Forum: Story Discussion and Feedback

I encounter so many stories that seem formulaic. The protagonist goes from crisis/climax to crisis/climax, many of which are very similar, until a certain word count is reached, and then the story ends (often abruptly and at times jarringly), sometimes on the heels of a brand new development or a pretext.

My platinum/diamond standard for a story ending has always been the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. After the hobbits have returned to the shire and set things right there, there are further events that place the entire trilogy in context and where we learn the fate of the shire, and of many of the characters (Galdalf, Elrond, Frodo, Sam, to name a few). But we also witness, from a microcosmic level, the end of an era that had endured for well over a millennium and the beginning of another (the era of Man). Talk about placing a story in context!

I loved the ending even more than the rest of the story, for how well-crafted and poignant it was. And what is more, it made the story even more of a work of art than it had been to that point.

What are your favorite story endings, and why?

I'm not coming up with anything better for a novel length story. Ursula K. Le Guin's novels, on the other hand, tend to end rather abruptly.

For short stories, I love the ending of Clarke's The Nine Billion Names of God The story itself is dated, as you'd expect of a story about computers from the early 1950s. The ending, though, wraps everything up rather nicely.

That's why I've always preferred both Prologues and Epilogues, on the stories where it fits—which is mostly series, where they help tie the various individual books together. Though, I'm routinely criticized for those who are largely incapable of grasping the point of either—probably never having read a decently written one before.

Prologues are wonderful for establishing context for a larger work, telling what happened before the main story characters are introduced, while the Epilogue similarly ties the whole story up, detailing what happens after the final conclusion scene (i.e. what happens afterwards to the individual characters).

Clearly, not every story needs either, yet for those that do, it creates a more unified, comprehensive story.