End With a Bang, Not a Whimper

 

By Larry Leech

 

Here we are, barreling toward the end of another year.

Thirty-one days to Thanksgiving.

Fifty-nine days to Christmas. Gasp!

Sixty-six days to the new year.

So much to do in so little time.

But let’s not hurry to the finish line of the year and not give our best.

2 Timothy 4:7, probably the most well-known Scripture about finishing well, says, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith" (NKJV).

No matter what we have endured this year, we should want to finish well. Yes, it might be easy, and more desirable, to curl up in a ball, sleep through the end of the year, and wake up January 1 with the hope of new beginnings. Trials can be a frustrating part of life. But as we know, we can grow mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally while we endure or suffer through trials.

So, finishing strong in 2025 should be our goal, our desire.

The same goes for writing. Our job as an author is to make our readers want to read one more chapter and then one more and another and another—until they are in a panic because dinner will be late, or they’ll only get five hours of sleep instead of their normal eight, or they’ll slide into a meeting at the last second because they couldn’t put our book down.

Well, just how does one do that?

First and foremost, a reader needs to care about what happens to your POV character. If they don’t, well, they won’t bother to find out what happens. So, way before you get to the end of your first scene, we gotta care about the character. The keys to that are for another blog. In the meantime, let’s assume your reader is so vested in your character that they will forego everything in life for a few moments to see what happens.

Second, chapters cannot start or end at predictable points. A character waking up to start a scene and going to bed to end the scene just doesn’t work. To steal a few words from an Oscar Wilde quote, readers, and you, must “expect the unexpected.”

Make your character play twister in the scene; make ’em change their mind or direction. Better yet, make someone else force them to change their mind or direction. Force ’em to do things the character doesn’t wanna do. Create moral dilemmas.

I read a blog on Nownovel a few years devoted to scene endings. The summary of six different endings is one of the best I’ve seen:

• End with surprise.
• Finish with a situation implying consequences.
• End with suspenseful action.
• Finish with a hint of what’s to come.
• End with the tension of arrivals or departures.
• Finish with the consequences of an earlier action.

For years, after I have coached a client through their entire manuscript, we spend the next-to-last session looking only at the beginning and ending of every scene. We don’t want a reader to yawn because they don’t care anymore.

Give the reader something to look forward to—with excitement and certainly some hope.

Photo by Nik on Unsplash

Larry J. Leech II has been in publishing for nearly 45 years—as a sportswriter and news management at daily newspapers for 23 years before becoming a writing coach of award-winning authors, ghostwriter, and editor in the Christian market. Also, for two decades Larry has taught at numerous general market and inspirational conferences nationwide. He currently is Master Book Coach and Acquisitions Editor for Illumify Media.