I usually go for the sad ending…

I like killing off my characters.

I usually go for sad/evil wins because I’ve read to many books where its so obvious that the good guys are going to win in the end.

I like it when you can’t really tell who the “good guys” or “bad guys” were. I.E. The First Law Trilogy.

I like the ending to the Bartimaeus Trilogy. Very bittersweet – those are my favorite types of endings.

But- but they killed Nathaniel!

(Okay, he was a little jerk for most of the series, and it’s his whole symbolic gesture of being good again but he died just when he was about to stop being a jerk!)

Yeah, I don’t like it when characters die after I’ve got all attached to them, but if it makes the story better, I usually deal with the feeling that they DESERVED TO LIVE. sniffles (Look below for spoilers about the Book Thief)

On the other hand, I don’t like it when everyone is forcibly given a happy ending just so the end of the book isn’t ‘depressing’. Let’s just say that it depends on the book, and if it’s well-written, chances are that I’ll appreciate it even as I curse the gods for killing my favorite characters.

What about endings that are kind of ambiguous?

SPOILERS:

I usually go for the sad ending…
I like killing off my characters.

Yeah, I’m in the midst of killing off my protagonist in the piece that I’m working on. He’s going to commit suicide, so it’s not easy, but I can’t have him survive because he’s just killed someone.

In any case, I like bittersweet endings as well as open ended stories. I didn’t like the ending to Harry Potter or the ending to Catching Fire. In the former’s case, there were too many tied up ends. (if that makes sense ;P) In the latter, the cliff hanger was RIDICULOUS. It just screamed “you don’t know what’s going to happen next, so BUY THE LAST BOOK!”

I like endings where it’s not quite clear how things were resolved. For some reason, I like books that end the main plot, but still leave lots of questions open, like “wait, what? Did the rebels win or lose? Are they just going to forget the whole thing now? What happened to…?”

I know done poorly these can simply become plot holes, but if a book ends on just the right note leaving lotsof questions open, it’s sometimes even more fun to imagine answers. Plus it opens the gate for speculative fanfiction.

And The Book Thief.

Thanks SWQ

At times like this, I wish for some Laser Guided Amnesia. By the by, er, for future members, would you please hide

^^You should hide that, as Steph (and possibly others) haven’t read Harry Potter yet.

But I agree with your comments.

I didn’t like the ending to Harry Potter

I agree. The epilogue tasted like cotton candy.

Of course, you also don’t want to force your characters into a bittersweet ending, a la Philip Pullman. By the end of the Amber Spyglass, it seemed like the entire multi-verse was designed to keep Will and Lyra apart.

Inorite? Who would have thought there’d be spoilers in a thread titled “Endings”?

The epilogue (of HP) tasted like cotton candy.

Yeah, that’s about right. Plus…I didn’t think Ron would allow Hermione to name their kid Hugo. Probably she bullied him into calling him after Victor Hugo or something, but I’d be seriously surprised if Ron knew who he was.

But there is something to be said for happy endings, and I can see why Rowling ended HP the way she did. Let’s face it, Harry’s been through a load of crap his entire life and he deserves his little happy family as much as anyone, I guess.

Especially given how long the RotK ending is.

Because it’s as much as about writing them as it is reading them. And how is anyone supposed to guess which book series would be included in this thread from the outside?

Thanks, Jeni. I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who assumed the context was about writing endings, not writing spoilers.

The fact that Frodo doesn’t die makes the ending even sadder for me. I ALWAYS cry when I watch the third movie, and to me, an ending that makes you cry even after the tenth time is a good ending.

I know! sobs I’m getting all choked up thinking about it.

Please go and edit your Harry Potter post to hide the spoiler text. I know most of us have read it, but seeing as we all know that Steph hasn’t (as was posted before), we can at least do her the courtesy of making it slightly harder for her to find out what happens.

Very well, very well. But I’ll have you know that Bruce Willis was a ghost, and Rosebud was the sled.

Edit: Speaking of which, what’s your opinion on twist endings?

Sucks to be Adam’s protag.

I know, it’s realistic

I disagree.

In my experience, you know a twist works when everybody tells you “I should have seen that coming!” after the reveal. It means you were able to lay the groundwork in a believable fashion without tipping the reader off overmuch.

Of course, that’s a subjective and highly variable measuring stick, but I don’t know a better way to gauge it.

Spoil not the Dark Tower! I’m about to start reading it.

I suck at endings. I never can actually write them. Any advice?

