The End of the End

The end is near. No, wait, the end is over.

We’ve all seen the movie where the action is playing along at a rapid clip and you still can’t quite see how all the pieces fit together. Maybe you’ve checked your watch. How are they going to tie it all up? Then, the bad guy crashes his car through a wall right into the room where our hero and heroine were trapped, thus freeing them. Also, our villain is carrying the stolen object. He puts up a token fight, takes a few left hooks from our hero, and gets cuffed. In a mere thirty seconds the movie has gone from unsolvable to rolling credits.

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Certainly this scenario can be varied slightly. Maybe it’s the heroine that punches the villain. Regardless of what varies it’s still the same – crazy, odd or improbable things wrap up the story at the last minute. But it isn’t just happening in movies, books are headed this way, too. Romances where the two don’t get together until the last page. Thrillers with only two paragraphs after the serial killer takes a bullet.

What happened to the ending?

Your seventh grade English teacher asked you to write a concluding paragraph to your essays. It wasn’t okay even on a one-page, five-paragraph essay to skip the ending. So why is it fine now? It seems to have been replaced with solving the mystery. Even when you work a puzzle you take a moment to admire it after you finish it. Don’t you? I’ve never seen anyone pop the last piece in and immediately begin to break it apart and box it up. Why are we being asked to do that with our movies and books?

Lots of writing manuals will tell you there are three parts of a story: character, setting and plot. Those are what you will find all over the internet if you try to look up ‘parts of a story’. However, these are key elements, not ‘parts’. The parts are ‘that part where the bad guy chased them’ ‘that part where they kissed’. That’s a real story part. The parts are: the beginning, the middle and the end.

Freytag broke it down further. The plot goes like this – exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement. These are not usually equal size parts. The exposition is however long it takes to get to know the characters, and good writers (authors and screenwriters alike) know to mix that into the rising action. The climax is hopefully obvious – the part where you are on the edge of your seat wondering how it will all come together.

Falling action may be a very small section of the plot. The denouement is the part where you tie off the ends and leave your reader / moviegoer satisfied with the ending. Unfortunately, writing a denouement is a lost art. These days, merely ending the problem is good enough.

Some great dramas get this right. Some allow you to wind down from the heights they have taken you to, to settle back from the front edge of your seat. But many other genres seem to have lost this idea entirely. A good wrap-up isn’t even that difficult to do – unless of course you had no character development. If your character grew or learned anything, you can use that to frame the denouement. Unfortunately, characters today aren’t expected to grow or change, and few seldom do. Even so, give us a chance to wind down, to let the rapid beating of our hearts find a slower pace. Writers everywhere, unite, and give us good endings. Maybe one where I don’t wonder if the lead guy’s heart is going to explode from the sudden shift from frenzy to … nothing.

We can each play a part in bringing back the ending. Look for it, and recommend it when you find it. Or, if nothing else, just sit back and appreciate that the writer gave you a moment to savor it.