how to end a memory essay

How to Write a Memoir: Examples and a Step-by-Step Guide

Zining Mok  |  January 29, 2024  |  29 Comments

If you’ve thought about putting your life to the page, you may have wondered how to write a memoir. We start the road to writing a memoir when we realize that a story in our lives demands to be told. As Maya Angelou once wrote, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

How to write a memoir? At first glance, it looks easy enough—easier, in any case, than writing fiction. After all, there is no need to make up a story or characters, and the protagonist is none other than you.

Still, memoir writing carries its own unique challenges, as well as unique possibilities that only come from telling your own true story. Let’s dive into how to write a memoir by looking closely at the craft of memoir writing, starting with a key question: exactly what is a memoir?

How to Write a Memoir: Contents

What is a Memoir?

• Memoir vs Autobiography

Memoir Examples

Short memoir examples.

• How to Write a Memoir: A Step-by-Step Guide

A memoir is a branch of creative nonfiction , a genre defined by the writer Lee Gutkind as “true stories, well told.” The etymology of the word “memoir,” which comes to us from the French, tells us of the human urge to put experience to paper, to remember. Indeed, a memoir is “ something written to be kept in mind .”

A memoir is defined by Lee Gutkind as “true stories, well told.”

For a piece of writing to be called a memoir, it has to be:

• Nonfictional
• Based on the raw material of your life and your memories
• Written from your personal perspective

At this point, memoirs are beginning to sound an awful lot like autobiographies. However, a quick comparison of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love , and The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin , for example, tells us that memoirs and autobiographies could not be more distinct.

Next, let’s look at the characteristics of a memoir and what sets memoirs and autobiographies apart. Discussing memoir vs. autobiography will not only reveal crucial insights into the process of writing a memoir, but also help us to refine our answer to the question, “What is a memoir?”

Memoir vs. Autobiography

While both use personal life as writing material, there are five key differences between memoir and autobiography:

1. Structure

Since autobiographies tell the comprehensive story of one’s life, they are more or less chronological. writing a memoir, however, involves carefully curating a list of personal experiences to serve a larger idea or story, such as grief, coming-of-age, and self-discovery. As such, memoirs do not have to unfold in chronological order.

While autobiographies attempt to provide a comprehensive account, memoirs focus only on specific periods in the writer’s life. The difference between autobiographies and memoirs can be likened to that between a CV and a one-page resume, which includes only select experiences.

The difference between autobiographies and memoirs can be likened to that between a CV and a one-page resume, which includes only select experiences.

Autobiographies prioritize events; memoirs prioritize the writer’s personal experience of those events. Experience includes not just the event you might have undergone, but also your feelings, thoughts, and reflections. Memoir’s insistence on experience allows the writer to go beyond the expectations of formal writing. This means that memoirists can also use fiction-writing techniques , such as scene-setting and dialogue , to capture their stories with flair.

4. Philosophy

Another key difference between the two genres stems from the autobiography’s emphasis on facts and the memoir’s reliance on memory. Due to memory’s unreliability, memoirs ask the reader to focus less on facts and more on emotional truth. In addition, memoir writers often work the fallibility of memory into the narrative itself by directly questioning the accuracy of their own memories.

Memoirs ask the reader to focus less on facts and more on emotional truth.

5. Audience

While readers pick up autobiographies to learn about prominent individuals, they read memoirs to experience a story built around specific themes . Memoirs, as such, tend to be more relatable, personal, and intimate. Really, what this means is that memoirs can be written by anybody!

Ready to be inspired yet? Let’s now turn to some memoir examples that have received widespread recognition and captured our imaginations!

If you’re looking to lose yourself in a book, the following memoir examples are great places to begin:

