How on earth do I end this book (or book proposal)?
Conclusions and denouements are often the hardest part of a book to write. Here's my advice if you're struggling to end things.
Conclusions are hard to write because they’re fake.
All of them. I don’t care if you’re writing fiction or nonfiction: to end is to pretend, and in a Puritan, imagination-phobic culture such as ours, that makes ending anything rather uncomfortable.
Nowhere does a human being feel the limitations of their own little pea brain quite like when they’re trying to impose a static Point onto the unfathomably complicated and ever-changing flux of spacetime.
This is true across disciplines. The scientist finishing a study, for example, knows that her data could be flawed and her interpretations off-base. Who is she to draw conclusions? To say nothing of the fact that in time, other scientists’ work will almost certainly obliterate hers. It happened to Isaac Newton; it happens to us all.
Ditto the historian, academic, and journalist: inevitably, time renders pretty much all of our conclusions obsolete. The story of existence is polyphonic and ever-evolving, after all; the second we put any part of it to paper, it’s already out of date.
Reality has no conclusion. Hell, life has no conclusion—besides death, of course, which comes for us all at various awkward and uncontrollable times and is unpleasant to anticipate and therefore difficult to write about in a manner of scalable interest to the book-buying public.
As writers and people, it’s much easier to just pretend we’re immortal, and our lives therefore contain infinite possibility for rich, narratively interesting conclusions. In truth, there is just one conclusion for all of us, and it’s two words long: we die. Talk about boring.
So, yes, back to my original point: Interesting conclusions are always a form of play-acting, which means that if you’re an intelligent author of nonfiction, they feel sort of wrong to include. They’re a lie, if only by omission. They’re fiction.
…Which, one would think, would make them easy enough to include in a novel, at least, but you would think wrong.
Endings are awkward and uncomfortable to write no matter where you’re writing them. They fly in the face of everything the canny observer of life understands as real and true—and of course, most fiction tries to get at some truth or another, even if it’s just, you know, emotional.
(Fiction that doesn’t do this is generally so postmodern as to be even more boring than death.)
I’m not the first person to make any of these arguments.
Frank Kermode made an entire book out of them sixty years ago, and I’m sure even he wasn’t the first.
I’m not trying to break new theoretical ground here—just reassure you that if you haven’t heard, endings are hard. And if you’re struggling to figure out how to end your novel or narrative nonfiction or anything else you’re writing, you’re not alone.
Still: that doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to write an ending, and a good one at that.
You’re going to need to do this simply because readers want and expect their books to end well, and this is commercial book publishing. You need to give them what they want.
Of course your readers want you to end well! Endings might be lies, but they are lies the human brain wants more than anything—the brain being an organ evolved specifically to hack out some semblance of meaning from flux.
Language, optics, the senses—the whole damn evolved point of a brain is to be blind to just enough reality that it can render something comprehensible from what remains.
People are meaning makers. We crave interpretations and conclusions. We need the night sky to have constellations in it.
You crave meanings; your readers also crave them. SO GIVE THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT.
Ergo: if you’re struggling with how to end your book in a satisfying way, let’s talk about how to get your imagination in gear.
Here’s my advice.