Margaret Tiger Ferguson

How do you write an ending for a short story? Read on Substack

Just as a keystone in a Roman aqueduct supports the load, endings in fiction add one last lock stone to the story. Readers enter the final pages with high expectations. Will new information be revealed? Will previous events be cast in a new light? Is the ending satisfying?

Knowing the readers’ expectations allows the writer to foil them. For instance, a seemingly digressive yet fitting “lock stone” will make the reader work to understand the text (Amy Hempel’s In the Cemetery Where Al Johnson is Buried). Elsewhere, a writer might leave the reader with potential but not guarantees (Fable by Charles Yu). One question to ask yourself might be, how would you like the reader to feel at the end of the story?

Craft can develop from studying other writers. Some writers, such as Kelly Link, draft their ending first. This ending will offer a destination for the story in progress. Such an ending might act as a goal post or convey their main point or central idea. Perhaps this story will prove that time travel changes neither the present nor the past (Ted Chiang’s “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”). Maybe the story exists because an older character confesses an unsuspected secret (“Hell-Heaven” by Jhumpa Lahiri).

For inspiration, I read endings I admire (Ethan Canin’s, Jennifer Egan’s, and others’). I sit with poems, and I study the last lines. Which endings do you admire most? Are these endings satisfying, moving, or evasive? What strategies does the writer use? Some craft moves that might end a story include: 

• Dialogue
• Imagery
• Offer a transcendent idea
• Twist
• Flash forward
• POV shift
• Zoom out 
• Echo a point earlier in the story
• Circle back to the start
• Epiphany
• Surprise
• Action
• Reflection
• Explanation
• Question

Writers are pressured to end the text on a meaningful note. I was once advised by an essayist to “write the climactic moment and then end the story quickly.” In my work, I take the same approach to writing a fictional ending that I once took for writing academic essay endings. I try to add a “so what?” Does the story need a twist at the end? What do I have to add here?