• The Year of Magical Thinking , which chronicles Joan Didion’s year of mourning her husband’s death, is certainly one of the most powerful books on grief. Written in two short months, Didion’s prose is urgent yet lucid, compelling from the first page to the last. A few years later, the writer would publish Blue Nights , another devastating account of grief, only this time she would be mourning her daughter.
• Patti Smith’s Just Kids is a classic coming-of-age memoir that follows the author’s move to New York and her romance and friendship with the artist Robert Maplethorpe. In its pages, Smith captures the energy of downtown New York in the late sixties and seventies effortlessly.
• When Breath Becomes Air begins when Paul Kalanithi, a young neurosurgeon, is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Exquisite and poignant, this memoir grapples with some of the most difficult human experiences, including fatherhood, mortality, and the search for meaning.
• A memoir of relationship abuse, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is candid and innovative in form. Machado writes about thorny and turbulent subjects with clarity, even wit. While intensely personal, In the Dream House is also one of most insightful pieces of cultural criticism.
• Twenty-five years after leaving for Canada, Michael Ondaatje returns to his native Sri Lanka to sort out his family’s past. The result is Running in the Family , the writer’s dazzling attempt to reconstruct fragments of experiences and family legends into a portrait of his parents’ and grandparents’ lives. (Importantly, Running in the Family was sold to readers as a fictional memoir; its explicit acknowledgement of fictionalization prevented it from encountering the kind of backlash that James Frey would receive for fabricating key facts in A Million Little Pieces , which he had sold as a memoir . )
• Of the many memoirs published in recent years, Tara Westover’s Educated is perhaps one of the most internationally-recognized. A story about the struggle for self-determination, Educated recounts the writer’s childhood in a survivalist family and her subsequent attempts to make a life for herself. All in all, powerful, thought-provoking, and near impossible to put down.

While book-length memoirs are engaging reads, the prospect of writing a whole book can be intimidating. Fortunately, there are plenty of short, essay-length memoir examples that are just as compelling.

While memoirists often write book-length works, you might also consider writing a memoir that’s essay-length. Here are some short memoir examples that tell complete, lived stories, in far fewer words:

• “ The Book of My Life ” offers a portrait of a professor that the writer, Aleksandar Hemon, once had as a child in communist Sarajevo. This memoir was collected into Hemon’s The Book of My Lives , a collection of essays about the writer’s personal history in wartime Yugoslavia and subsequent move to the US.
• “The first time I cheated on my husband, my mother had been dead for exactly one week.” So begins Cheryl Strayed’s “ The Love of My Life ,” an essay that the writer eventually expanded into the best-selling memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail .
• In “ What We Hunger For ,” Roxane Gay weaves personal experience and a discussion of The Hunger Games into a powerful meditation on strength, trauma, and hope. “What We Hunger For” can also be found in Gay’s essay collection, Bad Feminist .
• A humorous memoir structured around David Sedaris and his family’s memories of pets, “ The Youth in Asia ” is ultimately a story about grief, mortality and loss. This essay is excerpted from the memoir Me Talk Pretty One Day , and a recorded version can be found here .

So far, we’ve 1) answered the question “What is a memoir?” 2) discussed differences between memoirs vs. autobiographies, 3) taken a closer look at book- and essay-length memoir examples. Next, we’ll turn the question of how to write a memoir.

How to Write a Memoir: A-Step-by-Step Guide

1. how to write a memoir: generate memoir ideas.

how to start a memoir? As with anything, starting is the hardest. If you’ve yet to decide what to write about, check out the “ I Remember ” writing prompt. Inspired by Joe Brainard’s memoir I Remember , this prompt is a great way to generate a list of memories. From there, choose one memory that feels the most emotionally charged and begin writing your memoir. It’s that simple! If you’re in need of more prompts, our Facebook group is also a great resource.

2. How to Write a Memoir: Begin drafting

My most effective advice is to resist the urge to start from “the beginning.” Instead, begin with the event that you can’t stop thinking about, or with the detail that, for some reason, just sticks. The key to drafting is gaining momentum . Beginning with an emotionally charged event or detail gives us the drive we need to start writing.

3. How to Write a Memoir: Aim for a “ shitty first draft ”

Now that you have momentum, maintain it. Attempting to perfect your language as you draft makes it difficult to maintain our impulses to write. It can also create self-doubt and writers’ block. Remember that most, if not all, writers, no matter how famous, write shitty first drafts.

Attempting to perfect your language as you draft makes it difficult to maintain our impulses to write.

4. How to Write a Memoir: Set your draft aside

Once you have a first draft, set it aside and fight the urge to read it for at least a week. Stephen King recommends sticking first drafts in your drawer for at least six weeks. This period allows writers to develop the critical distance we need to revise and edit the draft that we’ve worked so hard to write.

5. How to Write a Memoir: Reread your draft

While reading your draft, note what works and what doesn’t, then make a revision plan. While rereading, ask yourself:

• What’s underdeveloped, and what’s superfluous.
• Does the structure work?
• What story are you telling?

6. How to Write a Memoir: Revise your memoir and repeat steps 4 & 5 until satisfied

Every piece of good writing is the product of a series of rigorous revisions. Depending on what kind of writer you are and how you define a draft,” you may need three, seven, or perhaps even ten drafts. There’s no “magic number” of drafts to aim for, so trust your intuition. Many writers say that a story is never, truly done; there only comes a point when they’re finished with it. If you find yourself stuck in the revision process, get a fresh pair of eyes to look at your writing.

