Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.
Each book needs a good beginning and a good ending. People get pissed off when you don't close things off properly at the end.
....there is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an "end" can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you.
He was reading from the beginning so that he could get to the end, where the reader was assured that the knight and the fair maiden lived together happily ever after.
The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.
The end of a novel, like the end of a children's dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plums.
Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention.
I do realize that the reader needs some form of resolution. Sometimes I think of it almost like writing a musical score where things have to harmonize and certain lines have to come to a close.
