They say that all good things must come to an end. I don’t believe in endings, as I don’t believe in beginnings. Blame my academic background, but I prefer to focus on duration and temporal chunks. Having said that, a novel has to end in some way, because there is a physical limit to how many pages you can put out there. But are narrative endings and physical endings one and the same? (Sneak preview: no)
In today’s post I’ll share with you an important secret about narrative endings: if you do things right, there’s one and only one ending that suits your book of fiction. I’ll give you the details below, but basically it goes like this: if you can’t pick that one ending, whether because it feels wrong or because you can’t find it, it means your structure is wrong. This might sound awful, but see the flip side of it: if your ending feels right, it usually means the entire narrative preceding it is also right.
