Since #RewriteaTVorMovieEnding is currently trending on Twitter, and I'm in the process of writing the ending of my current WIP - Golden Eagle - today seems like a good day to talk about story endings.
Beginnings are rife with possibility, but endings are the linch pins. Fail to stick the landing, and the wheels can come off the whole thing. Writing the conclusion - climax and denouement - of a novel always leave me anxious, Golden Eagle especially, it turns out, if my level of constant nausea is anything to go by. I'm anxious by nature, but, generally, I'm over-anxious about writing endings, and past results prove that I shouldn't be. Because here's the thing about endings, the constant truth.
Someone's always going to be disappointed.
Nobody Likes a Goodbye
Goodbyes are always hard, and the longer your story's been around, the harder the goodbye is going to be. There's pressure associated with the proper wrap-up of any tale, but a six-episode limited miniseries has way less viewer pressure than a series that's been running regularly for years. Viewers - and readers, too, because this applies to books as well - have grown to love and care for the characters, and aren't ready to relinquish them. These regular adventures have become bright spots in the lives of the audience members, and knowing it's all drawing to a final close creates a kind of mourning; like sending a dear friend off to another country for good.
This anxiety from the audience creates a similar anxiety in the content creators, and they want very badly to get it right. For the audience to walk away singing praises.
But I think there's a disconnect, at times, between the two parties.
The current school of thought in the film/TV industry seems to be this: that a shocking, unexpected ending - the one nobody could have predicted - is the best ending. No one saw it coming, therefore the writers must be very clever to have dreamed it up, therefore it's a quality ending. But...is this automatically true? While some shocking twists are brilliant, many more are a case of creators bending, twisting, and viciously manipulating the narrative in ways designed to make the audience feel blindsided. In the age of social media, in which creators have access to fans' discussions and predictions online, sometimes it feels like it becomes a creator's goal to pen an ending that no one is expecting, even if the expected ending would have been pleasing to the audience - and this usually requires a rewriting or breaking-down of our characters.
I would argue that big, OMG shock endings work best for, one, standalone films and miniseries, and, two, for particular genres, like horror or thriller. I expect Stephen King to shock and horrify me - that's part of the fun of it. But, looking at it purely from an adrenal response level, I couldn't spend ten years watching a weekly show full of Stephen King-level shocks and horrors.
One of my favorite movie twists - and this is an old one, at this point - is that of The Sixth Sense. I love that, though we aren't expecting to learn that - spoiler alert - Bruce Willis's character has been dead the whole time, we can look back on the film and find all the little clues that we wrote off as coincidence. Shocking, sure, but it makes sense. There were breadcrumbs all along. The point of that film is the shock, and the whole of it works toward delivering it in the most effective way. Horrors and thrillers are trying to scare, shock, stun you; they're crafted that way.
Conversely, I would argue that romances, good-natured action flicks, superhero movies, and family dramas are designed to delight and excite. We know there will be a happy ending: the world will be saved, the lovers will kiss in an airport, and everyone learned valuable lessons about love, tolerance, and working together. The endings aren't EVER surprising - but that's not the joy of watching that kind of entertainment. Those stories are all about the journey, rather than the outcome. They're character-focused, rather than plot-driven.
Blending genres is fine - I think it's welcome - but it's important to understand your audience. We expect to be shocked - negatively, traumatically - watching horror/thriller/crime shows. We don't expect that to be the case with romance/superhero/family drama.
Expectation is important. Hamlet is a tragedy, and you're prepared for it. We know Hamlet is doomed from the first - it's right there in the playbill - but there's a beauty to his struggle.
But if a main character in your charming sitcom dies in the final episode, nobody asked for that.
In this respect, I think it's far preferable to leave some viewers a little bored or underwhelmed, than it is to leave devoted fans dismayed and angry, just so you can say you shocked them.
So. How do you avoid the latter? This is my approach:
1. Keep your characters consistent until the end
2. Make it make sense
3. If something has to give, always have the plot yield to the needs of character development
Before I know the plot points of a novel, I know what sort of growth needs to happen for each character, and the plot ebbs and flows as needed around them. Because I'm writing character-driven family dramas, the needs of the characters far outweigh the needs of the plot. Sometimes, cool ideas have to be axed, but I'd much rather do it that way than destroy a character's progress.
Tomorrow - or whichever day I get to it - I plan to continue with a part two of this post, in which I look at a few specific examples of endings that were mentioned frequently in the Twitter hashtag. All in fun and in the name of learning from other fiction. Stay tuned!
