There’s an expression about writing craft that I’m sure most of you have heard: “Kill your darlings.” Well, it applies not just to characters whom you love but are superfluous to requirements, but also to plot elements, scenes, and much more. Including, it seems, endings. 

As I’ve written about before, endings are hard. Getting it just right so that the reader will be left satisfied and happy as they close the book at the end (which happens to also be the very crucial moment when they jump over to Goodreads to give that all-important review!) is essential. My publisher and I found this to be a particular challenge in my second book, The Love I Could Have Had. We initially over-edited the ending, and the pre-launch ARC readers found it too abrupt—so much so, it dragged down the star ratings ahead of publication day. At that crucial review moment, we’d let the reader down. But that’s what ARC reader feedback is for! To fix any issues ahead of publication—which we did, by reinstating the longer ending I had originally written, and now the average rating is so much better.  

For my newest, as-yet-officially-untitled book, the publishing deal I was offered was contingent on some changes, as mentioned in my previous post. The biggest of these was to change the ending from one outcome to another. This was quite the darling to kill! I had written it as being in one way satisfying, but in another aspect, somewhat morally grey. And leaving some questions open to the reader’s interpretation. 

I was okay with this moral murkiness, as were some of my beta readers. But one of those readers, as well as several folk on the Joffe Books publishing team, felt it would be detrimental to the experience of lots of readers, who demand not only a satisfying but also an ethically justifiable ending to a story. And I’m sure they’re right. 

So, I’ve changed the ending to have the protagonist end up with the “right” thing, and make the ending more in line with her desire to help others. It meant I had to kill various darlings to achieve this, but it’s absolutely worth it to give readers the ending they need to feel good about it. 

The morality clause 

All this has got me thinking about the moral implications of our characters’ behaviour and how readers feel about that. For example, cheating and adultery (which is not an issue my new book deals with) is seen by many as an absolute no-no in romantic fiction. For that reason, I’d avoid that topic entirely as an author, as too many readers will slam and down-rate a book that has a cheating/cheater storyline. (I mean, apart from cheating on your partner with another version of your partner from an alternate universe—see my first novel The Love of My Other Life—as that doesn’t count!) 

Personally, I don’t mind reading about adultery—for example, for me, Elin Hildebrand’s 28 Summers is her most standout, memorable novel, and that’s a true adultery tale. The English Patient is another, and Sebastian Faulks’ On Green Dolphin Street is one of my all-time favourite books. Perhaps if you’re Elin Hildebrand or Sebastian Faulks you can get away with these topics—us mere mortal authors cannot. Even Carley Fortune’s wildly popular lakeside romance Meet Me at the Lake has been slammed in many reader reviews for “emotional cheating” and I swear it’s dragged down her overall star rating. But I thought it was great.  

It’s a delicate balance: telling the story you want to tell, and telling the story that readers want to read. In a world where readers will reduce your book’s star rating not necessarily because it wasn’t good, but because it wasn’t written how they would have written it, this is not an easy compromise to make. We can’t make everyone happy all of the time. But we do our best to be true to ourselves as authors while hoping to please the people who matter most: our readers!