All’s Well That Ends Well?

Every novel has to come to a close at some point, and novel endings (or movie endings, or TV series endings) come in a variety of flavors: happy, uncertain, sad, intentionally or unintentionally ambiguous, cliffhangers designed to propel you to the next in the series, and so on.

As a reader, I probably prefer happy ones for the dopamine lift and escape they bring, but I also enjoy ambiguous endings that don’t give you full resolution of all the mysteries inside the story but that make you think, reflect, and wonder what happened to the characters after the writer stopped writing.

It’s the uncertain endings, though, that I suspect best reflect real life and real-life endings. All those things we wish we’d done, people we wish we’d stayed in touch with, all those things we wish we’d said instead of just thinking about saying, until one day, for one reason or another, it was just . . . too late.

In reality life is uncertain, so endings are uncertain too. I guess for my friends and readers who enjoy the conviction that comes with religious faith it’s a little different, but the rest of us have to live without knowing what comes at the end. I suspect that makes us crave a bit more certainty in our fictional worlds.

What kind of fictional endings do you like? I’d love to hear from you!

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Best,

EJS