We have to leave a story, of any length, both satisfied and wishing the story stays with us—having fallen in love with the protagonists or having been at least drawn close to their situations, we want to carry the characters inside of ourselves, as if they are friends we know we won’t see again, people who have moved away and gone on with their lives. We want the impact they have had on us to linger. We want to feel that their lives have shape, that one part has ended and more of life will go on for them. And to do this effectively, we pick up on seeds planted in the very opening of the story, seeds that might not have been planted until drafts later, but seeds that must be there in a final version for the ending to feel satisfactory.

Just as a story must start when something is about to happen, a story must end on something having happened, whether that is an action of the plot or a changed perception on the part of a protagonist or a combination of the two.

A very quick summary of what makes a story’s ending satisfying appears at Creative Writing Now:

1. Effective endings show (or suggest) the result of the story’s conflict.
2.  Effective story endings come from the main character’s actions.
3. Satisfying story endings use elements from the story’s beginning and middle.
4. Great story endings make the reader feel something.

Endings in Novels

Let’s explore the craft of pulling off endings that link us back to their books’ openings, placing our feet on the ground where we stood when we opened the book but leave us standing there transformed.

One of my favorite novels is Intrusions by Ursula Hegi. It’s the story of an author, who is a mother and wife, and her novel’s protagonist, who is also a mother and wife, each intruding into the other’s life. Because of the interactions with one another, the story becomes a revelation about women and the choices they make in life.

Before we read the ending in which the novel’s protagonist, Megan, is returning home to her children and her husband from two weeks away, let’s check out the beginning:

The novel begins:

Megan Stone was walking along the deserted beach.

You will probably ask, Why another book about another woman walking along the beach? Another deserted beach, to be more specific. And you will sigh impatiently wondering how soon Megan is going to arrive at some monumental insight which will liberate her dramatically from her husband, the demands of her children, and the eighty or ninety Christmas cards she feels obligated to send every year—an insight which will leave her alone in the open-ended situation that could lead anywhere, not excluding nowhere. . .

…You could go on to other possibilities, but in reality (the reality within this novel) Megan Stone’s hair is short, and not blond but rather a sort of red, too light to be called auburn, the kind of red that usually goes with sunburned skin. She is only twenty-nine, and she has never had a lover, neither younger nor older, not even before she married Nick Stone. . .

. . . Later, when she had been married several years, she found herself cautiously wondering what it would have been like, mildly resenting the disadvantage of not having any basis for comparison. It made her uncomfortable to realize that she still harbored the old but well-worn double standard, that it was all right for a boy but not for a girl. Eight years ago, when she had married Nick, she had actually been glad that he had gathered experience, while she had been in a condition referred to by her Aunt Judy as: clean.

Perhaps you would like me in the role of a writer who does not interrupt, who presents a slice of life without interferences, without calling attention to the fact that this is a story. I won’t accept this role…

And here is the ending: At this point, Megan is returning from a two-week trip to visit Aunt Judy and has decided she can work on changing the way she performs her role and that her marriage will work for her:

As she felt the wheels separate from the runway, the tickling in her stomach expanded into a moment of queasiness. She swallowed and it went away. This was always the worst part, taking off; once she was up, she was fine. She looked at her wristwatch. In Boston, she’d have fifty minutes to catch the Delta flight to Connecticut. By the time she landed in Hartford, it would be five-thirty. Dusk. Instead of calling Nick from the airport, she’d rent a car and drive home. She’d see the lights in her house from the end of the street, lights in the living room and den, lights in the kitchen where Nick and the children would be sitting at the table, eating dinner.

She’d knock, once, or maybe she’d walk to the front door, unlock it, quietly, and come in through the living room. There’d be a warm fire in the fireplace, toys on the rug in front of it. Standing in the kitchen door, she’d look at them for a few moments. Then Timmy would notice her. Jumping up from the table, he’d run to her, and she’d kneel down, catching him against herself with one arm, holding the other wide open for Nicole. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath. She could almost smell their fine hair, feel their soft faces against hers. Nick would get up and . . .

She opened her eyes. There, she was doing it again, imagining things ahead of time, painting details of a homecoming that might never be matched by reality. She looked out of the small window. Beyond her reflection, she could see at a distance, a long curved stretch of sand and, at the end of it, the Great Point Light. Although it didn’t seem deceptively close, it didn’t look too far for someone determined to reach it, someone who’d ignore the faded signs threatening prospective intruders, someone who’d loosen the nails, one by one, and remove the weathered boards.

This ending accounts for the characters introduced at the opening. I think it is important to note that the third-person limited point of view, Megan’s, is how the book ends while it opens with the author’s point-of-view. Here the author doesn’t interrupt. She lets Megan have her thoughts. I think it is possible that in doing so, the author becomes her character, or “admits” that she has invented a character to learn more about herself. So just as the ending reaches back to the opening, it also allows for the feeling that a new page is being turned, for both the author and the woman she has drawn to engage with.

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Now let’s look at another of my favorite novels, All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews.

Again, before we can look at the ending skillfully, I think we have to look at the opening. Here is an excerpt from page 1 and 2:

Our house was taken away on the back of a truck one afternoon late in the summer of 1979. My parents and my older sister and I stood in the middle of the street and watched it disappear, a low-slung bungalow made of wood and brick and plaster slowly making its way down First Street, past the A&W and the Deluxe Bowling Lanes and out onto the number twelve highway, where we eventually lost sight of it. I can still see it, said my sister Elfrieda repeatedly, until finally she couldn’t. I can still see it. I can still see it. I can still. . . Okay, nope, it’s gone, she said.

