"There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story." — Frank Herbert (DUNE)
Four thumbs up!
So true, though. Characters and stories live indefinitely in our imaginations. Peace...
Cool. Years ago a New Yorker editor told me that that magazine had a practice of chopping the endings off most stories they published. I don't know if that is still the case at The New Yorker. They never published anything of mine. But I found that idea conceptually interesting
How was it that Auden framed this very thing? Something like,"a poem is never finished--only abandoned."
I took an online fiction class where we spent eight weeks studying where stories started and stopped (and why). Never forgot the instructor's sage advice: "Always stop writing when the story is told."