7. How to Write a Memoir: Edit, edit, edit!

Once you’re satisfied with the story, begin to edit the finer things (e.g. language, metaphor , and details). Clean up your word choice and omit needless words , and check to make sure you haven’t made any of these common writing mistakes . Be sure to also know the difference between revising and editing —you’ll be doing both. Then, once your memoir is ready, send it out !

Learn How to Write a Memoir at Writers.com

Writing a memoir for the first time can be intimidating. But, keep in mind that anyone can learn how to write a memoir. Trust the value of your own experiences: it’s not about the stories you tell, but how you tell them. Most importantly, don’t give up!

Anyone can learn how to write a memoir.

If you’re looking for additional feedback, as well as additional instruction on how to write a memoir, check out our schedule of nonfiction classes . Now, get started writing your memoir!

29 Comments

Thank you for this website. It’s very engaging. I have been writing a memoir for over three years, somewhat haphazardly, based on the first half of my life and its encounters with ignorance (religious restrictions, alcohol, and inability to reach out for help). Three cities were involved: Boston as a youngster growing up and going to college, then Washington DC and Chicago North Shore as a married woman with four children. I am satisfied with some chapters and not with others. Editing exposes repetition and hopefully discards boring excess. Reaching for something better is always worth the struggle. I am 90, continue to be a recital pianist, a portrait painter, and a writer. Hubby has been dead for nine years. Together we lept a few of life’s chasms and I still miss him. But so far, my occupations keep my brain working fairly well, especially since I don’t smoke or drink (for the past 50 years).

Hi Mary Ellen,

It sounds like a fantastic life for a memoir! Thank you for sharing, and best of luck finishing your book. Let us know when it’s published!

Best, The writers.com Team

Hello Mary Ellen,

I am contacting you because your last name (Lavelle) is my middle name!

Being interested in genealogy I have learned that this was my great grandfathers wife’s name (Mary Lavelle), and that her family emigrated here about 1850 from County Mayo, Ireland. That is also where my fathers family came from.

Is your family background similar?

Hope to hear back from you.

Richard Lavelle Bourke

Hi Mary Ellen: Have you finished your memoir yet? I just came across your post and am seriously impressed that you are still writing. I discovered it again at age 77 and don’t know what I would do with myself if I couldn’t write. All the best to you!! Sharon [email protected]

I am up to my eyeballs with a research project and report for a non-profit. And some paid research for an international organization. But as today is my 90th birthday, it is time to retire and write a memoir.

So I would like to join a list to keep track of future courses related to memoir / creative non-fiction writing.

Hi Frederick,

Happy birthday! And happy retirement as well. I’ve added your name and email to our reminder list for memoir courses–when we post one on our calendar, we’ll send you an email.

We’ll be posting more memoir courses in the near future, likely for the months of January and February 2022. We hope to see you in one!

Very interesting and informative, I am writing memoirs from my long often adventurous and well travelled life, have had one very short story published. Your advice on several topics will be extremely helpful. I write under my schoolboy nickname Barnaby Rudge.

[…] How to Write a Memoir: Examples and a Step-by-Step Guide […]

I am writing my memoir from my memory when I was 5 years old and now having left my birthplace I left after graduation as a doctor I moved to UK where I have been living. In between I have spent 1 year in Canada during my training year as paediatrician. I also spent nearly 2 years with British Army in the hospital as paediatrician in Germany. I moved back to UK to work as specialist paediatrician in a very busy general hospital outside London for the next 22 years. Then I retired from NHS in 2012. I worked another 5 years in Canada until 2018. I am fully retired now

I have the whole convoluted story of my loss and horrid aftermath in my head (and heart) but have no clue WHERE, in my story to begin. In the middle of the tragedy? What led up to it? Where my life is now, post-loss, and then write back and forth? Any suggestions?

My friend Laura who referred me to this site said “Start”! I say to you “Start”!

Hi Dee, that has been a challenge for me.i dont know where to start?

What was the most painful? Embarrassing? Delicious? Unexpected? Who helped you? Who hurt you? Pick one story and let that lead you to others.

I really enjoyed this writing about memoir. I ve just finished my own about my journey out of my city then out of my country to Egypt to study, Never Say Can’t, God Can Do It. Infact memoir writing helps to live the life you are writing about again and to appreciate good people you came across during the journey. Many thanks for sharing what memoir is about.

