Endings
First lines and last lines: how an opening promises what the ending pays
Read a novel's first and last lines side by side and you see the promise and the payment. Five classic pairs, two modern ones and a test for your own draft.
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Last Chapter
on novels, endings and finishing what you write
Every novel is written toward its last page, and most readers judge a book by how it leaves them. Last Chapter reads literary fiction from that end: how great novels close, what an open ending owes you, guides and questions for book groups, the first novels and prizes worth knowing, and the slow, practical work of finishing a draft of your own.
Seven kinds of last pageReading guidesFinishing a first draft
Closing lines
I want to know what kind of ending the book is going to attempt, because that tells me what kind of book it is.
The questions that work are the ones where two careful readers can disagree, and both point to the page to prove it.
I keep a notebook of abandoned openings, and if I am honest it is really a notebook of abandoned middles.
New chapters
Endings
Writing the last chapter: practical ways to land an ending
How to write the last chapter of a novel: what it must resolve, three trial endings, last line versus last scene, pacing, planted echoes and cutting the extra page.
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The reading life
How to read a dense literary novel without giving up
Page targets, reading aloud, a character list, fifty pages of patience and an honest way to quit: practical habits for slow, demanding novels, with a weekly plan.
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Writing the draft
MFA or self-study? Weighing a writing degree against the alternatives
What a creative writing MFA gives you, what it costs in time and money, and the alternatives, from workshops and online courses to a year of self-study.
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Reading guides
The Rust Belt in fiction: novels of Ohio's industrial towns
A guided shelf of eleven novels and story cycles set in Ohio's mill towns and the wider Rust Belt, from Winesburg to Detroit, with questions for book groups.
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Writing the draft
Revising a novel in passes: a practical order of work
A practical order for revising a novel: rest, a read-through, then structure, character, scene, line, reading aloud and a final proof, with a worked example.
Read onThe shelves
EndingsHow novels close: last chapters, epilogues, open and shut endings, and the craft of landing a book.
Reading guidesGuides and discussion questions for modern literary novels, written for readers and book groups.
First novels and prizesDebut fiction, the presses that publish it and the prizes that look at first books.
Writing the draftDrafting, revision and finishing a manuscript, from the sagging middle to the final pass.
Getting publishedAgents, query letters, synopses and comp titles, explained plainly and without promises.
The reading lifeHabits, rereading, journals and the pleasures of reading serious fiction slowly.
Essays and asidesShorter thoughts on books, adaptations, translation and anything else on the shelf.
The novel this address was named for
This domain once belonged to the website of The End, Salvatore Scibona’s first novel, published by Graywolf Press in 2008 and set in an Italian immigrant neighborhood of Ohio on a single August day in 1953. We kept three of its old addresses and wrote new pages for them, as readers of the book.
- A reader’s guide to The Endsetting, structure, themes, and the ending behind a spoiler line
- The novelist and his two booksa profile from public sources
- Reviews, interviews and further readingwhere to read more about the novel