I was reading My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite a little while back, and it was in many ways an excellent book with great writing, a highly original premise, and if not loveable then at least very insteresting characters. However, there was something about the ending that felt deeply unsatisfactory to me whereas my wife found the ending just find. This led to a fair deal of pondering and a few discussions as to what makes an ending work and why we couldn’t agree on whether the ending of My Sister, The Serial Killer worked or not. This is results of all those discussions.
First of all, if you haven’t read My Sister, The Serial Killer, there will be spoilers (for Lord of the Rings and the Joker movie too).
Secondly, I just want to point out that I loved 99% percent of this book, and since you might not agree with how I view the ending, I think you should go read it. The excellent writing, premise, and characters aside, it was one of the few books where it actually felt plausible that the protagonist might fail.
Still, it serves as a good example of how impossible it is to please every reader and how important it is to stick the landing. Because nothing can drag the reader’s opinion of a story down like an unsatisfactory ending.
To put things in persepective, there are studies showing that if you prolong an otherwise painful operation by adding a less painful but completely useless bit at the end, the patients will think back on the entire procedure as being less painful. So, yeah, endings are important.
Sure, openings might the thing that lure reader into your stories to begin with, but if your endings suck, then the readers will, at best, remember your story as mediocre, and they’re far less likely to return and read your next book. Congratulations, you’ve just become a one-hit-wonder.
Okay. Calm down. Take a deep breath. It’s not a make or break thing, but clearly creating a satisfying ending is important if you want your story to stick in the reader’s memory as being something other than a let-down. So how do we go about it?
Happy vs. sad endings is a good place to start, because many writers will probably have heard of the the Hollywood school of thought that a happy ending is always better.
Looking at the medical operation example above, it sort of makes sense: if people are smiling when they leave the theater, they’ll remember the entire movie as one that made them happy and the other way around if it made them cry at the end. That’s why otherwise pretty depressing Hollywood movies often have a happy ending and/or end with a super upbeat tune, to convince you that you had a good time all the way through.
The big Hollywood studios have a ton of data from screenings, telling them that happy endings usually causes the audience to walk away happier from their movies. But being happy and satisfied isn’t the same thing, and if you aim for your story to be more than just pure escapism, then I’d argue there’s more to striking the right tone for the ending than making it all-out happy.
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve gotten up from the theater seat as then ending credits started to roll, thinking “that was an oddly forced ending” or “that’s a happy, catchy tune, yes, but it doesn’t fit the journey you’ve just taken me through in any way.” And it’s always left me at least somewhat annoyed (not exactly the feeling you want your audience to walk away from your book/movie with), because they just made the movie worse than it could’ve been. Adding a happy ending isn’t the same as creating a strong, satisfying ending. (google tells me I’m far from the only one who feels this way).
Lord of the Rings (LotR), for example, have what is often considered one of the greatest endings in classic English literature. (and we’re talking the books here, not the otherwise excellent Peter Jackson movies with their stretched-out slow-motion reunion scene, which is another example of an unsatisfactory, overly happy ending).
At first glance, the LotR ending might seem like an extremely happy ending. Sauron is destroyed for good along with the ring. Middle Earth is saved. The friends return home. And Sam, most readers’ favorite character, lives happily for the rest of his life. But there’s more to it than that. Frodo, affected by the ring for so long and mortaly wounded, has to leave Middle Earth. Sure, he gets to live forever but he’ll never see his friends again. And the elves are going West too, leaving the world a bleaker, poorer place. So much so that when Tolkien tried to write a follow-up book set in the world of men instead of the world of elves, it turned out too bleak, and he never finished it.
A more recent example is the 2019 Joker movie, showing the rise of the infamous Batman villain. It’s the story of how the world mistreats the sick and vunerable Arthur Fleck until it turns him into the Joker and the psychopath we know him to be. From society’s point of view, this is obviously a bleak and deeply unhappy ending. In the universe of the story, the Joker will go on to murder and torture hundreds if not thousand of people. But on the other hand, because the movie does such a great job at building sympathy for Arthur Fleck, it came across a triumph, too, when he finally managed to stand his ground and fight back against the society that just kept beating him down. It’s the perfect blend of happy and sad.
So when it comes to tone, I’d argue that bittersweet is what you should be aiming for, not pure happy, happy, happy. It probably takes a psychologist or better literary critic than me to figure out why, but my best guess is that it’s because purely happy endings tend to come across as unnatural. We often read stories to follow characters we emphasize with through hardship, see how they deal with it, and learn from it so we’re better equiped to tackle problems in our own lives. But if everything turns out just perfect for the characters, then it becomes difficult for us to take that with us into the real world, because here things just don’t work that way. If you’re having difficulty dealing with one of your colleagues, you’re probably not going to find that one thing you had in common and become the bestes-of-best friends ever after you nearly killed one another (solid rom-com setup right there), but you might learn to deal with one another in a way that’ll make your professional life much more bareable. It’s not perfect. It’s bittersweet.
The LotR and the Joker movie also show another important aspect of the ideal amount of happy-sad in your ending: it depends on the story.
LotR has a bittersweet ending and so does Joker, and both work really well for their particular story, but Tolkien’s epic leans far more towards the all-out-happy than Joker, so which one is the best?
Well, it depends on the story. Bittersweet isn’t just a point in between all-out happy and bordering-to-depressing sad. It’s a spectrum.
LotR tackles some heavy themes and has some pretty dark, depressing moments, but mostly it’s a relatively light-hearted adventure. It’s far from a children’s story, but it leans towards the lighter, happier tone.
