To end a story, answer the question its opening asked, let a choice the protagonist makes decide that answer, and stop soon after, on an image, a line or an act that shows what has changed. Before you draft the last pages, decide what kind of ending you want (closed, open, twist, circular, tragic, bittersweet, happy or an epiphany) and check that the earlier pages planted everything it needs. An ending feels earned when it surprises in the moment and looks inevitable on a second reading.
The ending is the last part of a longer stretch. The climax decides the conflict, the falling action plays out what it set off, and the denouement settles the new normal. This guide is about the end of that stretch: what the last pages are for, how to choose and earn an ending, and the endings readers resent.
What an ending has to do
Aristotle wrote his definitions for Greek tragedy, but they still describe a good ending better than most modern ones:
A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it.
Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect.
The first passage is a test: an ending follows from what came before and leaves nothing important still waiting to happen. The second (the “effect” is tragedy's pity and fear) is the standard for every reversal and twist since: surprise the reader, but through causes the story has already set up.
In practice, the last pages of a story do four jobs:
- Answer the main question. Will she get the farm back? Will he confess? The answer can be no, or partly, but it has to come.
- Show the change, or the cost of refusing to change. Set the protagonist on the last page beside the one on the first.
- Settle the feeling. The plot can resolve while the emotion stays raw, but the ending sets the mood the reader leaves with.
- Leave one thing to remember. Usually an image, an act or a line that sums up the book without saying so.
Eight kinds of story endings
| Ending | What happens | What the reader keeps | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| EndingClosed | What happensThe main question is answered and the main threads tied | What the reader keepsSatisfaction | ExampleA Christmas Carol |
| EndingOpen | What happensThe question is stated clearly and left partly unanswered | What the reader keepsA question to carry | ExampleChekhov, “The Lady with the Dog” |
| EndingTwist | What happensA late fact changes the meaning of what came before | What the reader keepsThe urge to reread | ExampleChopin, “The Story of an Hour” |
| EndingCircular | What happensThe story returns to where it began, and the return shows the change | What the reader keepsA sense of shape | ExampleThe Wonderful Wizard of Oz |
| EndingTragic | What happensThe protagonist loses or dies, usually through their own choices | What the reader keepsPity, and the sense it had to be | ExampleThe Great Gatsby |
| EndingBittersweet | What happensThe goal is reached at a real price | What the reader keepsGratitude and grief together | ExampleA Tale of Two Cities |
| EndingHappy | What happensThe protagonist gets what they want and what they need | What the reader keepsRelief | ExamplePride and Prejudice |
| EndingEpiphany | What happensA character suddenly sees the truth about themselves | What the reader keepsRecognition | ExampleJoyce, “Araby” |
Circular endings are the easiest to see. The first chapter of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) paints Kansas gray (“The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass”), and the last chapter, “Home Again,” ends with Dorothy's “And oh, Aunt Em! I'm so glad to be at home again!” The place is the same. The girl who says it isn't.
An open ending is not an unfinished one. The story still has to state its question so precisely that the reader keeps thinking about it. Chekhov's “The Lady with the Dog” (1899) leaves its lovers, each married to someone else, certain only “that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.” He had defended the approach in a letter to his publisher eleven years before:
You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist. … It is the business of the judge to put the right questions, but the answers must be given by the jury according to their own lights.
A twist ending lives or dies on Aristotle's rule, and the plot twist ideas are worth testing against it. Kate Chopin's “The Story of an Hour” (1894) plants its twist in the first sentence and springs it in the last:
Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death.
…
When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—of joy that kills.
In between, alone in her room, she finds herself whispering “Free! Body and soul free!” Then her husband lets himself in with his latchkey: he “had been far from the scene of accident.” The doctors' verdict is the twist, and the irony belongs to the reader alone, because we know what killed her and they don't. The heart trouble was there from the first line.
Writing an ending, step by step
- Name the question the opening asked
Write it in one line. Will Scrooge change? Will Pip become a gentleman, and what will it cost him? If you can't, the trouble may be in the opening rather than the ending, and how to start a story covers the question a first page should raise.
- Decide the answer
Yes, no, yes but, or no but. One way to choose is to set what the protagonist wants against what they need, the two halves of a character arc:
Gets what they want? Gets what they need? The ending tends to read as Gets what they want?Yes Gets what they need?Yes The ending tends to read asHappy Gets what they want?No Gets what they need?Yes The ending tends to read asBittersweet: the dream lost, the person saved Gets what they want?Yes Gets what they need?No The ending tends to read asIronic: a hollow victory Gets what they want?No Gets what they need?No The ending tends to read asTragic - Let the protagonist decide it
The outcome should turn on something the protagonist chooses or does, not on luck or a rescue. Aristotle stated the rule in Chapter XV of the Poetics: the unravelling of the plot “must arise out of the plot itself, it must not be brought about by the ‘Deus ex Machina’.”
- Pay off what you planted
List every promise the book has made: the gun on the wall, the skill she practiced in chapter three, the letter nobody opened. Each should be used, or dropped on purpose, by the end. That is Chekhov's gun worked backward. For a twist, check the reverse: every clue the reveal depends on should already be on the page. The foreshadowing examples show how to plant them.
To check your list against the draft, attach the opening chapter and ask the Strokes Assistant which questions, objects and promises it sets up, and which of them the last chapter pays off or drops.
- Choose the last image
Endings that last usually close on something the reader can see: a gesture, an object, a place revisited. Look for an image from the opening you can bring back changed. The first chapter of The Great Gatsby ends with Gatsby reaching toward a green light across the bay, and the last page returns to it.
- Cut the last paragraph, then reread
First drafts of endings tend to run one beat long: a paragraph that explains the image, a moral, a final hug. Read the ending without its last paragraph. If it's stronger, cut it, then try the same test on the paragraph before.
