You’ve written a great story, full of drama and description and meaningful characters. But you can’t quick stick the ending. What’s going on?
Endings are notoriously tricky. First of all, where should it end? Endings aren’t always about the moment you pack your bags for home. Rather, they should focus on the change you’ve experienced.
So ask yourself: How did I change?
This change doesn’t need to be very dramatic or life-altering. It can be quite small. Just an expanding worldview will do—anything to show that you are now more alert to the world and everything in it, that your eyes have been opened and cannot be shut again.
The answer to the question how did I change? should be found within your story itself. Ideally, you’ve already set up a story where you (as the main character) go through an experience which changes you in some way. So, think about that experience at the center of your story.
How did you interpret that experience, and what did it teach you? What did you believe before you had this experience, and what did you believe after?
Here’s an example, let’s say you’re a nurse and you travelled to a clinic in Haiti to help with medical care there. Before your trip, you thought about how many people you’re going to help and how you’ll achieve so much in your time there. However, once you arrive, you realize that you actually cant’ help as many people as you had thought. The equipment isn’t up to date or doesn’t exist, and the much needed medicine is scarce. A month goes by, and you don’t feel like you’ve achieved very much. Yet, there is one family you become quite close to, and manage to help despite the odds against you.
In this example, what could you have learned? You could describe your change as one where you realize the hubris of your early beliefs about all you could accomplish. You learn to sit with disappointment; you become more aware of injustice and privilege and access to care. And you learn to slow down, to focus, to improve your one-on-one relationships because that’s what matters most here, and really, it’s what matters most everywhere.
This is a very general example, and I know that your stories are richer and more nuanced. But I hope this example does illustrate how to extrapolate a lesson from an experience. A description of that lesson is what you want to include in your ending.
You could go about describing that lesson / change in you in a number of ways.
You could simply state what you learned, as in, “By the end of my trip, I learned that …” This is totally acceptable.
You could also allude to this change by providing an ending description or image that really shows what you learned, such as a hug from the little girl in the family thanking you for the time you spent with her and her family. This might be enough to simply show the reader what you gained from this experience.
Or, you could do a combination of both. Give us that important scene that shows us what you learned, and then give us a sentence or two that tells us exactly what you learned, how you’ve changed, and what you’ll bring with you from this experience when you return home.
Where you want to end the story is a moot point—endings are all about change. Pinpoint the end of an experience that changed you, and you’ll find the end of your story. Describe that moment, and also state what it meant to you. Once you do this, you’ll be well on your way to writing a meaningful ending.
