Last week, I wrote about what finishing a book teaches you as a writer. This week, I wanted to take a look at what a good ending in fiction looks like. One of the first things I know about any story I’m writing is how it ends. For my current #WIP, I saw the final scene so clearly in my mind even before I began my first draft. The challenge was figuring out the road map and discovering how to get to that final scene. When I’m teaching writing, I always tell my students that the last conversation, the last thought, the last scene is in many ways the most important part of the story because that will be the reader’s final moment in your world. If they love the ending, they will think about your story long after they finish it. If they dislike the ending, they will leave your world unsatisfied.
This is where my reading informs my writing. As a reader, if I’m disappointed in a story, it’s often with the ending. I’m okay with ambiguous endings, and I’ve written more than one myself, but an ambiguous ending is not the same as just stopping writing. Some books feel as if they end mid-thought. For me, the ending is the moment when a reader decides not just how they feel about the final pages, but how they will remember the entire journey that led them there.
When I consider some of my favorite endings, often they are about an image, a theme, or a moral position that has been present all along, only now it’s altered by everything in the story that came before. Charles Dickens (you had to know I was going to use Dickens as an example) understood this instinctively, and most of his endings work well. The ending of Great Expectations works well, at least to a degree. The final pages do not resolve Pip’s life into triumph or failure, but instead into recognition of love, loss, and the illusions he has shed. Pip understands himself in a new way that reframes the entire novel in retrospect.
The interesting thing about the ending of Great Expectations is that Dickens originally wanted a darker ending where Pip and Estella meet, share a few words about how Estella has grown, and then they part. Edward Bulwer-Lytton (yes, that Bulwer-Lytton, of “It was a dark and stormy night” fame) couldn’t deal with the darker ending and asked Dickens to lighten it up, which Dickens did, and Pip and Estella come together in the end. Yes, the ending we have is happier, but I’d argue that Dickens’s original vision better suited the tone of the rest of the story.
Orson Welles said, “If you want a happy ending it depends on where you stop the story,” meaning that any story is simply a segment of someone’s (in the case of fiction, of a character’s) life. The Happily Ever After (known in romance circles as HEA) stops the story at the moment of the couple’s greatest happiness. If you flash forward a week, they may be having a knock-down argument about him leaving his socks on the floor. Writing a story with a satisfying ending is not the easiest thing since you have to choose the moment to end your story.
One of the greatest challenges of writing an ending is that, first, it must acknowledge what has been come before. The most satisfying endings succeed when they reflect a character’s transformation rather than the story’s resolution. In other words, the character has learned something they didn’t know at the beginning. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment doesn’t end with a tidy moral conclusion but with the suggestion of one–a Russian version of “You do the crime, you do the time.” Rodya Raskolnikov committed the crimes and now he must be punished. The novel closes with the possibility of Rodya’s inner change.
One of my favorite modern authors is Kazuo Ishiguro, and his The Remains of the Day ends not with some sort of reconciliation but with the acceptance of missed chances. Stevens, the butler in the story, does not change his life. Instead, he recognizes those missed chances. The restraint of his conclusion is precisely what makes it a strong ending. By the way, the film with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson is awesome.
When I end a story, my wish is to bring everything to an end without over-explaining. The ending of The Professor of Eventide is ambiguous, but I also mean for it to have a circular feel, as if the beginning of the story and the end are interconnected and there’s a cyclical feel to the character’s life. My intention is to imply rather than clarify. I also trust my readers to form their own judgments. In one of my favorite reads of 2025, The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern doesn’t end by explaining the mechanics of the magic or the future of the world, but by allowing the story to feel ongoing. The ending does not shut the door for Marco and Celia. They will always be with the circus.
Another favorite ending of mine is Ian McEwan’s Atonement. The story is devastating because the entire novel has been preparing the reader to confront the cost of storytelling itself. The ending reframes everything that came before it, transforming narrative into moral reckoning.
One thing I always tell my writing students is that the ending should never contain any new information. The ending should be the summing up, whether directly or indirectly, of everything that has come before. I know the tendency is to opt for a happy ending, and there are stories where happy endings work. I have certainly written stories with happy endings. I have also written stories with ambiguous endings, and stories that contain tragedies.
Even in the stories with tragedies, I try to end on a note of hopefulness. But whether an ending is hopeful or bleak, it must feel true to the world that has been created. That’s why the ending of Great Expectations works on one level but isn’t entirely satisfying. It doesn’t match the tone Dickens spent hundreds of pages creating. The lesson here is never take story suggestions from anyone who starts their novel with “It was a dark and stormy night.”
When a reader closes a book and continues to think about those final moments, as I did with The Night Circus and Crime and Punishment, then the ending has done its job.