- Test it on fresh readers
Ask beta readers what they expected to happen, whether the ending surprised them, and whether it felt like the only one possible once they had read it. A reader who says it came from nowhere usually means a setup is missing, not that the ending is wrong.
One premise, two endings
An opening can ask more than one question, and the ending you choose decides which one the book was about. Here is the first page of an invented novel, then two possible last pages.
Dell Haskins came home for her father's funeral and found the auction notice nailed to the barn door. Under the sale date, in her brother Ray's square capitals, someone had written SORRY.
Ending A. The gavel came down at a price she couldn't have matched with two more years of wheat. Dell signed where the auctioneer pointed, and on her way to the car she pulled the notice off the barn door and folded it into her coat.
Ending B. She let the sale go ahead without her. At the bus station in Salina she found Ray asleep on his duffel bag, bought two tickets to Denver and put one in his shirt pocket before he woke.
Ending A answers the question the notice asks, whether Dell keeps the farm, and the answer is no. Ending B answers the question the word SORRY asks, whether she forgives her brother; the farm is lost in both. Neither ending is wrong. The trouble comes when a draft asks one question for three hundred pages and the last page answers the other, and the reader feels the book has changed the subject. Decide which question the ending answers, then make sure the opening chapters ask it.
Classic endings, and why they work
He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was a second father.
…
And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!
Dickens closes in summary, which works because the reader has just watched Scrooge buy the prize turkey and raise Bob Cratchit's salary. The capital NOT answers the future the ghosts showed him, and the last words borrow Tiny Tim's toast from Stave Three: a book that opened on “Marley was dead” ends on a living child's blessing.
Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.
The third section follows Farquhar's escape: the rope breaks, he dodges the soldiers' fire and makes his way home through a forest. On a second reading the clues are everywhere. The road “seemed untraveled,” the stars look “unfamiliar and grouped in strange constellations,” and he hears “whispers in an unknown tongue.” The escape was the last moment of a hanging, and the final sentence says so as flatly as the first described the bridge.
Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.
The boy reaches the bazaar to buy a gift for the girl he adores just as the stalls are closing, and buys nothing. What changes is how he sees himself, and the story stops the moment he sees it. An epiphany ending works when the details before it have earned it, and when it is stated once, at full strength.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. … So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Nick sits on the shore, brooding on the old, unknown world, and the narration pulls back from one man to everyone: “us,” then “we.” The green light from chapter one returns as a future that always recedes. A widening ending works when a particular life has earned the general claim.
If he had given any utterance to his, and they were prophetic, they would have been these: … It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
Sydney Carton goes to the guillotine in another man's place, and Dickens doesn't pretend he made a speech. The narrator says what he would have said, which lets the book end on its most famous line without breaking the scene. A bittersweet ending needs a real price: here, a whole life for someone else's.
But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.
The plot is wrapped up and Huck could settle down. He won't. The last line turns the ending into a decision, in the voice the book began with. Characters who stay themselves often end like this: the world has changed around them, and they leave before it can change them.
I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.
In Dickens's first ending, Pip, still single, meets Estella briefly in London after she has been widowed and remarried. Edward Bulwer-Lytton found it too sad, and Dickens rewrote it before publication, moving the meeting to the ruins of Satis House. Even the new version is careful: “no shadow of another parting” is what Pip saw that evening, not a promise about the years after.
Endings readers resent
- The rescue from outside. A coincidence, a cavalry charge or a new character solves the problem. Merriam-Webster's second sense of deus ex machina is the literal one: “a god introduced by means of a crane” in ancient drama “to decide the final outcome.” One of Aristotle's examples was the end of Euripides's Medea. Readers tend to accept luck that causes trouble far more readily than luck that ends it.
- It was all a dream. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) gets away with “Wake up, Alice dear!” because its dream logic was plain from the rabbit hole on. In a realist story the same move tells the reader nothing they cared about happened.
- The moral. A last paragraph explaining what the story meant. If the final image works, an explanation usually weakens it, and if it doesn't, an explanation rarely saves it.
- The unplanted twist. A surprise built on a fact the reader never had a chance to notice feels like a trick, not a revelation.
- The vague ending passed off as open. The question itself is unclear, not just its answer. State the problem correctly, as Chekhov put it, before you leave it to the jury.
- The cliffhanger in a standalone. A sequel hook on the last page of a book that promised to finish its story. In a series, close this book's question even as you open the next one.
- The epilogue that answers everything. Three pages of who married whom after a last chapter that ended on a held breath. An epilogue usually works best as one scene that gets out quickly.
Frequently asked questions
What are the different types of endings?
The common kinds are closed, where everything is resolved; open, where the main question is left partly unanswered; twist, where a late fact changes what came before; circular, where the story returns to its start; and tragic, bittersweet, happy and epiphany endings. Many endings combine two kinds, such as a twist that is also tragic.
How do you end a short story?
Short stories usually end at or just after the climax, with little falling action. Many close on a single image or a moment of realization, as Joyce's “Araby” does. Make sure the last line lands on the effect the whole story has been building, and cut anything after it that explains what the reader has already felt.
Is an open ending bad?
Not if the story has stated its question clearly. An open ending leaves the answer to the reader, while a vague ending leaves the question itself unclear. Chekhov's “The Lady with the Dog” ends with the lovers facing the hardest part of their road. Readers know exactly what is unresolved, which is why the ending stays with them.
How do you write a twist ending?
Decide the twist first, then plant the clues it depends on throughout the story, in plain sight but easy to read another way. The twist should change the meaning of earlier scenes without contradicting them. Test it on a reader. If they say it came from nowhere, a clue is missing. If they guessed it on page two, a clue is too loud.
