How important is the ending?
For my first blog about something other than my writing I decided to begin at the end.
As a slight warning, this piece containers spoilers, but the stories I’m referencing are award winning classics from 1953 and 1962 so I make no apology. And if you’ve not already read them, then why not?!
How a story ends has always been as important to me as the idea, the plot and the characters. So often I’m left frustrated by how a movie, tv show or book ends, more so when the set up is so good. It’s not necessarily that the end is rubbish, it’s usually that it feels rushed. There are plenty of endings that are sheer genius, such as the Planet of the Apes or the Empire Strikes Back. Immediately, you want more. You need to know what happens.
After vociferously reading 300 pages, watching 2 hours of genius film making we then discover we’ve built up to a 20 page or 10 minute conclusion. And that can be so disappointing, so much so that we feel robbed of our time investment. These endings can occur for a few reasons I guess. Having devoted hours to carefully building a world, a tight plot and interesting characters it could simply be a case of the author running out of steam and writing a crap ending, or lazily relying on a MacGuffin to tie everything up.
Alternatively, it could be factors outside of the writer or director’s hands. Budget overspend on a movie or a book that just can’t be edited to the right length. Cuts could be made that somehow interfere with the delivery of the ending. So be it. Nobody creates, particularly for money, in a vacuum but it is something I’ve been alive to. A full ending doesn’t always hit the mark either sometimes, not least the never-ending conclusion to the movie version of Return of the King.
Does that guarantee I’ll write endings that deliver? Of course not, however I’ll try! Indeed, on The Triton Run one well-meaning and very supportive agent suggested I cut the last chunk of the book out and use it to begin a sequel (before I’d even thought of doing a sequel- after all there was no point in writing one if I couldn’t sell the first one). I felt that would end the story in a funny place, without resolution for some characters and without dangling the carrot that the world continued for these characters though this story was at an end. But I fully understood why he suggested it.
I’m a big reader, but not one of those who can recite passages from their favourite poems, Shakespeare play or books. Apart from lines in two rather iconic stories. And the lines just happen to be the final sentences in those stories.
That these lines stuck with me in the decades since I read them says a lot, and is what gave me the idea for this piece.
The 9 Billion Names of God was a short story from Arthur C Clarke. Looking back, it’s remarkable that I read it first when I was about 10 or 11, it being recommended by a family friend who’d told me all about and then loaned me the book. Interestingly I always thought that 2001 and Rendezvous With Rama, both absolute classics, left me frustrated at the end.
Not with this short story though, if anything it left me a little terrified.
It’s a curious piece, and this summary is based on my memories so may not be completely inaccurate. A Tibetan Monastery has, for centuries, been recording every name of God and expect to need thousands of years to complete the list. When completed, the work of mankind would be done, and presumably the world would end. With the advent of computers the monks employed experts to carry out their work, knowing the task would be completed far quicker.
Once done, the story concludes with an incredible, yet gentle, sentence:
“overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”
A sentence that raises all sorts of theological questions, that at the age I read it only served to confuse and scare me. It’s the end, but what happens next? The fact I remember it so clearly shows how effective it was.
A different story that ends with a degree of finality for the universe yet manages to infuse a degree of optimism was written by James Blish. I discovered him from his adaptations of the original series of Star Trek, which I loved. They were the equivalent to the legendary Target novelisations of Dr Who episodes. Cities in Flight could not be more different to the Clarke story. It’s epic, verging on Tolkien in length. It’s very disjointed and the quality varies, unsurprising as it was a series of shorts / novellas that were serialised, written out of order and bolted together.
Despite this the concept was brilliant, with Cities leaving Earth, lifted off the Earth and powered by spindizzy technology, to explore the universe. Immortality is possible for most. The build-up is slow and some of the adventures are patchy – perhaps simply a victim of the age in which it was written. Much of it is very much space opera. The end however really stayed with me. Again, excuse my memory as it’s some time since I read it all for the third time. Mayor Amalfi discovers that the universe is shortly to end, with a big crunch to occur before the singularity it creates forming the next universe.
It was felt possible to influence the format and content of the next universe by altering the chemical composition of the singularity and I recall some interesting musings about exposing it to water. In the end Amalfi waits until the last moment and then blew himself up, changing the new universe.
The bit that struck me was that even at the end of everything our characters, and the reader, knew there was still hope. Sadness yes that all ended, but an acknowledgement that things started over.
We end with “creation began”, which I regard as utter genius.
It’s impossible to match such writing, but it reminds me that a story needs an effective conclusion while it is possible to be even more satisfying by leaving the reader with the knowledge that outside of the pages, even when an ending appears definitive, life carries on.
