Aristotle coined the word catharsis, which is defined as purging of powerful negative emotions through dramatic art. It occurs when someone empathizes with characters. When those characters overcome their negative emotions, the reader overcomes those emotions with the characters, but it also tricks the person’s body into purging any pent-up emotions he feels in his own life. It’s a powerful form of therapy that helps reset and cleanse people of negative emotions. Whenever it happens, there is a high that follows in a person’s brain, and it gives the reader the sense of a satisfying and fulfilling ending.
While there are many ways to write a satisfying ending, I want to propose five ways you can enhance your ending to make it cathartic for your readers.
1. Raise The Level Of Risk And Difficulty
In order to create empathy in your readers for the main character, there has to be personal stakes for the character. If an American man is tasked with stopping an air raid in Britain, there is low personal stakes. However, if the raid is happening where his family lives in Minnesota, then he has a lot to lose if he fails. By increasing the risk, the readers have more reason to cheer for him to succeed.
Going along with raised risks, the story needs to increase in difficulty for the main character. Maybe at first, he just needs to push a button. That’s easy. But what if on his way to that button he runs into a special forces unit tasked with stopping him? The difficulty of his job has increased. It should continue to increase slowly over the course of the story so it makes the readers cheer for him more. The more they want him to win, the more they feel a connection to him and increase their empathy for him.
2. Show The Character’s Failures And Emotions
While risks and difficulty are rising, the character should fail. It doesn’t have to be all the time, but readers need to see him fail so there is a sense of uncertainty. Can he actually get to the button in time to stop the air raid? If the readers see him fail numerous times at smaller tasks, they will start to doubt him. Also though, the readers will feel he earned the win at the end if he had to struggle to get there.
While all this struggling and failing is going on, you need to show the character’s emotions and reactions. I’ve said this a lot, but it’s important. If you show character emotions in a way that the reader can feel them, then you are creating a strong empathetic link between the reader and the character. Make the reader feel what the character feels, and they won’t be able to do anything but feel relieved at the end when he wins.
3. Slowly Give The Character What He Needs
In order for an ending to feel satisfying, the reader needs to feel like the whole book was a journey that led to the climax. Every lesson the character learned, every failure, every thought pointed him to this exact moment to conquer this exact thing.
You will have to do a lot of foreshadowing to make this work, but the good news is you don’t have to do this on the first draft. Foreshadowing is best done once you have the ending finalized. Then you go back and add little hints or lessons in the book’s beginning and middle to point to your ending.
4. Weave The Theme Into Everything
Your character’s internal arc will be about facing some universal truth. It’s a personal decision he will need to make in order to win. That theme needs to be woven through the entire story. When the character finally gets to the climax, he needs to have gone through a metaphorical refiner for his beliefs and come out with a solid stance on the universal truth. Maybe he started the story thinking he was a useless brainiac in a lab, but at the end he realizes his intelligence is a tool he can use to make a difference. It doesn’t matter what theme you choose, just make sure it’s subtly written into the story so the reader finds meaning and purpose at the climax and not just a disaster averted.
5. Create Mirror Scenes To Bookend Your Story
This is something I recently discovered that has really helped me shape my own stories. Mirrors are pairs of scenes that mimic each other and draw subtle attention to the differences between them. You use them as bookends around your story to give the reader a hint at how the character has changed over the course of the book.
Pick an early scene in your story, like the opening scene or the first turning point. Think about how you can mirror that scene at the end. The Name of The Wind does this with its first and last chapter. The imagery chapters are almost word for word identical, except for subtle changes that hint at how the story has changed. You can also do this with an actual scene. If our man started his story in a lab working on a technology project, we could end it in the lab as well except maybe instead of being the ignored colleague he now runs his own project team. Think of ways you can subtly draw attention to the story’s beginning and ending differences, and let the reader put together how the character’s life has changed.
Final Thoughts
While there are a lot of details that go into writing a satisfying book, these are five ways you can enhance any plot line. Creating catharsis for your readers is a lasting emotion that will stick with them. They will look back fondly at the story and most likely reread it. That strong of an impression will also encourage them to tell others about the book, and that’s something every author wants.
Thanks for reading!
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