I am a survivor of gun violence, having witnessed my adult son being shot 13 times by police in 2014. I have struggled with writing my memoir because I have a grandson who was 18-months old at the time of the tragedy and was also present, as was his biological mother and other family members. We all struggle with PTSD because of this atrocity. My grandson’s biological mother was instrumental in what happened and I am struggling to write the story in such a way as to not cast blame – thus my dilemma in writing the memoir. My grandson was later adopted by a local family in an open adoption and is still a big part of my life. I have considered just writing it and waiting until my grandson is old enough to understand all the family dynamics that were involved. Any advice on how I might handle this challenge in writing would be much appreciated.

I decided to use a ghost writer, and I’m only part way in the process and it’s worth every penny!

Hi. I am 44 years old and have had a roller coaster life .. right as a young kid seeing his father struggle to financial hassles, facing legal battles at a young age and then health issues leading to a recent kidney transplant. I have been working on writing a memoir sharing my life story and titled it “A memoir of growth and gratitude” Is it a good idea to write a memoir and share my story with the world?

Thank you… this was very helpful. I’m writing about the troubling issues of my mental health, and how my life was seriously impacted by that. I am 68 years old.

[…] Writers.com: How to Write a Memoir […]

[…] Writers.com: “How to Write a Memoir” […]

I am so grateful that I found this site! I am inspired and encouraged to start my memoir because of the site’s content and the brave people that have posted in the comments.

Finding this site is going into my gratitude journey 🙂

We’re grateful you found us too, Nichol! 🙂

Firstly, I would like to thank you for all the info pertaining to memoirs. I believe am on the right track, am at the editing stage and really have to use an extra pair of eyes. I’m more motivated now to push it out and complete it. Thanks for the tips it was very helpful, I have a little more confidence it seeing the completion.

Well, I’m super excited to begin my memoir. It’s hard trying to rely on memories alone, but I’m going to give it a shot!

Thanks to everyone who posted comments, all of which have inspired me to get on it.

Best of luck to everyone! Jody V.

I was thrilled to find this material on How to Write A Memoir. When I briefly told someone about some of my past experiences and how I came to the United States in the company of my younger brother in a program with a curious name, I was encouraged by that person and others to write my life history.

Based on the name of that curious program through which our parents sent us to the United States so we could leave the place of our birth, and be away from potentially difficult situations in our country.

As I began to write my history I took as much time as possible to describe all the different steps that were taken. At this time – I have been working on this project for 5 years and am still moving ahead. The information I received through your material has further encouraged me to move along. I am very pleased to have found this important material. Thank you!

Wow! This is such an informative post packed with tangible guidance. I poured my heart into a book. I’ve been a professional creative for years to include as a writer, mainly in the ad game and content. No editor. I wasn’t trying to make it as an author. Looking back, I think it’s all the stuff I needed to say. Therapy. Which does not, in and of itself, make for a coherent book. The level of writing garnering praise, but the book itself was a hot mess. So, this is helpful. I really put myself out there, which I’ve done in many areas, but the crickets response really got to me this time. I bought “Educated” as you recommended. Do you have any blog posts on memoirs that have something to say to the world, finding that “something” to say? It feels like that’s theme, but perhaps something more granular. Thanks for this fantastic post. If I had the moola, I would sign up for a class. Your time is and effort is appreciated. Typos likely on comments! LOL

thanks. God bless

I am a member of the “Reprobates”, a group of seven retired Royal Air Force pilots and navigators which has stayed in intermittent touch since we first met in Germany in 1969. Four of the group (all of whom are in their late seventies or early eighties) play golf together quite frequently, and we all gather for reunions once or twice a year. About a year ago, one of the Reprobates suggested posterity might be glad to hear the stories told at these gatherings, and there have since been two professionally conducted recording sessions, one in London, and one in Tarifa, Spain. The instigator of these recordings forwarded your website to his fellow Reprobates by way of encouragement to put pen to paper. And, I, for one, have found it inspiring. It’s high time I made a start on my Memoirs, thank you.

Thank you for sharing this, Tim! Happy writing!

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Write a Great Memoir: How to Start (and Actually Finish) Your First Draft

by Joe Bunting | 1 comment

When I first started writing my memoir, Crowdsourcing Paris , about a real-life adventure I experienced with my wife and ten-month-old son, I thought it was going to be easy.

After all, by that point in my career, I had already written four books, two of which became bestsellers. I’ve got this, I thought. Simple.

It wasn’t. By the time Crowdsourcing Paris was published and became a #1 New Release on Amazon, it was more than five years later. During that time, I made just about every mistake, but I also learned a process that will reliably help anyone to start and finish writing a great memoir.

