Earning Your End

Ok, let me first clarify the title of this blog. "Earning your end" is a phrase I try to write all of my stories by that can be summarised by; "If you want the story to end a particular way, especially happily, break your protagonists." One of my biggest pet peeves is stories where a happy ending happens, but the main character really didn't lose anything. For a story that ends happily, I find it to be much more satisfactory if I read the protagonist getting their shit pushed in during the story and/or at several points in the story, failure seems to be just around the corner. This might just be me, but after looking over many of the most popular stories, it seems to be a common thing. So let me see if I can help explain how to "earn your end".

Ok, so you just came up with an idea for a story, good for you. And you know that you want it to end happily, cool beans. Now, ask yourself, why do the main characters deserve that ending? If your answer is; "they're the good guys, they deserve to win", you just killed every posable examination that can happen to our story. While this won't mean your story will be terrible, it will mean that your story, more than likely, won't be great. Ask yourself, did you or someone you know root for Thanos to win in Infinity war? Why would anyone do that? Well, the answer is simple; his motivations were sympathetic, understandable, and most importantly, he faced hardship to accomplish his goal and was absolutely determined to win. So why am I bringing this up? To prove that the idea of "the good guys deserve to win because their good" isn't right. To help make your ending feel right, my suggestion would be to punish your characters by making them face true adversity, adversity that they are more than likely ill-prepared to deal with. One of the primary ways I have seen this done successfully is by having the characters quit or contemplate quitting. By showing the audience that these individuals are fallible mortals with breaking points, the audience is endeared to the characters and will be more likely to root for them to succeed. Now, this isn't true for all stories with happy endings, some story concepts work perfectly fine without you needing to have your characters treck through the nine circles of hell, but for most stories I can think of, beating down the main character improves them.

Now, what about darker endings? How do I "earn" one of those? Now that's a little trickier to explain. If I were to summarise how to make darker endings work would be to have the ending give your audience a sense of catharsis, of closure. If the ending feels like a question has been answered, that ultimately, the story has at least concluded, then the ending works. BUT, that isn't entirely true. You see, darker endings are actually a little more complicated to explain how to do them right simply due to there being so few stories with those types of endings in comparison to the happy ending stories, and the successes being vastly different. Actually, now that I think about it, the one thing that connects them is that the tone being applied to the ending is consistent with the rest of the story. While it might seem a little obvious, and I'll admit, its not much in terms of good advice, if you want to have a dark ending, make sure the rest of the story keeps about the same level of darkness throughout. Don't have plucky young protagonists fighting an evil organization, only to have every living organism in the city where the fight is happening die. Nor should you have a story go from "there is no hope, death comes for us all" throughout the duration of the story end with "the world is shit, but at least there is something worth fighting for", unless you are progressively getting lighter throughout the entire work and not just having the lighter tone come out of left field.

In conclusion: For happy endings, the more a character struggles, the more justified the happy ending becomes. And for dark endings, if you were to graph how dark the story is throughout, it should look roughly like a straight line, either going up, down, or lying flat.