Joker, on the other hand, is a extremely heavy story throughout. It’ll make you cringe and cry, but if you laugh while watching it, it’ll probably be the nervous oh-God-the-world-is-horrible kind of laughter you do instead of breaking down crying. So it makes sense that the optimal ending for the Joker movie will lean towards the sadness end of the spectrum.
Where you want the ending to land on the happy-sad spectrum depends on how heavy/light the tone of your story is.
Tuning back to My Sister, The Serial Killer, where does this leave us?
Well, the story definitely ends in the bittersweat area. The protagonist, Korede, and her sister Ayoola manage to escape prison, which is one plus on the happy scale (depending on how deeply the book leaves you resenting Ayoola, of course). And Korede manages to save the love interest from getting killed. Another big plus. On the other hand Korede doesn’t manage to stop her sister killing the latter’s boyfriends in general or make her see why it’s wrong or see her punished in any way, pulling it into the bittersweet area.
One out of two down.
And the story keeps the lighthearted approach that never evolves into pure comedy from start to ending so that’s another check mark for My Sister, The Serial Killer. But since I’ve already revealed that I’m not a big fan of how the novel ended, you probably guessed there’s more to landing the ending of a story than striking the right tone and level on the bittersweet scale.
A story that starts out by revealing that a murder had taken place and then lets us follow the down-on-his-luck detective trying to solve it doesn’t come to a satisfying conclusion if the who and why of the murder is left unanswered. It doesn’t matter if the tone is consistent from start to finish and the right level of bittersweetness is achieved by having the detective getting his life straight but not end up with the girl. The major narrative questions have been raised: who committed the murder and why? And if we don’t get the answers at the end, then we’ll feel cheated, like we’ve been handed the right ending for the wrong story. (This example could totally work, of course, if the framing in the opening made it clear that this was going to be a story about a man putting the pieces of his life back into a functional state and not about the particular murdercase.)
A satisfying ending has to answer the narrative question posed somewhere near the opening of the story. Continue too long after that question has been asked and you’re probably meandering, deviating from what’s actually interesting to the readers. Stop the story before the question has been answered and you’re not really giving us a full story. (On a sidenote, if your story doesn’t pose the main narrative question until chapter 31, then you probably should consider if you’re starting it in the right place too.)
This is where My Sister, the Serial Killer starts to fail, in my opinion. The opening tells us pretty quickly that: Ayoola has murdered someone, Korede is helping her clean up the mess, that this isn’t the first time it has happened, and that Korede hates her sister (not just for the murder-thing). For me, this immediatly raised the narrative question “What will Korede do to eventually stand up to her sister, stop her, and achieve justice?” And the when story ended, the only answer I got to that question was “Nothing”, which was extremely unsatisfying.
I’m willing to cut the story some slack here, though, because I can see how for other readers, the narrative question raised may instead be “Will Korede do anything at all to stop her sister and achieve justice?” in which case the case the answer will be a much more fitting, “No”. It’s not as interesting a narrative question, if you ask me, or the one that jumped to mind when I read the story, but all readers are different and you’ll never be able to please everyone, so I’ll move on to the final building block of what I consider the foundation of a satisfying ending. This one relates to change.
In my opinion, all good stories have some element of gradual change. Sure, you might end up with a circular story where the world or the protagonist end up in exactly the same place and state as when the story started (which somewhat happens in My Sister, The Serial Killer), but that usually won’t come about without either character or their world beginning to gradually change only to gradually fall back into the opening state (the story of Fidel Castro is an example of this: the revolutionary who sets out to overthrow the dictator only to end up a dictator himself thereby leaving the country in the same state but having changed himself). If there’s no change, usually of the main character, then you probably have a pretty boring story without any sense of progress or much of a plot.
Even stories which start with the ending and then go on to reveal how things ended up that way do so by gradually providing information and thereby changing how much the readers knows and how they see the characters or world. And if the ending of the story doesn’t correspond with the gradual change in character or setting, then you have an unsatisfying miss-match.
This is where the ending of My Sister, The Serial Killer really didn’t work for me.
Yeah, we’re handed backstory scenes of how Ayoola is shaped by the way her father treated her and Korede, and it does show the bond growing between the two sisters. But mostly, it just explains why Korede helped out her sister to begin with, not why she decides to keep helping her. Especially considering the much clearer development where scene after scene is used to show (and tell) how Korede loath her sister more and more until she finally does something to actively stop her.
Given how horrible Ayoola’s acts are and the hatred Korede has build up towards her, the renewed bond between them and Ayoola’s points regarding the men’s superficiality just doesn’t match up. Korede deciding to keep helping her sister seemed like her giving up. It came about too sudden. It didn’t fit the gradual change she’d gone through.
There are probably many ways this sort of miss-match can come about, but when I read this kind of ending I keep thinking that the author decided on the ending beforehand and was unwilling to change it or the build-up when it was all written down and didn’t match up. Or it could be that the author focused too much on having an ending that would surprise the reader and not enough on it making sense regarding the events coming beforehand.
Either way, My Sister, The Serial Killer was an excellent story, and a lot of people will probably disagree with me on whether the ending was satisfying or not. But it really got me thinking, and I think it made for a good example of how a miss-matched ending can really pull a good story down. At least, it helped me figure out what makes an ending hit the mark, fail completely, or fall somewhere in between. So I hope you found my musings useful too.
In summary, a satisfying ending will:
* Have some sort of triumph for the protagonist without it being all-out happy.
* Have a tone that fit the rest of the story.
* Deliver on the narrative question raised early on.
* Fit the change occuring throughout the story.
References:
Toby Backman 