David Sedaris on How to End a Story

One of America's preeminent humor writers, David Sedaris is known for his incisive social critiques. He writes about his own life in essay collections and non-fiction books, from his childhood in upstate New York to his high school years in Raleigh, North Carolina. He often weaves in hilarious anecdotes that include his parents and his five siblings—Paul, Gretchen, Tiffany, Lisa, and Amy Sedaris—or his partner Hugh.

First recognized for his story Santaland Diaries which he read on NPR’s Morning Edition in 1992, Sedaris’s writing career has spanned almost three decades. He’s been nominated for five Grammy Awards for Best Spoken Word Album and Best Comedy Album, and received the Thurber Prize for American Humor. He and his sister, Amy—a writer and performer—write plays under the name The Talent Family that run at the La Mama Theater in New York City. Their shows include The Book of Liz, Incident at Cobbler’s Knob, and Stump the Host.

David is one of the funniest observant writers, often writing about the human condition vis a vis his own life experience. Here are the works for which he is known:

1. 1. Barrel Fever (1994)
2. 2. Naked (1997)
3. 3. Holidays on Ice (1997)
4. 4. Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000)
5. 5. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004)
6. 6. When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008)
7. 7. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary (2010)
8. 8. Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls (2013)
9. 9. Theft By Finding: Diaries (1977-2002) (2017)
10. 10. Calypso (2018)

David Sedaris is a master of satire and a writer who can turn diary entries into poignantly crafted stories. While his stories might make readers laugh, he often ends with a deep, memorable moment.

Here are five of his tips for how to end your writing:

1. 1. Be authentic. To successfully end an essay with weight or substance, you have to understand the difference between sentimentality and truth. Sentimentality is manipulative and unsurprising. It’s the Hallmark card, the easy words that have always been used to signify certain emotions without actually moving someone into feeling them. Oscar Wilde said, “A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of emotion without paying for it.” In a similar vein, James Joyce said, “Sentimentality is unearned emotion.” Truth, on the other hand, convicts you to your core.
2. 2. Don’t always go for a laugh. When David started writing, he wanted to make his reader laugh. He learned how to do that well. Then he wanted to do more—he wanted to suffuse comedy with tragedy. When sorrow is attached to humor, an essay has more gravitas and is more memorable. The sadness can’t be forced or formulaic, but it’s important to always look for a way to move people, to add meaning, with more than laughter. He can make you laugh and cry all within the confines of the same 12 pages (consider essays like “Now We Are Five,” about his sister Tiffany’s suicide, or “Why Aren’t You Laughing,” about his mother’s alcoholism).
3. 3. End with honesty. Read the ending to David’s essay “The Spirit World.” He achieves a weighted end beautifully by revealing a story about something that happened with his sister Tiffany, the last time he saw her before she committed suicide. He stopped worrying about what people might think of him for writing this and stayed vulnerable and honest, even when it seemed risky. This is gut-wrenching truthfulness, not sentimentality, and it is what you must be brave enough to strive for in your own work.
4. 4. Practice writing endings. “The danger is writing something that just stops instead of something that ends,” Sedaris says. Practice writing endings by giving yourself mini assignments, as David sometimes does: Write an ending that repeats a single word three times; write an ending that ends with a line of dialogue; write an ending where the final line of your essay is the same as the very first line.
5. 5. End with weight. Choose a place where you lived at a time when you went through a lot in your life. This could be where you grew up, but it doesn’t have to be. Use nostalgia and memory about a specific place to drive an essay with both humor and pain. See if you can attempt to weigh the end with a truth that comes as a bit of a shock after lighter moments earlier in the piece.

One of the most important decisions any good writer makes is how to end a story. Part of the writing process is crafting a great ending that makes your book memorable. Take these four elements into consideration when coming up with your ending:

1. 1. Make it about the main character. Your main character has been the center of your whole story, and the conclusion should be about them, too. Avoid deus ex machina—an ending often used by the Ancient Greeks in which an outside force (often a god) swoops in and resolves the story. This is a letdown for readers, especially in a thriller. The protagonist has been on the case and they need to be the one to solve it.
2. 2. The ending should be unexpected. While you don’t necessarily need a big plot twist, surprise readers with an ending that they didn’t see coming.
3. 3. An ending should be satisfying. Your reader has put in hard work filling in the blanks, following plot points, and waiting for the big reveal. Your story doesn’t need a happy ending like fairy-tales, but it needs to feel satisfying. Whether the final scene is happy or sad, your readers deserve the payoff of a great resolution to the story.
4. 4. Think about your ending at the beginning. When you’re starting a new story, think about how you want to end. When you know where your story is going, it can help build your story arc.

There are different ways a writer might choose to end a story. It often comes down to what works best for the story and genre, and what will leave a lasting impression with the reader. Here are four types of endings:

1. 1. Resolved ending: A resolved ending is complete closure of a plot. Character arcs come to a conclusion and all the loose ends of a story line are tied up. There’s no question what happens.
2. 2. Unresolved ending: An unresolved ending concludes the storyline with lingering questions. This is a good strategy for books like J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Each novel has a conclusion to the current storyline but leaves bigger questions for the overall story arc of Harry’s battle against Lord Voldemort, a natural progression when a book is part of a series.
3. 3. Ambiguous ending: When an author concludes a story after the climax without letting readers know what happens to the character next. Readers must speculate about how the characters fare in the future.
4. 4. Tied ending: Sometimes a writer does a tie-back and comes full circle, placing the characters back where they started.

Whether you're just starting to put pen to paper or dream of being published, writing demands time, effort, and commitment to the craft. In award-winning essayist and humorist David Sedaris's MasterClass, learn how to sharpen your powers of observation, how to translate what you see, hear, and experience in the real world into memorable stories, and how to grow as a writer.

Want to become a better writer? The MasterClass Annual Membership provides exclusive video lessons on storytelling, character development, and the path to publication, all taught by literary masters, including David Sedaris, Malcolm Gladwell, Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume, Dan Brown, and more.