It looks as though no one can end anything anymore. 

That's the feeling I get after listening to serial complaints about the endings of "The Sopranos" and the seventh and last Harry Potter book. You would have thought, I've heard it said, that David Chase and J.K. Rowling could have used the last decade to come up with something better than cut to black and all is well.

But is all well if it fails to end well? Will we refuse to watch Chase's next series?  Will we ask Rowling to pay her readers back, say, a cool hundred million? Or are we so ending-obsessed that, lacking a perfect conclusion, we're moved to revise our opinion of the whole body of work?

If you think such questions trivial, consider scholar Frank Kermode's notion that each literary ending is like a little death. He suggests that we see, in the journey through a story, intimations of our own mortality. The end, alas, is nearer than we'd like to think. "We cannot, of course, be denied an end," writes Kermode in the great book "The Sense of an Ending." "It is one of the great charms of books that they have to end."

Yes, stories must end, but how? That's the writer's puzzle.

Mikhail Gorbachev argues that, in the American imagination, every conflict must end with an American victory. It's another way of saying that we have too limited a sense of ending. In spite of widespread disgust with the war in Iraq, no one can figure out how to get out. No one can write an ending.

Here's more Frank Kermode:  "When you read, as you must almost every passing day, that ours is the great age of crisis — technological, military, cultural — you may well simply nod and proceed calmly to your business; for this assertion, upon which a multitude of important books is founded, is nowadays no more surprising than the opinion that the earth is round. There seems to me to be some danger in this situation, if only because such a myth, uncritically accepted, tends like prophecy to shape a future to confirm it. Nevertheless, crisis, however facile the conception, is inescapably a central element in our endeavours towards making sense of our world." He wrote this, not yesterday, but in 1965.

Perhaps because human life exists in the middle of things, writers search for endings to limit and frame our view of the world in hopes we can make sense of it.

We know that song writers have a variety of tools to end a piece of music, from fadeout, to a hard stop, to a crescendo, to an echo of the beginning. Here are some questions you can use to test the ending of your story:

*Is there a payoff, or will my readers be disappointed? (A payoff does not require a happy ending, but it should satisfy the human instinct that life should go on.)

*Does the ending help the reader remember that important stuff in the lead?

*Does the ending help the reader imagine what will happen next?

*Should you end the story sooner? Is the real ending hiding a few paragraphs from the bottom?

*Is the ending consistent with the theme and mood of the story, or does it seem to come out of nowhere? Deus ex machina?

*If you end with a surprise, can the reader find clues earlier in the story?

*Can you deliver the ending better than a character or source, or should you end with a quote or a sound bite?

All these questions should be asked with the knowledge that journalism, in general, is ending-averse.  The classic structure for a news story — the inverted pyramid — supports the notion that the most important news goes at the top while the least important goes at the end.

To write good endings, of course, you need to read good endings and save them for re-reading.  One of my favorites was written by Jack Schaefer for the western novel "Shane":

"And always my mind would go back at the last to that moment when I saw him from the bushes by the roadside just on the edge of town. I would see him there in the road, tall and terrible in the moonlight, going down to kill or be killed, and stopping to help a stumbling boy and to look out over the land, the lovely land, where that boy had a chance to live out his boyhood and grow straight inside as a man should. [...]

"He was the man who rode into our little valley out of the heart of the great glowing West and when his work was done rode back whence he had come and he was Shane."

That ending takes us back to the book's first paragraph, but like all good endings, carries us well beyond it. 


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