You’ve written your last word. Your novel has reached a satisfying resolution. With great flourish, you write (or type): The End. Center stage, those words have some meaning to you, the author. It means you’ve finally done it! You’ve written your novel from beginning to end. But, is THE END really necessary? Are those final two words the ones you want to leave as your last tribute for readers to remember you by? Or, perhaps you plan on a sequel. Should you write: To Be Continued?

Charles Dickens and P.G. Wodehouse ended their novels (in first and second editions, perhaps not so much in more recent reprints), with THE END. Often capitalized and in bold, definitely centered below the last paragraph. But how many of us actually read those final two words? If the story ends well of its own accord, then these final words, THE END, seems rather redundant, don’t they?

My young writing students always make a great show of writing THE END. To which, I always ask, Why? The story should complete its cycle and it should be clear that the ending is exactly what and where you intended it to be. You don’t need to write goal posts along the way. Do you label each part of the plot: the rising action, the climax, the resolution? No! Then why write THE END? Isn’t it rather redundant? If you’ve brought your story to a clear resolution, finalizing the plot, then you have ended the story without any need to write THE END.

Simply put, the end of the story is enough to indicate the story has ended. There are no further pages, no more words, nothing to suggest that the story goes on. That, in itself, is sufficient to finalize the story. Nothing else is needed.

But, and there’s always a but, there might be some editors out there who prefer to see THE END written at the end of a manuscript. To make it clear that the story has completed its full cycle of plot development, climax and resolution. This writing of THE END at the end of the manuscript will not dictate its inclusion at the end of the published book. It’s merely a guidepost, like chapter numbers and page numbers.

A good ending leaves the reader satisfied and the redundancy of THE END more evident. With endings like these famous ones, who needs more:

- And so, as Tiny Time observed, God bless Us, Every One!” Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol (1843)

- “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925)

- “After all, tomorrow is another day.” Margaret Mitchell Gone With the Wind (1936)

- “It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

Of course, I may not be famous (yet) and I may not have the most famous last lines, but here’s the last line to my most recent novel:

- “He’s here. He’s found the gun. And he knows how to use it.” Mrs. Murray’s Home (2020)

A character in one of Jess Walter’s novels said, “A book can only end one of two ways: truthfully or artfully.” But it must end. Like Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in his poem, Troilus and Criseyde, “All good things must come to an end.” Something that even the best authors have successfully accomplished without adding those two words: THE END!