No, endings are not as difficult or mysterious as everyone makes them out to be. I don’t say that they are easy. No stage of novel-writing is necessarily easy. But I think writers and professors are too quick to throw up their hands and say, “endings are just hard.” No, no, no, no!

They aren’t any harder or easier than anything else. Just like any other part of a novel, there are patterns that appear in endings, and you can use these patterns to make your endings better. Today I’ll be talking about one such pattern, which I call “The Wheel of Callbacks.”

Before I explain the wheel of callbacks, I have to explain to you what a callback is. A callback is a reference to something—some event, idea, or phrase—that happened previously in the narrative. Think of when a standup comedian tells a joke, and then, after they move on to another topic, they weave in the punchline of the old joke into the new joke.

A good callback occurs when an audience has forgotten or almost forgotten the event or joke. It is funnier, or more dramatic, or more painful, the second time around, because we’re already familiar with it, but we’ve had a chance to move on in the story, so when we get a good callback, we aren’t expecting it. A good callback is familiar but unexpected.

Callbacks are like refrains or motifs. A dumb example is the way Johnny Depp, in Pirates of the Caribbean, is always asking why the rum is gone. Even if you roll your eyes at the joke—Jack Sparrow is a kooky drunk—the callback is still reassuring. It sends a subconscious message to the audience: the writer is in control. You are watching something that was created according to a plan, and if you keep watching, this story will delight you.

David Lipsky, a professor at NYU, introduced me to the concept of the callback and their prevalence in writing. It’s an obvious concept, but once you have a name for it, you will notice it everywhere. Just this week, I attended a college graduation ceremony, and the keynote speaker’s address mentioned a kestrel that Iris Murdoch had written about. He returned to that kestrel several times over the course of the speech: “Just like Iris Murdoch’s kestrel….” “…the temperature of the planet is rising; the population of kestrels has diminished to only 500….”

The kestrel made the speech feel organized. A callback, like a refrain, is an organizing principle. It reassures the reader or listener, and tells them that you know where you are going.

A quick note. You may ask, “what’s the difference between a callback, a refrain, and a motif?” I think they are so similar that the distinction hardly matters, but I’ll make the distinction anyway.

A motif is a recurring image or idea. It could be something as simple as a recurring color. One example might be Anna Karenina’s recurring dream of a creepy, muttering peasant, or the green light at the end of Gatsby’s dock. These are not images or moments that occur once in the book—they get their power from repetition.

A refrain is a recurring line of poetry or a recurring phrase in a speech. The phrase “I have a dream,” in Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech is a refrain. A refrain is more word-for-word than a simple callback. In fact, you could say that Jack Sparrow’s “Why is the rum gone?” is a refrain.

Here’s a refrain in literature: “But that is another story, and will be told another time.” That line comes from the Neverending Story. It probably appears five times in the book, if not more, and it is the very last line of the book.

There are distinctions between refrain, callback, and motif, but for the purposes of this blog post, they all do the same thing: they remind the reader of something important—or at the very least, funny—that happened earlier in the narrative.

So what is the “Wheel of Callbacks” and what does it have to do with endings?

The Wheel of Callbacks is when a novelist reminds the reader of all the important events that happened over the course of the novel. (For most novels, reminding the reader of ALL important events is probably impossible and unnatural; let’s say MOST important events.)

The easiest—albeit the most boring—way to do this is to make a character remember them. Yes, that’s all: just make a character remember some of the most important things that have happened. It may take a reader a few weeks to finish your novel. That’s enough time to forget some of the things that have happened, and it is also enough time to feel nostalgia for the early parts of the book! The reader knows that the book is about to end; with the Wheel of Callbacks, you are spinning him through all the things he is about to leave behind when he finishes.

Now this shouldn’t be done all at once. I would say that in about the last eighth of the book—or across the climax, falling action, and denouement—you should be sprinkling in these callbacks to the important emotional moments of the book, reminding the reader of as many characters as possible, and showing the reader how much the characters have changed over the course of the narrative.

Wide Sargasso Sea does this particularly well. Antoinette has been driven insane by the abuses of her husband, Rochester, and the last five pages or so are a fugue. Her mind is racing—we are with her in her madness. In this state—where Antoinette’s mind is leaping from subject to subject, past to present—the wheel of callbacks takes place quite naturally, and we seem to fast forward through the important events of the novel. She remembers the fire that burned down her childhood home, the girl who used to be her friend, her girlhood in the convent… I believe she remembers other important events too, but it’s been a few years since I read the book.

Many books spin the wheel of callbacks at a more leisurely pace than Wide Sargasso Sea. You have time, after the climax of your book, for several scenes. You can use these scenes to bring many of the minor characters back on stage, and while they are on stage, it’s very natural to remind the reader of earlier moments in character relationships or problems that these characters caused. The ending of Gatsby is a solid example of this more slow-paced Wheel of Callbacks.

After Gatsby’s death, Nick calls a few people about Gatsby’s funeral, and only Owl-Eyes shows up. He later meets Jordan Baker and breaks up with her, and on that occasion, she references an earlier conversation she and Nick had. Then Nick runs into Tom Buchanan again and confronts him about the death of Gatsby. This all happens over a period of ten pages or so, but it doesn’t feel rushed. At last, before the book’s closing monologue, Nick visits Gatsby’s house one last time and remembers how it used to be when Gatsby was alive.

This is a strong and simple technique for a poignant ending. After the climax of your novel, take your time. Take your reader through the Wheel of Callbacks. She will feel the final pages of your novel between her fingers with a mixture of sadness and joy. Yes, much like Jack Sparrow’s rum, or the majestic kestrel (pictured below), the novel will soon be gone.