It may be a long way off but how and where to end a story can be a dilemma.  For me, recently, it has often been the least satisfactory part of otherwise excellent books I have read, fact or fiction.  Now, Dickens knew how to end a story that left the reader feeling satisfied, giving the whole narrative a shape and balance, if that makes sense.  Or do I have an old fashioned notion of wanting loose ends tied up, mysteries solved and that writing should be tidier than real life?  I feel let down as a reader when I am left ‘hanging’ or the story has no natural conclusion.

THE  END

There is an amount of guidance available on the internet, of course.   One suggestion is that if you cannot find a satisfying end it is because you have not got the beginning and middle right.  You have not raised enough questions or conflicts that require a resolution to hold the reader’s interest in how it works out.

So I have been working on the ending for my family history.  In fact, having got a first draft, I have not got the chapters to second draft stage in any chronological order.  My ‘narrator’ Thomas Burnley introduces himself in 1925, the last year of his life, and then takes the story from 1750 to 1925 in 12 chapters.  An Epilogue takes it on from 1926 to the present day – chiefly because Gomersal Mills, Grove Chapel, the village and Pollard Hall all got along very nicely without my ancestors living there and it seemed the right place to explain why I had written the story.  I have therefore axed or, rather, re-positioned the Preface.  I think it works, but the middle now needs some serious attention.

Margaret