Everyone talks about the importance of a story’s beginning, but what about the ending? The ending either leaves the reader feeling satisfied or disappointed with everything else you’ve carefully composed.

In my first life as a high school band director, I really learned the importance of endings. For the last piece on the program, I usually chose something loud (forte) to make the audience want to jump out of their seats cheering. Maybe that’s why my band got so many standing ovations. [Of course, they sometimes cheered for a very soft (pianissimo) ending as well.]

A novel could be compared to a band concert. That last climax scene is where you pull out all the stops and make the reader really sweat over the main character’s fate. Like my brass and woodwinds, the main character in the story should put forth a supreme effort and achieve a grand finale.

Good endings require extra work, and not all your writing sessions should “take it from the top.” When you finish your first draft, try working the story backwards. Ask yourself if your last few sentences strike a chord with the reader or if they’re out of balance. Maybe you ending simply lasts too long. Maybe you slipped into a telling mode instead of showing. Maybe the final words are trite such as “they all laughed heartily.”

When you have analyzed the last few lines, go back and analyze the final scene. Watch out for these false notes. Has an adult stepped in to solve the young main character’s problem? Has the solution to the conflict come about because of a too fortunate coincidence?

Fine-tune your characterizations, too. Your main character should have grown by the end of the story, but only because a significant event brought about the change. Be sure the sidekick who was jumpy at the beginning is still the twitchy type at the end. The words of the person who spoke with a southern drawl early on should still melt upon your ear. And beware the character you painted as an evil villain who too easily becomes best buds with the main character.

Sometimes your perfect ending will (and should) require changing everything that came before it. Don’t be afraid to make big changes in the plot if something better occurs to you. It often takes several drafts of a story to figure out what it’s really about. For example, you might think your story is about treating animals fairly, but on your tenth read-through, you discover the theme is really “don’t judge people by their appearances.”

Maybe you’ll decide the story would work better for a different age group. Maybe you’ll change some characters names or ages. Maybe one of them will even need a sex change. That’s okay.

Writers often come up with a good beginning and a good ending, but they just don’t match. So check to see that what finally made your main character happy (or at least more hopeful) is the solution to the exact conflict you introduced on page 1.

Here’s an example of a beginning and ending that don’t quite match. A main character (let’s call her Carrie) is sick of the room she shares with her little sister. She says all those pink ruffles disgust her 13-year-old sensibilities. Sounds like the solution would be some redecorating. Right? But let’s say that by the end of this story Carrie has a room of her own and is rejoicing because she finally has some privacy.

Whoa! Where did this privacy issue come from? The reader won’t feel satisfied by that ending unless Carrie has bemoaned her sense of privacy from the story’s beginning. If you really like your ending, change the beginning. If you like the beginning better than your ending, then change the ending.

For instance, you could open this story with Carrie’s little sister spilling the beans about something Carrie didn’t want her parents to know. Carrie could beg for her own room in order to get privacy. The bulk of the story would be Carrie’s struggle to find privacy. Only when the reader has watched Carrie struggle mightily to reach this goal will that reader feel satisfaction over what was accomplished.

Endings are harder than beginnings, because in the beginning, all things are possible. On the last page, you have far less flexibility.

We all want editors to give us standing ovations (and contracts). So fine tune your finales until they are your forte.