Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.

My new editor and I were sharing a celebratory drink at a swanky Lower Manhattan bar, like a pair of characters in my first novel, which she would publish in less than a year. She said that everyone loved it, there was only one concern: It did not have an ending. I explained that it did have an ending, it was just an ambiguous one.

She nodded. “But what happens to the characters?”

I had to admit that I did not know.

Endings have always been my Everest. Or, really, if writing a novel is like climbing Everest, then my tendency is to get within eyeshot of the summit and say, “Well, that’s far enough.” In the seventh grade my English teacher had only one rule: Our stories couldn’t end with it all turning out to be a dream. Thanks to me, this rule soon expanded to include everyone dying in a bus crash, an asteroid hitting Earth, etc., etc.

In college I wrote nearly 300 pages of a novel in 10 months, got right up to the final scene and — stopped. I knew exactly what was going to happen, I just didn’t write it down. Three years later I started over, labored for a year and with a final gasp of effort managed to tack on a short ending. Then I closed the document and walked away.

If this seems certifiable, I can say only that writing a bad book is like reading one. Sometimes you trudge on with faith that the ending will redeem the rest. Sometimes you give up, because you are sure it won’t.



The oldest surviving text on writing is Aristotle’s “Poetics.” Circa 335 B.C., he defined an ending as “that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it.” The ending occurs when the chain of cause and effect reaches its final effect. But after the big wedding I always want to know: How do the star-crossed lovers get on? At least with tragedies you can kill off your hero in some spectacular fashion. Afterward, nothing’s the same. But how exactly? Even after “The rest is silence,” in “Hamlet,” I’m still wondering what Fortinbras gets up to. Cleaning up all those dead bodies, I guess.

How do you know when it’s over? My “Gotham Writer’s Workshop Guide” advises that an ending “generally follows a pattern of crisis, climax, and consequences […] we get the answer to our major dramatic question. Then, the consequences, however briefly handled, are alluded to at the very end of the piece.”

Sounds so simple. Like George Costanza in a board meeting, just know when you’ve peaked and get out fast. Raise the stakes higher and higher until, in a climactic scene, you answer the “major dramatic question” and take a bow. Does Lizzie find true love? Does Johnny survive the war? These premises have “yes or no” endings already built in. Lizzie is swept off her feet by the man of her dreams, or she decides she’s better off on her own. Johnny comes home to a parade, or in a box.

Or is that too simple? In “Poetics,” Aristotle explains that a good plot “will admit of a change from bad fortune to good, or from good fortune to bad.” But this seems awfully predictable. Perhaps we’ll try a clever twist. Lizzie starts off looking for love and ends up opening a successful coffee shop. Johnny defects from the Western Front and takes up potato farming. If the story is written by one of my undergraduate students, Lizzie and Johnny will both turn out to have been vampires the whole time! No, these endings don’t quite satisfy, because according to the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, a writer must move toward “an end not to be foreseen (by the reader) but also towards an end which, having been reached, must be seen to have been from the start inevitable.”

This is a high-wire act, to be sure. Fitzgerald had to make us believe things just might work out for Gatsby and Daisy, but still leave enough clues so later we could see they were doomed from the start. Of course things aren’t going to work out for the Joads, as they head west. But Steinbeck must make us believe they’ll find greener pastures. And how could I have really thought J.K. Rowling was going to polish off Harry Potter at the end of the seventh book? We cry “spoiler alert!” to save ourselves from the knowledge of endings, but how many truly surprise us? When the rare Red Wedding occurs, we all tip our hats.

One solution is the ambiguous ending. “The Gotham Writer’s Guide” advises that the answer to the major dramatic question can be a maybe “as long as you’ve convinced the reader that you’ve tried your best and that, in the end, neither yes nor no would really be honest.”

If I had it my way, instead of “The End,” every book would close with “I’ve Tried My Best.” Does Lizzie find true love? Well, she meets our veteran Johnny and after three awkward dates they sleep together. In the night he screams during PTSD nightmares. In the morning she sees a bird, stuck on the fire escape, flapping a broken wing. The end. I’ve tried my best.

These non-endings leave much to discuss in workshops, and they can work well in short stories, often said to be “slices” of life, beginning in the midst of some situation and often ending with just the whiff of possible change. Anton Chekhov, a master short story writer, said, “The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”

But a novel aims not to represent just a slice of life, but the whole of it. We need more than just artfully posed questions. We expect to know unambiguously who is virtuous and who is corrupt, and have a novelist mete out fates accordingly. Some writers set out with a point to make about society or human nature, and they press on until they’ve made it. But this is where I start thinking I’ve climbed far enough. Who am I to say what’s right or wrong? Any further feels like playing God.

Back in the seventh grade we learned the phrase deus ex machina. This translates to “God out of the machine” and originated before Aristotle’s day, where plays would end when a god literally rose up on a platform to deliver justice to all the mortals. But of course it is not really Zeus or Athena rising up to say what’s what – it’s Sophocles or Euripides saying it, and Aristotle warns against the device, because of course the gods can see everything. The point is that we cannot.

Kurt Vonnegut put it best in a lecture to M.F.A. students at the University of Iowa: “The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is. And if I die – God forbid – I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, ‘Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?’”

After you’ve created characters that feel real, developed affections and pity for them, lived with them a long time and walked them through crisis after crisis – it has to end. To turn to them and say “this was the good news, and that was the bad news” takes some hubris.

Whether or not a writer believes in God (and I’m pretty sure Vonnegut didn’t), it’s important to remember that, at best, playing is all we are doing. It’s less important if things end well for our characters than if we have shown their lives, and through them life itself, honestly. If the truth is that the good news and bad news are hard for us to tell apart, then an ending that says that is not ambiguous at all. In his book “How Fiction Works,” the critic James Wood says that if Chekhov was right and novels do not give answers, they can still give “the best account of the complexity of our moral fabric.”

We are trying our best. Endings need not be conclusions.

With this in mind, it turned out to be pretty easy to finish my novel. By the time my editor and I were done with our drinks that night, I had a pretty good idea where things had to end – like Elizabeth Bowen’s reader, as soon as I got there, it seemed to have been inevitable from the beginning. I banged out a new final chapter in just a couple of weeks.

The last hundred yards up the mountain are the steepest. The air is very thin and you cannot share it with your characters anymore. You have to leave them, along with everything you’ve written to that point. It is the last thing you want to do, but as you go higher you’ll get your first look at them from above. They become smaller somehow, as from the summit you can finally see the mountain in its entirety.

The paperback edition of Kristopher Jansma’s first novel, “The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards,” was just published.