So I’ve spent more than 15 years coaching writers and editing their books, and over the years I have slowly and methodically collected the absolute best strategies to end novels. The 9 strategies below aren’t foolproof, but one of them will probably be right for about 99% of novels. So let’s get into it.
1. The Thematic Ending
What’s your book about? Is it about injustice? Is it about the betrayals of love? Because if your entire book has been discussing a theme, then you probably wanna end on that note as well.
In The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, the entire book’s about hunger. This is during the Great Depression and everyone’s out of a job and no one can find food and everyone’s starving. So it’s very fitting that the novel ends on a scene that shows hunger dramatically. The Joad family finds a man who is starving to death in a barn, and in order to save his life, one of the new mothers has to breastfeed him. That is an ending you will not soon forget.
So to copy this strategy: 1) figure out the main theme in your novel, and 2) figure out a scene that demonstrates that main theme.
2. The Cliffhanger
This is probably the best-known strategy of all endings. You cut off right as the action gets going, which leaves all the readers on the edge of their seat, or they’re extremely angry at you.
The main worry is whether cliffhangers leave the reader feeling cheated, whether it’s kind of extortion for them to buy your next book. And the way to solve this problem and keep your readers from getting angry is to resolve most of the plot threads that you have going, and then just keep, say, one as a cliffhanger. And I’ll also note that cliffhangers work much better for series rather than for standalone books.
At the end of Hunger Games: Catching Fire, we learn that District 12 has been firebombed and now the revolution has begun. It is a huge cliffhanger that makes every reader super eager to read that third book in the series.
Or check out this cliffhanger by Roberto Bolaño in Last Evenings on Earth. The very last line of the book is about a fight beginning. Imagine ending a book right as a fight is actually breaking out.
3. The Ambiguous Ending
Ambiguous endings offer at least 2 different interpretations of what happened, and let the reader come to their own conclusions.
Let’s take a look at the end of The Giver by Lois Lowry. At the end, does Jonas find a town and he’s saved, or is he hallucinating and about to die? And the very best ambiguous endings will convince a decent portion of your readership that it’s not ambiguous at all. Casual readers of The Giver walk away thinking, “Oh, it’s a happy ending, yay, he found a town.” Only after a second read or after thinking about it a while will those readers think, “Huh, I wonder whether he was hallucinating because of hypothermia.”
Another good example of an ambiguous ending is Life of Pi. Did Pi really survive on the open seas with a tiger for months, or, as a coping mechanism, did he substitute animals for humans and spend a lot of time with his mother and a guard on the boat? With an ambiguous ending, there is not a right answer. Readers get to embrace what version they think is right, or they get to embrace both.
4. Humor
No one hates a joke — I mean, at least if the joke is good. And if you’ve had at least some comedic elements in your novel, you might wanna end on a joke.
Think of The Princess Bride by William Goldman. The grandfather waxes on and on about the greatest kiss of all time, making the grandson squirm and get super awkward. Or at the end of Some Like It Hot, Jerry removes his wig and says, “You don’t understand, I’m a man.” And Osgood smiles and replies, “Well, no one’s perfect.” And the very last line of Coconut Cowboy ends on a joke about corn dogs, which is a little too risqué for me to repeat here.
5. The Tieback
A tieback just means that the ending refers to something previously in the book. And the further back that thing is — say, the first chapter or the second chapter — the better.
There’s a number of things this could be. The first thing is it could be an object. Think of the spinning top at the end of Inception. That top has been crucial to the whole story in helping them determine whether they’re dreaming. And it’s also an ambiguous ending because you see it spinning and you’re like, “Does it begin to wobble or doesn’t it?”
Or, a callback could be to a phrase that’s used throughout the book. The Hebrew phrase timshel means “thou mayest,” and that phrase is repeated in a heartbreaking moment at the end of East of Eden.
