I’ve been sitting with a Susan Orlean line for a few days now, the way you sit with a splinter you can’t quite locate.
“Stories don’t need a ‘conclusion,’ a flourish of finality. It’s better to leave readers falling forward, tumbling through the piece and beyond it, finishing the tune in their heads.”
What strikes me isn’t the advice — plenty of writing teachers have said something like it — but the verb she chose. Tumbling. Not drifting. Not lingering. Tumbling. There’s a loss of control in that word, a small helpless momentum, the way you take one more step than you expected on a dark staircase and your body has to catch up to itself.
I’ve always been suspicious of endings that arrive wearing their own bow. You can feel them coming, those last paragraphs — the rhythm slows, the sentences get more declarative, the writer seems to straighten up and clear their throat. And then comes the lesson, the restatement, the turn toward uplift or hard-won wisdom. The piece explains what it was about. You close the browser tab and that’s the end of it.
But some pieces don’t end so much as they stop, at the right moment and the right angle, and something in you keeps moving. You find yourself thinking about them in the shower two days later. You’re not remembering the conclusion because there wasn’t one. You’re still inside the piece, finishing the tune, as Orlean says. The writer handed you the melody and walked off mid-phrase.
I think about this with music. Jazz, especially. The best solos don’t resolve — they suggest a resolution and then leave the air charged with it. Miles Davis understood that the note you don’t play is still a note. The silence after the phrase is part of the phrase.
I’m not sure I’ve ever actually written an ending this way. Most of my pieces come in for a landing; I can feel myself starting to circle and descend. Maybe that’s the real lesson in Orlean’s line — not a craft note about structure, but a challenge to trust the reader enough to leave the door ajar. To believe the piece was good enough that they’ll want to keep walking around inside it.
I’m still not sure I do.
