The End?

What makes the endings of some novels so good? So good that you make yummy noises as you turn that last page and everyone on the train stares at you and you have to pretend you're humming to your iPod (even though you're not even wearing your iPod?) So good that you flip right back to the beginning and start again?

I think it's the fact that the beginning is in the end and the end is in the beginning.

Huh?

What I mean is that the best authors put clues to the end of the story in the very beginning of the story and vice versa. Think about Ella Enchanted, with Ella finally breaking the curse that has haunted her for the whole book. Or Pride and Prejudice, which gives us a romantic wrap-up that echoes the first line: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Or Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle, which brings us the narrator ending the story of her life—which she has been writing in notebooks from the beginning—with these words: "…only the margin left to write in now. I love you. I love you. I love you."

The best novels never really end, they simply bring us back to where we started, only now we are illuminated, surprised, thrilled, moved, gratified, even changed.

As this particular phase of the HarperTeen FanLit contest comes to a close, I hope you've been illuminated, surprised, moved, and even changed. And I hope that you're prompted to go back to the beginning—that is, to write the next amazing story. And stick around—the folks at HarperTeen FanLit have some more fun stuff in the works.…

You guys rock!

What's your favorite novel ending?

Laura Ruby
Author of Good Girls