Everyone knows that endings are important in stories; this fact isn’t new. What kind of ending can make or break a series; and when it breaks, well. There’s a reason we have the saying ‘jumping the shark’. Not all endings will satisfy everyone, but neither will all stories: a person’s individual taste doesn’t necessarily mean a story is badly written. Even so, when you set up your story in certain ways, you make certain promises, and when those go unfulfilled, you have a problematic ending.
This is something of an issue when you (general you) have narrative trends and/or an industry which pushes loss and suffering as ‘realism’. There’s reasons for these things to exist – stories are fundamentally a way to process our own emotions – but the prescriptiveness of these publishing expectations means that a lot of stories which promise one thing wind up with an ill-fitting end.
As for me, I can’t handle tragedy. I Do Not Like It. I engage in stories to go to worlds where tragedy is averted, not to watch the train-wreck. So I have a hard time trusting new (to me) writers, due to current and recent-history narrative trends.
I’ve talked about this on my blog already, and obviously I think about it a lot – partly because a lot of the stories in which I engage are recommendations from my friends. Having rubrics by which I can say ‘this is what I need’ is important. Sometimes it’s hard to articulate them, or why an otherwise positive story didn’t work.
My friends have known for a long time that endings are extremely important to me, as a reader (or a consumer – video games have stories too, for instance).
So as a writer and a reader, I want to tender the concept of multiple narrative endings.
I’m not talking about alternate universes or what-ifs (which are huge amounts of fun, and if you’ve seen the movie Clue can work really well). What I mean is that one story does not have just one ending: it has many.
It has one for every character in it.
When most people talk about endings they’re talking about the main plot, the main characters, good defeating evil (or the tragic reverse), and so forth, etc.
But one of the reasons I have a lot of trouble with some media is because I don’t see just one ending: I see many. I see the abused antagonist no one likes, but who never had a chance, get short thrift. I see a side character ignominiously offed for the sake of shock value.
Protagonist-centred morality is predicated on this: the idea that only the protagonists matter. The thing is, I invest in the side characters. I invest in them because I know that – most of the time – the protagonists will come out okay. I don’t need to worry about them. But the other characters, the ones who aren’t front and centre, the ones who have lives or their own ignored for furniture, or tragic pasts without the benefit of being in the spotlight –
These are the characters that matter to me. These are the endings that matter, because these are the ones that tell me whether or not the world in which they live is fundamentally a hopeful one.
And this is often how I judge the value of a work. Not does good win, or do the protagonists come out okay (although sometimes those are questions I do need to ask). But do they leave the world a better place or do these other people who suffered come out okay or the broad and all-encompassing please tell me the narrative isn’t a raging hypocrite.
Endings matter. Individual endings matter. Your protagonist can win out and get their beau and I won’t give a shit if it had to happen at the expense of other likewise suffering characters. That, for me, isn’t a good ending. It isn’t a good ending if it’s unjust, if non-protagonists would never have received the same satisfaction even when they suffered the same way.
Writers rarely know what themes they’re writing when they begin; but by the end, they ought to be aware of the story they’re telling. If you find you’re telling a story about the value of freedom, of choice, of the right to be alive, you must also apply that value to everyone else in the world you create; and when you end the story of your protagonists, that value should be inherent in the endings of the supporting characters and the world they live in.
If you don’t, then your ending isn’t a resolution. It’s a betrayal.
So pay heed to the endings in your story: because if you focus on only one, then the weight of all the other tattered lives may well outweigh that one you thought mattered most.
Aurichalcum Publishing 