Finish Strong: Ending Nonfiction Pieces

I love the end of nonfiction pieces, because all the information has already been delivered. Now, we have an opportunity to feel the author’s mind directly.

One ending that definitely takes this opportunity is in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It begins: “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.” (Nobody remembers that part.) It ends: “Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.” (Everybody remembers that part.)

The beginning conveys a mixture of feeling and information, and the end conveys primal feeling. This isn’t because there’s something wrong with the beginning, but because the beginning is where you have to get into the topic; endings give us opportunities that beginnings do not.

As another example, here are the closing words of the last chapter of the Zen Buddhist classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind:

“One thing flows into another and cannot be grasped. Before the rain stops we hear a bird. Even under the heavy snow we see snowdrops and some new growth. In the East I saw rhubarb already. In Japan in the spring we eat cucumbers.”

This passage deliberately departs from making sense, from giving useful information (what’s this about rhubarb and cucumbers?), because it conveys not what Zen says, but what Zen is: what the mind of Zen is like. And it works vastly better as an ending—opening into the silence—than if the speaker needed to pause and then continue with, “And another thing about Zen is…”

Finally, here is the end of the 2019 essay “My Mother’s Tongue” by Zavi Kang Engles, the overall topic of which is being of mixed ethnic heritage and losing fluency in Korean:

“One girl skidded to a stop and offered up her swing. And when she turned I saw her familiar face, a bronzed face, a face of multiple origins. She called out to someone, ‘Oppah, iriwah,’ tossing the language out in the air like a bright beach ball. I hope she feels at home.”

“I hope she feels at home” sums up the emotional impact of the essay as a whole. The essay up to this point is, necessarily, a mixture of content and emotion: what Engles is experiencing, intertwined throughout with how she feels about it. The final sentence is pure emotion. It gives us every opportunity both to understand how Engles feels, and to feel it ourselves: we yearn for home, to feel at home.

There are lots of good ways to end nonfiction pieces, so I’m not advocating a fixed approach; but I do hope you’ll experiment with seeing endings as an opportunity to gather yourself and find what is the core of it all. You’ve delivered all the information—good! Now you can linger a bit, and deliver the message: the raw heart, not implied or glimpsed or faintly heard, but manifest, floating in bright space, beating, soaked in blood.

Try It: Writing Strong Endings

Okay, so how do you surface the heart of your piece? Here are some suggestions:

• Feel the silence. You are about to stop causing words to appear in the reader’s mind, and so the last words you share will ring into a sudden silence. Feel that silence, and explore what has the proper gravity to ring into it. “This earth, after all, is our only home.” kind of does. “This underscores the importance of making environmental conservation a higher policy priority.” definitely does not, at least if reader feeling is one of your goals for your piece.
• Rhythm and musicality matter. It’s no coincidence that King’s speech ends with literal music; or that “I hope she feels at home” is all monosyllabic words. Engles’s essay would end disappointingly if it read, “I really hope she’s feeling like she’s at home,” even though the meaning is the same. Do not be afraid to think like a poet as you compose the end of your piece, because you are dancing with what is effectively a large, final line break.
• Go back to basics. What are you really trying to say—and can you say that, plainly, right at the end? “I hope she feels at home.”—meaning, in context, “I wish belonging for people like me, as I have struggled to find it”—shares plainly the piece’s emotional core, and I feel it carries more impact than something more masked, jaded, or sophisticated might have.
• If it’s feeling too blunt, how can you give it a little bit of artfulness? The “Dream” speech does this by quoting song, the Zen passage by speaking purely in lilting imagery, Engles’s essay by projecting feeling onto a girl who stands in for the author herself. Finding that little bit of ornamentation can deliver impact without being on-the-nose or obvious.

I think you can measure the result by how your body feels when you read the ending. Does it feel like, “Oh, all right, then,” like a normal goodbye at a cash register? Or does it ache, or have a soaring feeling, or want to move or sing or be very still? If you feel a response like these, then the ending may be conveying some of the power you intend. Give it a try!