Effective endings - wrapping the story up in style

I've agreed to run an effective endings workshop for Havant and District Writers' Circle next Wdnesday, so I thought I'd better write it this week.  Enter one of my best charity shop purchases: 'Beginnings, Middles, and Ends', by Nancy Kress.  

I've never thought about endings in much detail before.  I've seen them as the closing-off of a story arc, and I've read many books where the ending has left me feeling unsatisfied. Sometimes that's because the writer has gone on too far.  He/she has created a fabulous set-piece Supreme Ordeal, full of danger and emotion and high stakes, and then waffled on for ages after the heroine won the fight.  That takes all the impact away from the big fight scene, and leaves me feeling deflated.

Sometimes I've felt the author ended the story too early.  In one dystopian book the characters spend all the story wandering across a ruined continent.  It ends with them gazing at a distant city with lights which has regained some tech.  And that's it.  The characters are in the same situation they were at the start of the story, and none of them seems to have the drive to improve things.  It's a totally unsatisfactory ending.

Contrast that with Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsinger.  Menolly starts the book running away from a father who thinks girls are useless.  She ends it as the first girl Harper of Pern.  She's apprenticed to the Masterharper, and promoted to Journeyman within a week of arriving.  The change makes for a satisfying ending to all Menolly's struggles.

Series books are tricky to end.  In Genehunter I've faced this.  Book one is half of the original story, and the big reveal that was at the end of it is now at the end of book two.  I've had to write a new Supreme Ordeal for book one, in which Aris is nearly killed.  Then I added a short denouement where she thinks about her missing father, and about the journey she will resume tomorrow.

I was surprised when researching my workshop how many books I picked off my shelves that had what I consider to be poor endings.  They say that we teach what we most need to learn, and researching endings for this workshop has certainly taught mr a lot.  It will make me look a lot more closely at my endings in future.