I’ve been considering a myriad of different options for the ending of the plot involving a male and female protag (yes, they’re in love but have several, erm, issues with each other), including:

1. The male and female protag never end up together after playing hit-and-miss for years. The guy marries someone else and has a family. The girl goes off and does her own (unspecified) thing.
2. Guy dies. Girl goes off and does her own (unspecified) thing.
3. Girl dies. Guy marries someone else and has a family.
4. Guy and girl finally get over their issues (which have been driving them apart for years), trust each other, and rebuild their relationship. (If they ever get married, I think they’d end up as fighters of poverty in the slums, educating poorer youths.) This is the ‘happiest’ ending, I guess, at least for the guy and girl, but everything’s not going to be sunshine happy cheese rainbows, obviously.

Yes, there are common elements, but all swapped around. What do you think? Right now, I’m leaning towards either 1 or 4 because I don’t know how effectively I can write a death scene.

@SWQ
I agree w/ sansa all options are solid, but I only have one thing to suggest, please don’t make a chapter entitled ‘Epilogue’ and fill it with all the details, essential encapsulate the ending within the last few chapters (i hate it when theres a many years later chapter showing everyone’s fates… I hate it when the author specifies the complete fate and family at the end… for example if the MC is say a ‘wanderer’, I would hate the end if it states that he realized his love for some girl, he marries her, they shift somewhere and they have x no. of children named Edward, Bella and Jacob… I would prefer an ending where he and the one he loves realise their feelings for each other and it simply ends with them say, ‘wandering into the sunset’)
The above is just my opinion :P

(and death scenes aren’t terribly hard as long as you portray the emotions correctly, and the character(s)‘s death has some meaningful impact for which he/she is remembered with whatever emotions… i hate it when the other protags simply forget about someone who dead and go on frolicking)

I like that.

I’m still a failure at endings, but I actually have a little bit of an idea for how to end what I’m working on now. Maybe. It’s very vague. I’m mostly just a failure at endings.

EDIT:
I just realized that my being terrible at endings is probably why most of my stories for high school English ended in “and it was a dream” or something similar. I don’t know why I always did that. “It was all a dream” stories piss me off most of the time when I read/watch them.

Endings are hard. Mine pretty much ends with one of the leads walking off.

I always got 100’s on them because they were good up until that point. One of them that I remember wasn’t exactly a dream. It was like whenever the protagonist went to sleep, she went to another reality/planet thing and wasn’t sure if it was really happening. The other one was getting experiments run on her or something, and that was the dream. But, yeah, I don’t do that anymore. Now that I’m thinking about it, those are the only two times I can absolutely remember doing it. But, we didn’t get to write a lot of stories. My elementary ones were better (ending-wise).

I like a bit of ambiguity. Like Klutor said, the end is only the beginning…

Like Klutor said, the end is only the beginning…

Thank you, SWQ.

I really, really, REALLY like bittersweet endings…

Me too, but they have to be 3 parts sweet, 1 part bitter and 1 part salty.:-D

Ah, okay.

So you have a team of a few heroes and a mentor.
What happens at the end is this:
Mentor dies = salty
Hero beats villain = sweet
Hero’s love interest marries someone else = bitter
Hero’s love interest is pregnant with hero’s child and neither of them know it = bitter
Villain’s henchman survives and finds out about kiddie who is on the way and plots to kill him in the sequel = bitter

Kind of like that?;-)

Perfect. :D

Glad you like it.

I’ve been using the circular journey motif a lot for my endings. Maybe too much. I incorporate it in varying degrees of literal-ness. Usually it turns out more bittersweet than happy.

Eh depends on the story. Many stories NEED to have the good guys win for obvious reasons. As long as they made lots of sacrifices and things arent the same anymore, the good guys winning is good. If you dont want good guys to win then dont read good and evil black and white stories. I’m trying to make sure there’s enough sacrifice and development to make the endings I have in mind for various story ideas good. One of my book series is your basic good vs evil, one story is a sort of grey area with the whole end justifies the mean thing, and some I’m not sure about.

I like endings to be mostly happy. They need to be positive overall or I just get depressed. But if things work out perfectly with no complications, yeah, that’s boring. Things need to go in strange, unexpected directions in the last act of a book. There must be loose ends and there must be things that don’t work out the way I want/expect them to. But… overall, I prefer if they’re largely positive. Depressing endings can take amazing books and make them difficult for me to ever read over again, my personal indicator of whether or not it was a good book to me.

Just enough questions to eave me happily daydreaming, but not so many that I feel cheated.

That’s a good way to put it. I like those endings too.

Bittersweet. I also like when an ending leaves me wanting more so much that I play/read it again.