How to End
A few weeks ago, my daughter’s fifth grade teacher asked if I’d be willing to come to his class and help him read and edit his students’ science fiction narratives. I gladly agreed and spent a few hours reading stories about time travel, secret passageways, and alternate dimensions.
One of the stories I read was about a girl who made a new friend at school and then somehow ended up kidnapped by evil robots in the end. Her narrative ended with the main characters in the back of a van, as they were being driven away to some unknown location. It went something like this: “And then the robots threw us in the back of their van and drove us away. The End.”
“What happens to the girls though?” I asked. “Do they escape?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I’m setting it up for a second story.”
I hate to talk badly about a story written by an eleven-year-old, but the ending was just so unsatisfying. In fact, I can’t even really call it an ending. She mostly just stuck the “The End” right in the middle of the action (probably the point at which she got tired of typing if I had to guess).
That being said, endings are hard aren’t they?
(I said the same about beginnings too, if you remember.)
I’d be lying if I said I haven’t wished I could just slap a “The End” on the end of an essay and call it good. It’s not unusual for me to spend 2+ hours trying to get the last three sentences of a piece just right, and then it’s also not unusual for me to send any given essay to Cara Stolen only for her to tell me the end needs work to which I almost always reply, “I hate this essay.”
Endings can be the bane of my existence, and, also, few things in writing top that moment when you unlock the exact right words to finish out a piece. Endings are hard, but they are not completely elusive. We can write satisfying endings. The next obvious question is, “How?”
Well, there isn’t of course one right answer to this, but there are three guiding questions I often ask myself when I’m trying to wrap up a narrative essay. In sharing them with you here, I hope you might gain some practical tips to apply to your own writing.
Guiding Question #1: Does this ending tie all the pieces of my essay together?
Emily W. Blacker speaks to this question in her article, Ending the Endless: The Art of Ending Personal Essays: “An essay ending “works” when it clarifies and amplifies the dominant theme or emotional exploration of the piece without hitting the reader over the head with it. In other words, an effective ending does not jar the reader into an entirely new direction nor is it condescendingly redundant, rather it shines essential light on the pathway the reader has just come down.”
It’s that last phrase I consider at the end of every essay I try to wrap up: Does this shine light on the pathway the reader has just come down? Does the entire essay work together to send the reader on a path of understanding?
Our endings shouldn’t introduce brand new information. They shouldn’t feel like an individual section. Endings are part of the whole, and they should read like a natural landing spot from whatever began in the first sentence. To quote Blacker again, “A satisfying ending to a personal essay doesn’t strive to solve, surprise, stun, or twist, but rather to shine a point of light on the writer’s best attempt at truth.”
A practical tip: Have someone else read your essay and ask them if there is a clear through line. What clearly connects in our own minds doesn’t always clearly connect to an outsider. So, put your essay in front of someone else and have them tell you if all the pieces fit together well.
Guiding Question #2: Does this ending amplify my theme?
The end of a personal essay should highlight what has changed or shifted since the beginning, and to continue with the light metaphor, we want to illuminate that theme in some way.
I’d like to quote Blacker again here: “Since personal essays are essentially emotional and/or intellectual inquiries, effective endings are ones in which an emotional and/or intellectual shift comes clear. That does not mean that an inquiry must be resolved (again, resolution tends to ring false in personal essays), but rather it should have evolved, hopefully, in the direction of greater understanding.”
By the end of an essay, something should have changed in either understanding or action, and our task as writers is to make that clear to our readers (without, as previously mentioned, hitting them over the head with it).
So, in the end, ask yourself, “Have I communicated my theme clearly?”
A practical tip: Our essays are a blend between narration (our in-scene, story-telling descriptions) and explanation (the ways we explain our thinking or actions). If your ending is starting to feel heavy-handed on the explanation—if you’re starting to feel like you’re over-explaining your theme—sometimes some simple rearranging can help. Can you move the explanation up a few paragraphs and then end back in the scene? Can you take away some of the explanation and replace it with a piece of dialogue or a simple observation? Sometimes these small changes can help if you feel like you’re starting to tie a neat bow at the end of an essay.
Guiding Question #3: Does this ending sound finished?
It is not unusual for me to edit an essay and give this specific and also kind of vague note: “The ending is missing a beat.”
What I mean when I write this is that the ending sounds unfinished to me, not unlike a song without its final few notes. Writing has a natural rhythm to it; it’s why we vary the length of both our sentences and paragraphs. You could have connected all the pieces and amplified the theme beautifully, but it still needs to sound finished when it’s done. Sometimes it’s the addition of a single short sentence to punch it up or a matter of splitting up a long sentence into three shorter ones. Whatever you choose, make sure your essay ends on the downbeat.
Make sure the rhythm sounds complete.
A practical tip: Read your essay out loud. This always helps me hear the rhythm of the words better than if I am just typing them. Is there a finality to the sound of the words? And if not, how can you adjust it?
One Last Piece of Advice:
Just like I didn’t tell you exactly how to begin when we talked about openings, I can’t tell you exactly how to end an essay. There isn’t one right way to do it. The challenge is to find the best and most true option. Again, I’ll give you my best advice as to how to improve our own endings: Read like a writer. Observe what other essayists do well and how they tie together their themes in a way that feels satisfying as a reader. I’ll get you started with a few of my favorite essays to analyze:
What Would You Grab in a Fire? by Megan Stielstra
Tomato on Board by Ross Gay
A Stirring Story by Melanie Dale
Will the Mom Know What to Do? by Sonya Spillmann
Repeat After Me by David Sedaris
And with that, I guess there’s only one thing left to say:
The End.