My father had built it himself back when he had a new bride, both of them barely twenty years old, and a dream. My mother told Elfrieda and me that she and my father were so young and so exploding with energy that on hot evenings, just as soon as my father had finished teaching school for the day and my mother had finished baking and everything else, they’d go running through the sprinkler in their new front yard, whooping and leaping, completely oblivious to the stares and consternation of their older neighbors, who thought it unbecoming of a newly married Mennonite couple to be cavorting, half dressed, in full view of the entire town. Years later, Elfrieda would describe the scene as my parents’ La Dolce Vita moment, and the sprinkler as their Trevi Fountain.

Where’s it going? I asked my father. We stood in the centre of the road. The house was gone. My father made a visor with his hand to block the sun’s glare. I don’t know, he said. He didn’t want to know. Elfrieda and my mother and I got into our car and waited for my father to join us. He stood looking at the emptiness for what seemed like an eternity to me. Elfrieda complained that the backs of her legs were burning up on the hot plastic seat. Finally, my mother reached over and honked the horn, only slightly, not enough to startle my father, but to make him turn and look at us.

The novel is the narrator’s telling of her sister’s depression and ultimate suicide. It is the evocation of what it is like to live under Mennonite paternalistic doctrine and escape it, what it is like to love one’s sibling ferociously. What it is like to carve out a career as a writer, to be a mother, to mourn an unsaveable sister. Ultimately, it is a book about surviving grief. Along the way there is humor shared between the sisters and insights gained from writing.

Here are excerpts from the last ten pages of the novel, in which the narrator is writing a letter to her now deceased sister catching her up on events:

Dear Elf,

Auntie Tina once told me that I’d be walking down the street one day and suddenly feel a lightness come over me, a feeling like I could walk forever, some magical strength, and that would mean I was being forgiven. I wish I had taken you to Zurich. I’m sorry. Auntie Tina said one day I’d be flying and not even know it.

The letter goes on to recount current activities. Here’s one that takes place on a trip to New York:

Will carried Nora on his back and zoomed around on the sidewalk and she laughed and bounced up and down and lost one of her flip-flops so we had to go back and retrace our steps in the dark which I suppose is the meaning of life.

In order to look in the dark, one must go back to find what is lost.

And in recounting another conversation, the narrator addresses grief in the letter by recounting a conversation with her mother who was in the hospital recovering from an operation:

I asked her what to do when a spade isn’t a spade and she told me that sometimes there are things like that in life, spades that aren’t spades, and that we can leave them that way. I told her, but I’m a writer, it’s hard for me to leave those spades so undefined, and she said she understood, she liked mysteries to be solved too, god knows, and words to be attached to feelings. She tapped her whodunit, the one lying on her chest, the one protecting her heart, that somehow with all this hugging hadn’t moved an inch. She told me that the brain is built to forget things as we continue to live, that memories are meant to fade and disintegrate, that skin, so protective in the beginning because it has to be to protect our organs, sags eventually—because the organs aren’t so hot anymore either—and sharp edges become blunt that the pain of letting go of grief is just as painful or even more painful than the grief itself. It means goodbye, it means going to Rotterdam when you weren’t expecting to and having no way of telling anyone you won’t be back for a while.

Then, after sharing more memories of their youth together, the narrator ends her letter with a description of a call from Winnipeg, Manitoba, their childhood city. The caller asks if she remembers how green the Province of Manitoba. “Yeah, I said, I know. It’s an amazing green. I remember now.”

Then the story leaps without a sign-off to a recounting of a time when the two sisters, Yoli and Elf, travelled together by plane and are lying in a hotel bed remembering life events:

Remember when we watched that solar eclipse? I asked her. You came to my school and dragged me out of Gunner’s English class to watch it with you.

Yes, she said. It was so cold.

Well, it was winter and we were lying in snow. In a field.

Wearing welding helmets, she said, weren’t we?

Yeah. Where did you get them from?

I can’t remember. I guess some guy I knew in town.

Wasn’t it amazing? I asked her.

The eclipse? It really was, she said. The path of totality.

What? I said. Is that what it’s called?

Yeah, remember what dad said? She dropped her voice.
The path of totality passed over Manitoba in the early afternoon.

Oh right, you mean when he said it in that super serious tone?

It was so funny. She laughed.

The next one’s not supposed to be for another fifteen hundred years or something like that, I said.

Then, I guess I will too.

Maybe not, said Elf. Who knows.

There was a skylight over our bed and we could see the stars. Elfie took my hand. She put it on her heart and I felt its strong and steady beat. We had an early appointment the next morning. Elf said it was like getting married or writing an exam.

It’s torture to have to wait all day, she said. Let’s just get up, shower, and go.

I am stunned by the beauty of that passage of back and forth conversation: I feel at once the flying that Auntie Tina predicted, the idea that things might just be what they are and we have to let them go, and the love and healing that goes on in grief. The beings of the two sisters are so clearly evoked—the magical thinking of Elf, the following nature of the younger sister Yoli. And, of course, the way being in the path of totality alludes to the largeness of the universe in which, grief or no grief, we are small, very small.

And I go back to the title, All My Puny Sorrows, believing both in deep sorrow and in the ability to process grief and carry the beloveds with us under this sun. Not only that, but the ability of the deceased to impart their spirit and assure us that we will be well.

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When you read fiction of any kind, take a look at how the endings have seeds in the openings. You’ll be delighted, I think, to realize that each journey ends with a change grown from the opening.