The Secret Sauce for Short Stories
You might think a short story needs to conclude. And you’d be right.
Conclusion is necessary. But it’s not sufficient.
Having a clear ending can help a story, but suppose you want your readers to hunt out the rest of your writing?
How do you make them hungry for your work?
The key here is resonance.
A story can raise a question. If it answers that question, the story concludes. The door is closed.
Decent, effective, but stories can do more.
The very best stories will resonate.
The ending will ask the readers another question and leave the door open.
Why short stories demand more than novels
Consider what happens just before a novel’s end.
Your readers have spent three hundred pages walking with your characters. Hopefully, they admire and respect your people and the world you built.
A short story has none of that.
The short story’s ending is the experience.
If that ending falls flat, the entire story deflates.
But make that ending resonate, and it’ll stay in your reader’s mind. They’ll seek more of your writing.
So there’s resolution and revelation. The words sound the same, but ‘mousse’ and ‘moose’ also sound similar. Best not mix them up.
Resolution wraps up the plot. The mystery is solved, the villain defeated, the choice is made. The reader gets their answer, closes the book, and moves on.
Revelation shifts the reader’s world. The reader looks back at what they’ve just read and sees everything differently. Technically, the plot is settled, but those implications keep unfolding. Your reader could be taking a shower, or driving to work the next day, or having their lunch, but your story won’t leave them alone.
You won’t find a revelation for all of your stories, but those that do will lift your work above the vast majority of stories out there.
Speculative fiction is suited to revelation endings. SFF deals in ideas.
You’re not just telling a story; you’re handing the reader a new way of seeing the world.
How to write an ending that resonates
You’ve three tools.
- End on the moment of recognition. Cut the scene as soon as your character processes the truth: the instant the truth lands. Let the readers know your character realises what they’ve done and end your story there.
- Trust the reader to take the last step. A wonderful revelation won’t need explaining; the reader can assemble the thoughts for themselves (readers are savagely intelligent).
- Seek to reframe what’s happened before. The strongest endings make the reader flip back to the first page. So, can you persuade your last line to change the meaning of your first line? Try to make your ending reach back into the story.
A couple of examples
In Ursula Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, we’re shown a perfect utopia. At the story’s end, we see the paradise runs on the unending torment of a single neglected child who’s been imprisoned in a cellar.
Most citizens accept this situation, but not all. The story ends:
“The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas”
Nothing is resolved or completed. We don’t know if the walkers’ destination even exists. But the moral problem is now ours to carry. Revelation gives the story a life in the reader’s mind even after the last page has been turned.
A modern story is Ken Liu’s multiple award winner, The Paper Menagerie. Jack grows up half-Chinese in America. He’s ashamed of his mother and the paper animals she folds for him, which come alive. Years after her death, he finds a letter she wrote on one of those paper animals. It’s written in Chinese, and he has it translated.
The letter covers her life. Growing up in poverty, being displaced, her love for him, and what his rejection did to her.
The story ends with Jack writing the Chinese character for love over and over beneath her letter, and refolding the tiger using the creases his mother’s own hands had made.
There’s no resolution. He doesn’t get his mother back.
He now understands what his childhood meant, even if that meaning arrived far too late. The reader closes the book and is changed.
An activity for you
Look at your most recent short story and its ending. Do you answer the question you raised in the story, or are you asking a stronger question? Something more profound, something to adjust the way your reader thinks?
If you’re answering the question rather than asking a new one, look earlier. Did something quietly shift in your protagonist or your reader a few paragraphs before?
End there. Cut the explanation. Trust the gap.
You’ll forget most of the stories you read. But some you’ll remember years later.
The ones that live in your mind won’t be the ones that wrap up neatly. They’ll be the ones that lodge a question in your mind and heart.
