirror for later; she flicks through radio stations, searching for the right song. A lingering close-up of a piece of popcorn under the driver’s seat. Is it really popcorn? Don’t be fooled. This could go either way.

The Explicit Ending:  It’s just popcorn.

The Gump:  The beginning and the end are the same. No discernible character growth despite the MC being named for a founding member of the Klu Klux Klan and stumbling along a path of bizarre coincidences involving the Watergate Scandal, the Vietnam War, John Lennon, Elvis, Smiley Face and President John F. Kennedy.

The Redemptive Ending:  Sue, the mean-pretty-popular girl loans her boyfriend to Carrie, the plain-weird-unpopular girl so she can go to Prom. Only we all know how that turned out.

The Unexpected:  You suspect somebody has torn the last pages from the book. Particularly frustrating when it’s an e-book (you buy the book twice only to discover it’s not a formatting error). Like savouring a sugared donut, swallowing the last mouthful and realising you can’t wipe your hands or lick your lips.

The Long View:  Ten years later and the MC has stopped having adventures, collects fridge magnets and eats porridge for dinner. The main reason people started writing fan-fic.

The Twist (or ‘I didn’t see that coming’):  Like playing Monopoly with someone who changes the rules halfway, tells you the aim of the game is to avoid owning property and live rent-free in Jail, and it’s not real money so none of it matters anyway.

The Cliffy:  Book One: lots of sparring and sexual tension. All roads lead to a hidden bunker with a single bed and an epic stash of weaponry, only nobody has kissed or fired a gun yet. (Spoiler: things get real in Book 7.)

The Happily Ever After:  Pretty girl who doesn’t think she’s pretty elicits a proposal from hot guy who knows he’s hot. Nobody believes but everybody wants to. A book best finished just prior to beating a rug or mashing potatoes.

Is there a type of ending you find most satisfying in books or film? Which is your favourite ending of all time?

27 April 2015