The ending is where you hit, or miss

If I write all the way up until it's time to go to bed, I won't be able to sleep. So I try to knock off in time to be able to watch a movie most nights before I need to crash. Lately I've been giving Netflix it's day in court, trying to find out if their stable of horror movies is up to par. Part of the reason I don't watch more movies than I do is because I hate getting my hopes up and then seeing a finale that makes me think the director suddenly realized he only had ten more minutes of film.

So what are some of the elements that make a good ending? It should end the story, it should give us resolution. We should know what happened to all the major characters, and, if they're still alive, we should have a good idea of what they'll be doing in the next few weeks, or months.

(I'm including the denouement in this discussion. That's where we usually get hints of the future)

The questions and issues that have been brought up during the story need to be answered. The ending is where the reader gets the return on their investment of emotion in all the characters and places that we've created, and as such, needs to speak to the reader's needs and feelings.

Most of us have ideas about how the universe/fate/God's will should behave. Even if we believe it doesn't work like that, we know it should. These are the feelings that the end of a story works on, and what makes us think about it with a smile when we're driving to go see someone we like, or snicker about it with our friends while we're doing grunt work at our day jobs. If the character whom we all love makes it to the end with a few scars, we'll feel our bond with him was justified if we already believe that a person like that should be able to survive. If the sleazy dope-peddler gets eaten alive by rabid maggots, then that makes our feelings of inherent justice in the universe feel vindicated. The old Twilight Zone episodes were good at this.

Question to ponder: are we limiting ourselves by using stereotypes like the sleazy drug dealer? The reality is that people who make their livings like that are human beings, with their own complications, their own hopes and dreams. We might wonder how they can sleep at night, but the obvious answer is that they sleep pretty much just as well as the rest of us, or they wouldn't be able to get up day after day and keep selling. When John Grisham writes about sleazy lawyers, he also writes about young, honest lawyers who fight the good fight. We've seen all the tropes used over and over again. I wonder if someone could make a sympathetic protagonist out of a character that would normally be a villain?

Which brings me to one more thing I want to say. A good ending doesn't have to stay neatly within people's beliefs. I've felt for a long time that most of us don't sit down and reconcile all the millions of individual things that we believe, ideas that would be single notes in a bullet point outline of our psyche. If the ending of a story points out a small contradiction or two, and ideally recommends a resolution, then we're happy. That's an ending that gives us something new that we want to believe in, which I think would be one we all would like.

Do I need to come out and say that all of the above is my opinion? Hopefully not, any more than I need to say that you're welcome to express your own.

Still writing.