Writing the last chapter: practical ways to land an ending

I keep a notebook of abandoned openings, and it is a long notebook. Openings are cheap. You can write ten of them in a week and keep the best. Endings are expensive, because by the time you reach one you have spent a whole draft getting there, and the last chapter has to carry the weight of everything before it. It is the second place, after the long middle, where I see manuscripts stall: the writer knows roughly what happens and cannot make it land.

This is a working method for the last chapter. It assumes you have a draft, or most of one. If you are still stuck in the middle, the piece on finishing the first draft suggests writing a rough ending early, and this picks up where that leaves off.

Step 1: Decide what the ending must resolve

Before you draft a word, make an inventory. Go back through the manuscript, or through a reverse outline if you made one, and list every question the book has raised. Not themes. Questions. Will she sell the house? Does he find out about the letter? Can the brothers be in a room together?

Then sort the list into three columns:

• Must close. The book's central question, and anything the reader has been actively worrying about for a hundred pages.
• May close. Subplots that can be settled in a line or two, or in an earlier chapter, to clear the stage.
• Can stay open. Questions that belong to the characters' futures, not to this story.

Most novels have one dramatic question on the surface and one emotional question underneath it. Will she sell the house is the surface. Can she forgive her father is underneath. My colleague Beatrix argued in her piece on open and closed endings that a good ending may leave the factual question open but must settle the emotional one. That is a useful rule for the sorting. Put the emotional question in the first column, whatever you do with the rest.

A practical tip: clear the "may close" column before the last chapter. If a subplot is still running in the final pages, it will steal attention from the scene that matters. Move its resolution back a chapter or two.

Step 2: Draft three alternative last scenes

Do not write one ending and polish it. Write three, quickly, and make them genuinely different rather than three versions of the same idea. A good spread:

1. A closed ending. Everything in the first column is answered on the page.
2. An open ending. The central factual question is left with the reader.
3. A sideways ending. The last scene moves away from the main action to an image, a minor character, a later time or a different place.

Give each one a day, no more. They are sketches. The point is to stop treating your first idea as the only possible one, and to find out which ending the book has been heading toward without your noticing.

Hemingway is the famous extreme. By his own count he rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms (1929) thirty-nine times, and the Hemingway Library Edition of 2012 printed no fewer than forty-seven alternative endings in an appendix. You do not need forty-seven. Three is enough to make a choice instead of a default.

Step 3: Separate the last scene from the last line

These are two different jobs, and drafts often confuse them.

The last scene is where the emotional question is answered. It needs action, even small action: a door opened, a phone call not returned, a hand taken. It is usually a page or a few pages long, and it is where the reader's feeling about the book is decided.

The last line is the note the reader carries out of the book. It does not have to contain the resolution. Often it should not, because the scene has already done that. The best last lines tend to be images or plain statements, and the worst tend to be summaries. If your final sentence starts with "She understood now," or "And for the first time," you are probably explaining a scene that has already worked.

A test: cover the last paragraph with your hand and read the page that remains. If the ending still lands, the paragraph may be decoration.

Step 4: Pace the final chapters

Endings go wrong in pacing as often as in content. Three habits help.

Compress time as you approach the end. The middle of a novel can afford long days. The last few chapters usually work better if they move quickly between scenes, so the reader feels the book gathering.

Do not introduce new people or new information late. A character who walks on in the penultimate chapter to deliver an explanation is a sign the explanation should have been planted earlier.

Slow down at the very last moment. After compression, the final scene often wants more space and fewer events. Longer sentences, a little more detail, one action at a time. The reader should feel the book exhale.

Step 5: Plant echoes, then pay them

An ending feels inevitable when it calls back to something the reader has half forgotten. Dickens ends Great Expectations with the evening mists rising over the place where Pip's story began, echoing the morning mists on the day he first left the forge. The image was there all along. The ending only had to remember it.

Salvatore Scibona's novel The End (2008) works on a larger scale: it begins on a feast day in 1953, travels back through decades of its characters' lives, then returns to the same day, so the opening becomes the thing the ending pays off. Our reader's guide to The End traces that structure.

You do not have to plan echoes in the first draft. Most are found in revision. Once you have chosen an ending, go back through the early chapters and look for images, objects and lines that could rhyme with it, then strengthen them slightly. The guide to revising a novel in passes puts this kind of work in the structural and scene passes, which is where it belongs.

Step 6: Know when to stop

Most last chapters I read are one page too long. The writer reaches the true ending, does not trust it, and adds a paragraph that explains, or a scene that shows everyone a week later, or a final reflection. The extra page feels like care. It reads like doubt.

Look for the point where the emotional question is answered and the image is in place. Then read what comes after and ask what it adds that the reader did not already know. If the answer is nothing, cut it, and let the book end a little earlier than feels comfortable.

A worked example: three endings for an invented novel

The novel here is invented for this piece. Call it Low Water. Nell Varga, in her forties, comes back to her late father's boatyard on a lake in northern Minnesota to sell it. Her brother Tom wants to keep it running. Her father spent his life on the yard and, as Nell sees it, let her mother's unhappiness go unnoticed. In the first chapter Nell refuses to step into any boat on the lake. The surface question is whether she sells. The question underneath is whether she can forgive her father.

Ending A: closed

Nell signs the sale papers. Tom does not speak to her. On the bus out of town she opens a letter her father left her, in which he admits he failed her mother. She cries, and the last line reads: "For the first time, she understood that he had loved them both, in the only way he knew."

Everything is answered. Too much is answered. The letter delivers the forgiveness from outside, and the last line explains the feeling instead of trusting the scene.

Ending B: open

Nell tears up the contract and stays. The last scene is her and Tom sanding a hull together in the shed. Nobody says whether the yard will survive. The last line is Tom handing her a sheet of sandpaper without a word.

This is warmer, and the image is good. But the reversal comes too late and too easily, with no scene that earns it, and it reverses the surface question while barely touching the deeper one. We do not know whether she has forgiven her father, only that she likes her brother.

Ending C: sideways

The sale goes through. On her last morning, before the buyer arrives, Nell takes her father's old wooden skiff off its trailer and rows it out alone to the middle of the lake. She ships the oars and lets it drift while, on the shore, the yard's lights go off one by one as Tom closes up for the last time.

This one wins, and for reasons that apply beyond this book. The factual question closes plainly: the yard is sold. The emotional question is settled without a word of explanation, because a woman who would not step into a boat in chapter one is now alone in her father's. The echo pays a debt the first chapter set up. And the last line can be an image, not a verdict.

Cutting the extra page

My first draft of Ending C went on after the lights. It had a paragraph in which Nell thinks about her father's hands, then a short scene back on shore where she and Tom hug and promise to phone. Here is the last paragraph as drafted:

The last light went out over the shed. Nell sat with the oars across her knees and thought about his hands on these same oars, forty years of them, and how she had never once asked him what he thought about out here. She thought she might know now. She thought it might be enough.

And here it is after cutting:

The last light went out over the shed. Nell sat with the oars across her knees and let the boat turn on the water.

Two sentences, both concrete. The cut lines told the reader what to feel. The kept ones show a woman letting the lake decide which way she faces, which is as close to forgiveness as this book needs to come. The shore scene went too. It answered a question nobody was asking.

That is the whole method in small: sort what must be resolved, try three endings, choose the one that answers the deeper question with an action, pay off an echo, and stop one paragraph sooner than your nerves would like.