By referring to something that’s previously mentioned, the reader’s gonna feel like the whole book is being tied up and concluded. And comedians even use this technique when they do stand-up routines — they’ll reference a joke they made all the way at the beginning of their set in order to end the session.
6. The Skip Ahead
This type of ending often finds its happy home in epilogues. With this strategy, the author fast-forwards time and lets us see what the characters are up to 5 years, 10 years, 20 years in the future. And it’s usually removed to some degree from the main story, like the mighty warrior has retired and is farming in some quiet village. This strategy gives the author a chance to show how the main character has sort of recovered from the events of the novel and how they’ve changed.
Think about the end of Harry Potter, when J.K. Rowling shows what her wizard heroes are up to 19 years after the end of the book — who married who, who had children, et cetera.
Now, a related version to the skip ahead is the skip back. In The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which is set in this apocalyptic wasteland where everything is bleak and dead, the ending is a paragraph about beauty. It’s talking about the beauty that existed before the apocalypse — describing this beautiful trout swimming in a pure, clean stream. Unfortunately, in the world of the book, all the trout have gone extinct. So the book ends on this bittersweet note of remembering the beauty that used to exist in this world.
7. The Happy-Sad Ending
You might have seen the greatest baseball movie of all time, The Natural. It’s about a man whose baseball career was cut short by a terrible tragedy, and then he tries to pick it up later in his 40s and try out for a professional baseball team. It’s based on a book by Bernard Malamud, but then Hollywood made a movie, and what’s interesting is that the endings are completely different.
In the movie, in typical Hollywood fashion, it’s a happy ending — he hits a home run and all of his wildest dreams come true. In the book, though, he strikes out and he’s absolutely crushed. I spoke to a person who watched the movie first, and he was so demoralized when he read the book.
That’s ’cause happy endings are an easy hit. If you write a depressing ending, you’re gonna get some flak from readers, but it still might be the right choice for your book. Sometimes stories end in tragedy. There’s nothing wrong with that.
But if the happy ending is too cheesy for you and the sad ending makes you think, “I think I’m gonna alienate my readers,” I would go for a middle route: the bittersweet ending. To pull this off, simply end one of your storylines on a happy note and one of your storylines on a sad note. For instance, the hero loses the big promotion, but ends up finding love. I feel like bittersweet endings capture all of the emotional notes that readers are looking for in an ending, and they never come off as unrealistic or cheesy.
8. Description
When you end a story, you are trying to help the reader transition from the fictional world back into the real world. Sometimes that transition is easier if the last lines of the story don’t have to do with the characters or the plot or the themes, but instead a description of the natural world.
To pull this off, try to describe something in your story that resonates with the main themes of your book. If your book is about father-son relationships, then end your book with your main character watching a father and son walk in a park. If you have a character who sacrificed absolutely everything in the hopes of a big payday, then show that same idea in the animal world — for instance, pelicans dive bombing for fish, like in this Taylor Antrim example:
Boom splash. The pelicans take these kamikaze plunges into the water. The way they hit, not one should survive, but of course they all do. They come up with their beaks full of fish.
The reader’s smart enough to know that the author’s not really talking about pelicans, right? They’re trying to talk about what the humans have done in that story. It’s just this nice resonance and metaphorical connection that ends the story strongly.
9. End on Dialogue
A powerful short line of dialogue might be just the right way to close out your book.
The Count of Monte Cristo ends on a positive line of dialogue — Alexandre Dumas closes the book with Valentine reminding us that all human wisdom is contained in two words: wait and hope. That ends on such a positive note. This is a book about unjust imprisonment for years and years and years, and plotting revenge, and so “wait and hope” is such a positive vision of what he’s gone through.
Hopefully, you can pick one of these strategies for ending your book. My recommendation is to try writing, say, 3 different endings — think of 2 of them as director’s cut endings — and then give them to a friend who has read the book and ask them, out of these 3 endings, which one’s your favorite?
Good luck with writing your ending.
