How do you usually end your stories?

[neodoering]

Hmm. My books end with the main character's victory, even if that gets him/her killed. In novels I'll go on a few pages after that, to describe the aftermath of the hero's victory. I don't write humorous novels, and I very rarely write humorous short stories, so my endings aren't played for laughs. Humor is a great skill, and I'm reading Christopher Moore's Secondhand Souls right now, to see if I want to try my hand at a humorous novel in the future.

 

[evolution_rex]

I'm like others in that I can't really say because I don't finish my projects often. However, I usually know the ending from the get go with my projects because they're usually the first things that I conjure up.

I'd like my readers to react to most of my endings with something like 'wait what'. I want them to be baffled so that it encourages them to go back and look for details so that in time they can build their own interpretation of what the heck I just wrote. I like ambiguity and throwing on last crazy element in the last few pages. But I also generally like happy or bittersweet endings because while I tend to lean on the horror genres and enjoy writing a lot of depressing/disturbing things, I'm an optimist at heart and like showing the beauty of the universe even when everything around you looks ugly.