Quote:
Originally Posted by crich70
And yet if you cut an ending too much you risk cutting your own financial throat as well. People want to know what happened to the characters that they've spent time and many pages learning about. I know if a book is too boiled down at its ending I may put it down with the thought to avoid that author's work in the future. There is telling and there is showing. Showing takes more words but it is far, far more satisfying to me as a reader. [...]
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I am not sure how you got from cutting down an ending to telling rather than showing - one does not have to lead to the other.
One excellent example of filling in the readers about the future of the characters is the epilogue to the Harry Potter series. Here we have one brief scene, 19 years later, that fills you in on so many details - but it's a scene, a showing, not an info-dump. ... Well, perhaps a bit of an info-dump, but not obviously so. I could quite happily have read another novel of Rowling's writing, filling me on every details of her vast array of wonderful characters, but she left me wanting more - and this is a good thing.
Endings are different beasts to beginnings, you're looking for satisfaction rather than intrigue. But, like beginnings, they are critically important: the ending is what the reader takes away with them. You want to end on a high, or otherwise emotionally strong note, not on a lengthy dissertation of mundane happenings. Leave the reader with a buzz, not boredom.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lake
[...snipped for brevity...] However, I envisioned it in my mind as being several distinct endings, but it may not turn out that way. It'd just be separate plotlines which all eventually merge into one.
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The advice/suggestion is necessarily generic when not privy to the detail.
Only you can know what is critical to have in your wrap up, but my last paragraph above above, in response to crich, still stands as - I think - good advice; something to aim for. Your priority must be the conclusion of the series, any set up for a new series must either fit in well, or be left as a problem for the new series.