Fable & The Verbivore

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Episode 118: Endings

Bethany Stedman

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Ep 118: Endings Fable & The Verbivore

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In honor of NaNoWriMo, this month Fable and the Verbivore are talking about beginnings, middles, and endings.

Spoiler alert! - Today, we're wrapping up this series by talking about story endings, and we’re not holding back from discussing final plot points from some of our favorites. Consider yourself warned.

In our conversation, we cover a lot of ground - talking as both readers and writers. We touch on the common writing advice that good endings are both surprising and inevitable, looking at how Veronica Roth’s ending of the Divergent series exemplified that principle.

We also look at endings that felt out of place or as if they ended at the wrong point - or that felt right but like they’re missing something we’d hoped for as readers. We dive into the satisfaction of a story that mirrors something from the beginning (and possibly midpoint) of the story - showing change, as well as ones that subtly plant seeds and then pay them off. One of of our favorite types of endings are ones that offer some hope for the future, even if the ending isn’t what we’d typically call happy.

Here are a few books whose endings we explore:

  • Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  • The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater

  • The Hunger Games / Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

  • The Wrath and the Dawn / The Rose and the Dagger by Renée Ahdieh

  • Caraval / Finale by Stephanie Garber

We realize how much an ending can come down to personal preference - as well as author intention and the needs of the story being told. So, one of our key takeaways as writers was how important getting beta reader feedback is to ensure that the ending lands and that there aren’t any setups that you have in your story that don’t pay off - unless you’re doing that on purpose. :-)

We hope you enjoy this episode! Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

In case you’re unfamiliar with NaNoWriMo, here is some information: https://nanowrimo.org/what-is-nanowrimo

Both Fable and the Verbivore mention that there’s a variety of ways to approach writing the ending of a story. Here are some articles that we found helpful in preparation for this conversation:

Fable mentions a quote from the Masterclass “Dan Brown Teaches Writing Thrillers”.

The Verbivore reads one of Pixar’s 22 story rules.

  • Pixar Rule #7: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.

The Verbivore references an article she found written by Veronica Roth on the ending of her Divergent series. This was part of the inspiration for this episode. Here is that article:

Fable talks about the denoument of a story. Here is that definition:

  • denouement - dā-ˈnü-ˌmä \

    1 : the final outcome of the main dramatic complication in a literary work. 2 : the outcome of a complex sequence of events.

The Verbivore brings up a video essay on the ending of the movie “The Return of the King”. Here is that video:

We touch on several of our previous podcast episodes. They are as follows:

Books & Movies Mentioned:

Music from: https://filmmusic.io
’Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)