UNCACS: How To End A Story [Jun. 20th, 2008|12:01 pm] Nick Mamatas vylar_kaftan critique service (slots still available — I'll critique your novel with copious marginal notes and an editorial letter for two smackers a page!) but sent me ten bucks to write this post on ending a story.



Warning: Eddie Campbell in How To Be An Artist, his wonderful autobiographical comic, explains that the advice within should be taken as how to be an artist successfully, not how to be a successful artist. All advice here is the same. This is how to write a good ending, not how to write an ending that will make the story saleable. There actually is a difference, which I will discuss at the end of this.



And now, another anecdote — this past weekend I was at Mo*Con, and at Mo*Con was a Celtic rock band called Mother Grove who played an extended set. I'm not much for diddly-diddly music, but it was good and fun and their fiddler player was cute so I stuck around. For most of it. Mother Grove, like many artists who are given free rein, ruined themselves by playing too long. I went to bed before they covered Public Enemy's "Don't Believe The Hype", which should have been how they ended the set an hour before. Then the experience would have been much better, though shorter. Actually, though is the wrong word — because it would have been shorter.



That's how you end a story: with a) a bang and b) leaving the reader hungry for more. The bang is easy enough, but what about hunger?



Too many stories make one of two errors — they cop-out on the implications of the story or exhaust the reader. Both serve to stop the story rather than end it, both fail to leave the reader hungry for more.



The most obvious cop-out is the well-known "it was all a dream..." ending, which erases the implications by erasing the plot. There are others — wiping out the protagonist for ill-considered reasons, having any evidence of the revelations of the story left obscure or hidden, or just unstated are others.



I read two stories in the CW slush, one good, one not. The good one was quite exciting; it was one of those times where, as I was reading, I said to myself, "I'm buying this if he doesn't mess up the ending."



And he messed up the ending. The story involved a weird discovery of a new world (in broad strokes, to hide what story this is) and Person A telling Person B all about it, and then saying, "Well, see ya!" and then diving in to that new world. Person B worried that he might be questioned by the police, so dove into the new world too. The end.



Awful.



The implication of the story is the discovery of the new world — what will it mean, how might it change things, what's Person B gonna do now! By eliminating Person B, the implications of the story are eliminated. The story is not ended but rather STOPPED as there is no pleasure to be gained by contemplating the story or its thematic and mimetic implications anymore, unless you ignore the ending. Indeed, I've daydreamed about several alternative endings for this story, just because the first 97% of it was so interesting. But, as a reader, I don't want to do the work of fixing the ending to allow for these post-reading daydreams and musings, I want the story to actively inform them.



This story didn't leave us hungry for more because of a bad dessert which upset our collective stomach. We're full and bloated and don't want to ever eat again. Bad.



The second story was just the sort of bad story tyros write. Time traveling guy buttonholes a scientist, says he has something for Mr. Science (the "Huh? "No!" "Impossible!" guy for this particular dialogue-driven story), and that thing is...a Presidential assassin. Mr. Science says, "Oh boy, I've got some questions for you." The end.



Awful.



What are the implications of a long-dead man coming to the narrative present? Well, the "questions" for one thing. What to do with him afterwards for another. What he may think of the modern world is another. Is he gonna shoot somebody else? That's a good one too! Nuffin.' In this the reader is not left hungry for more, because we didn't get to eat in the first place. That whole story is the first line of a real story.



The end of a story should connect back to the beginning in some way that makes the beginning more interesting and gives the reader something to linger on afterwards. This is why it's not a great idea to title your story after its last line, why ending with protagonist suicides and murders is fraught with the peril of tedium, why tying up every single loose end is not a good idea.



A good ending either takes a step back or pushes one step ahead. Let that last bit of awe or confusion follow the reader, or the final tragedy or triumph echo a bit after the protagonist experiences it. Leave that ragged edge at the end, that line — "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger."



This brings us to readerly exhaustion. What if our young hero in the line above explained how he went home and cried all night and his mother asked, boredly, "What's wrong, dear" and he couldn't bring himself to say what was bothering him because he was just a kid so instead he said that someone made a mean face at him while he was at the Araby and then, later, while on the commode he wondered why he had said such a thing and so he decided to write a diary entry about it, which is what you are reading right now?



Awful.



Don't pave over the implications of the story by repeating the ending — that great moment of revelation above — three or four times. We'll get it. We're not dumb. Don't streeeeetch out the story's ending to make sure some neat sentence was included, or to hammer home exactly what the reader should experience. Step back. Leave the reader wanting to know more about the character, the circumstance, leave room for that post-reading daydream.



Aside: Oh, and for the love of God, if you're writing a first-person story, think about how that character might actually sit down and tell the story. If you were attacked by a dragon at the grocery store and called your friend right afterwards, would you say "Guess what, I was just attacked by a dragon. What happened was..." or "Guess what, I just went to the grocery store! And I bought eggs, and pork chops, and I stepped in some gum in the parking lot and I thought back to the time I went to Maine for the long weekend and rolled up my pants to wade in the surf and then a dragon attacked me. Oh well, talk to you later"? In these stories, the major implication is that the story itself is a told thing, and the ending must reflect the reason for its telling, just as the beginning must reflect the reason for the listener to pay attention.





But but but, what about tying everything up in a neat little bow and leaving nothing unsaid or undone? No. That's common enough bad advice, but it is not advice that serves the story. Rather it serves the political economy of popular magazines as they existed in the first half of the last century. Magazine circulations are a function of print run and sales, but only a function of the same. There is a multiplier effect, the "pass around" of someone leaving the magazine behind on a table, bus, or in an office, and someone else looking at it. Magazine content is designed to be disposable, so that the artifact can be freed up to be examined by more people, thus exposing the ads — and the magazine itself — to a wider audience. The magazine as an object is its own best advertisement.



What did this mean for fiction content? Essentially, it means that the stories in these popular magazines had to resist rereading or being interesting enough for the buyer to hang on to the issue, or rip out the pages (and associated ads) to look at again. The "well-tied bow" ending is a design feature to make you forget about the story and let the magazine go.



These days, however, the popular magazines no longer carry fiction and content is all going online. That means that the "pass around" is dead; modern audiences need to be "pulled" toward content, they cannot have it "pushed" at them. Thus, a story has to have such an effect on a reader as to make him or her want to share that experience by sending the story to friends, or by broadcasting it via links on a blog, email, twitter, etc. Only by following through on the implications of the story, and only to the extent that the reader wants more can this happen.



Contemporary editorial advice is still informed by the pulp era, when stories needed to be easily disposable. However, the economy of the story is changing under the feet of the current generation of editors. If you want to be good, leave the ragged edge. You may not sell your stories immediately — not until the current crop of well-entrenched editors die, perhaps — but when they do sell in the new online environment, they will be well-regarded.



So end your stories, don't just stop them.