On Writing Endings ✍️
There is something terrifying about writing the end of a story.
Because everything has already passed. The battles are over. The confessions have been made—or have not been made. The wounds have been inflicted and are either healed or not. The dead are dead. And yet, somehow, it feels like there is still so much left to say.
An ending isn’t just a final scene. It’s the moment when every thread you’ve been holding—every promise, every wound, every look exchanged across a room—comes to rest in your hands. And you realize the weight of it. The weight of expectations, your own and the readers’. The weight of all the quiet details you planted chapters ago, trusting that one day they would bloom.
And, of course, you have to decide where to let go.
That’s the hardest part. Not the climax. Not the plot twists. Not even the love and the heartbreak. It’s choosing the last line. It’s looking at characters who have lived inside your head for months—sometimes years—and saying: this is where your journey ends.
Because when you write the ending, you’re not just finishing a story. You’re saying goodbye.
Goodbye to the routines you built with them. To their voices interrupting your thoughts. To the longing to wake up early to have your moment with them, writing about their lives, their problems, their failures and their victories. Goodbye to the version of yourself who started writing them, who needed this particular story told in this particular way.
It’s strange how fictional people can feel like companions. How their growth mirrors your own. How the conflicts you resolve for them sometimes help untangle knots within yourself. Writing a story—especially a long one—isn’t just creation. It’s a way of living.
But endings aren’t really about loss, although a very similar feeling overwhelms me (when the pressure of expectations finally fades). I think they’re proof. Proof that you stayed. That you carried the story all the way through. That you brought something to its end and reached the finish line. And that you took everyone—characters, story, and readers—with you.
And maybe, once the goodbye stops hurting so sharply, what remains for me is gratitude.
For the journey. For the characters. For the version of me who needed to tell this story. And, above all, for you, who have accompanied me.
