Why It’s So Tough To End Things Well

AKA, I wrote the first version of this before the final season of Game of Thrones*, but I guess it’s even more ~*~relevant~*~ now?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from teaching a course on professional presentations, it’s that sticking the landing is the hardest part.

New speakers — heck, experienced speakers, too — find it much easier to deliver strong beginnings. They’ve practiced their hook, their intro, dozens of times. It’s their chance to surprise the audience with the new. To be heard on this topic. To do something.

But the ending is a different beast. Even strong speakers with strong content shy away from it. The ending, you see, is old hat. Everything exciting has already happened. We’ve learned all the new content the speaker had planned. All that’s left is to wrap it up and hammer the main idea home.

Speakers are out of energy. They can see the finish line not in the distance but within reach. And that makes it so, so tempting to jog the last few steps instead of keeping up their pace or breaking into a sprint.

Because you start off full of energy and run out by the time you need to finish.

I mean, my job literally has me public speaking several times a week, and I still haven’t mastered the powerful conclusion. I’m the same me I was at age thirteen, running the 800-metre at the grade-eight track meet: with no sense of how to pace myself, I went all out from the starter’s signal, ahead until the very last stretch when a competitor who’d actually been, you know, saving her energy, shifted into top gear and passed me. Sometimes, the end of a class is like the end of a race: I just don’t have the gas left to end on a high note.

But the ending is so important. It’s your chance to frame your content, set the tone, and choose how your presentation will live on in your audience’s memory.

It’s hard to stick the landing when writing too.

I start each story or blog entry with an idea I’m excited about. Whether that’s an opening scene, a gripping paragraph, or an intriguing question, I have no trouble getting it down in words. I’m ready to express it. I want to scrawl it out.

Middles, yeah, middles are tough too. I mean, writing is tough in general, and there’s a lot of middle to write. But that’s exactly why they’re easier than endings. In all that middle territory, you’ve got a lot of space to mess up and make things better. The ending, though — you need those perfect sentences to help your reader literally or figuratively close the chapter on what you’re saying.

I’m not even talking about the climax of a narrative or the conclusion of an argument. Those are also difficult, no question about it, because you’re making every bit of tension you wrung out of the plot pay off and wowing your reader with your best narrative fireworks. But what comes next, the denouement, is a different kind of tough.

Because the tools you used up until now are no longer effective.

There’s no new, unresolved momentum driving the plot forward anymore. You don’t get to tease the reader with a mystery you’ll resolve in the next chapters. All your skill and diligence up until now has been directed at building tension and making stakes higher, and suddenly that’s not your aim anymore.

I admit, I often find myself an end-at-the-climax kind of gal. Psssh, any fallout you can imagine is probably more evocative than what I’ll write, yeah? No? *sigh*

This is probably because as a reader, I tend to rush through denouements myself. I never really paid attention to Harry Potter on his way home to the Dursleys, and, embarrassingly often, when I pick up the second or third book in a series I started, I can’t remember where the characters are or what they did to get there. I remember the shape of the previous book just fine; I often remember its climax. But… I forget who ended up living somewhere else and what rules the authorities put into place in response and who made friends or had a post-battle argument. I forget the new normal.

I know that the denouement is about rewarding the reader with the anticipated details, just like I know that the end of the speech or a blog entry is about tying everything together in a satisfying way. But when you can’t use your old tried-and-true techniques, it can be a struggle to develop new tools.

Because mistakes snowball.

Besides, even when you hammer together an ending that should work, sometimes it still doesn’t. That’s because endings depend on everything that came before. If there’s something wrong with your build-up or your argument or your structure, even the best ending won’t fix it.

Sometimes, when the end of a blog draft is dragging out and all I can do is keep blathering on and hope it’ll make sense, it turns out that my ideas took the wrong turn at Albuquerque paragraphs ago (not that that stops me from posting anyway). If I really want the last lines to resonate, I have to go back and trash most of the content I’ve already written, because I didn’t actually wind up making a cogent and focussed point.

Sometimes, when the last lines of a story aren’t working, it’s because I set myself up for scenes I don’t know how (or have convinced myself I don’t know how) to write. Or because I had a final scene in mind that no longer fits where the story led.

(See: that shoehorned romantic kiss because when I made up the characters, they were obviously a perfect couple, but now that I’ve written them, they started behaving to each other in Absolutely Not! ways. Or: that calm reaction that made sense when the mystery kidnapper was a minor character but not now that I’ve realized he’s actually a murderer and also someone closer to the protagonist.)

And sometimes, based on feedback from my audience, I took class in a direction I didn’t think we’d go, because every lesson plan has multiple goals that sometimes conflict with learners’ priorities. Sometimes I can tell they’re anxious about an upcoming midterm or just want to catch their commuter train home before they have to wait an hour for the next one, and our workshop ends up more fragmented than planned. It’s hard to end strongly when you know that the moment anything that feels like “In conclusion…” leaves your lips, half the class will drown you out by packing up immediately.

Because the pressure is on.

Plus, there’s the ol’ elephant in the room: people best remember the very first and the very last parts of a series. For that reason, I struggle sometimes with how to end a class because there are a LOT of important things I need everyone to remember (what’s due! What room we’re in next week! How to do the skill I was talking about! The deadline to book an appointment with me! Etc.).

But it also makes putting together a strong ending feel that much more difficult. No matter how good the beginning, middle, etc., if you choke on the finale, it can feel like you choked on the whole thing.

There are at least a dozen mysteries where I remember whodunnit (the climax) but very little about how the detective figured it out and how the murderer actually went about it (the denouement). I don’t think of those mysteries as my favourites, even though I know I was really into the story right up until the very end. What usually happened was the explanations disappointed me somehow or were dull or straight-up proposed something that smashed my suspension of disbelief.

I don’t want to leave my audience with a confused message or a let down. I don’t want my stories to run out of steam or my essays to feel like they end on ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And that drive leads me to become hyper-critical of myself in a way I rarely am with beginnings. After all, I have the whole rest of a piece to recover from a bad beginning. But a bad ending? That has to stand on its own.

* I do not watch or read Game of Thrones or A Song of Fire and Ice. I have no opinions, other than, yeah, maybe listen to sexual assault survivors/disabled folks/racialized folks/other marginalized groups when they’re/we’re like, “Um, heyyyy, what was just done there wasn’t so great to us…”, which is pretty much my default opinion on everything.