My memoir, Crowdsourcing Paris , as a #1 New Release on Amazon!

In this guide, I want to talk about how you can start writing your memoir, how you can actually finish it, and how you can make sure it’s good .

If you read this article from start to finish, it will save you hundreds of hours and result in a much better finished memoir.

Hot tip : Throughout this guide, I will be referencing my memoir Crowdsourcing Paris as an example. To get the most out of this guide and the memoir writing process in general, get a copy of the book to use as an example. Order your copy here »

But Wait! What Is a Memoir? (Memoir Definition)

How do you know if you're writing a memoir? Here's a quick memoir definition:

A memoir is a book length account or autobiography about a real life situation or event. It usually includes a pivotal experience in your life journey.

A key point to make is that memoir is a  true story . You don't have to get every piece of dialogue perfect, but you do have to try to tell the personal story or experience as best as you remember.

If you're looking to fictionalize your real life account you're writing a novel, not a memoir (and specifically a roman à clef novel ).

For more on the difference between a novel and a memoir, check out this coaching video:

How to Get Started With Your Memoir: 10 Steps Before You Start Writing

This guide is broken into sections: what to do before you start writing and how to write your first draft.

When most people decide to write a memoir, they just start writing. They write about the first life experience they can think of.

That’s sort of what I did too. I just started writing about my trip to Paris, beginning with how I first decided to go as a way to become a “real writer.” It turned out to be the biggest mistake I made.

If you want to finish your memoir, and even more, write a good memoir, just starting with the first memory you can think of will make things much harder for you.

Instead, get started with a memoir plan.

What’s a memoir plan? There are ten elements. Let’s break it down.

Get the memoir plan in a downloadable worksheet. Click to download your memoir plan »

1. Write Your Memoir Premise in One Sentence

The first part of a memoir plan is your premise. A premise is a one-sentence summary of your book idea.

You might be wondering, how can I summarize my entire life in a single sentence?

The answer is, you can’t. Memoir isn’t a full autobiography. It’s not meant to be a historical account of your entire life story. Instead, it should share one specific situation and what you learned from that situation.

Every memoir premise should contain three things:

• A Character. For your memoir, that character will always be you . For the purposes of your premise, though, it’s a good idea to practice thinking of yourself as the main character of your story. So describe yourself in third person and use one descriptive adjective, e.g. a cautious writer.
• A Situation. Memoirs are about a specific event, situation, or experience. For example, Marion Roach Smith’s bestselling memoir was about the discovery that her mother had Alzheimer’s, which at the time was a fairly unknown illness. My memoir, Crowdsourcing Paris , begins on the first day of my trip to Paris and ends on the day I left. You can’t write about everything, at least in this book. But you can write about one thing well, and save all the other ideas for the next book.
• A Lesson. What life lesson did you learn from this situation? How did your life change inexorably after going through this situation? Again, here you can’t write about everything you’ve ever learned. Choose ONE life lesson or emotional truth and focus on it.

Want to see how a premise actually looks? Here’s an example from my memoir Crowdsourcing Paris :

When a Cautious Writer is forced by his audience to do uncomfortable adventures in Paris he learns the best stories come when you get out of your comfort zone.

One thing to note: a premise is not a book description. My book description, which you can see here , is totally different from the premise. It’s more suspenseful and also less detailed in some ways. That’s because the purpose of a premise isn’t to sell books.

What is the premise of your memoir? Share it in the comments below!

2. Set a Deadline to Finish Your First Draft

Or if you’ve already finished a draft, set a deadline to finish your next draft.

This is crucial to do now , before you do anything else. Why? Because there are parts of the memoir plan that you can spend months, even years on. But while planning is helpful, it can easily become a distraction if you don’t get to the writing part of the process.

That’s why you want to put a time limit on your planning by setting a deadline.

How long should the deadline be?

Stephen King says you should write a first draft in no longer than a season. So ninety days.

In my 100 Day Book program, we’ve helped hundreds of memoir writers finish their book in just 100 days. To me, that’s a good amount of time to finish a first draft.

However, I wouldn’t take any longer than 100 days. Writing a book requires a level of focus that’s difficult to achieve over a long period of time. If you set your deadline for longer than 100 days, you might never finish.

Also set weekly milestones.

In addition to your final deadline, I recommend breaking up the writing process into weekly milestones.

If you’re going to write a 65,000-word memoir over 100 days, let’s say, then divide 65,000 by the number of weeks (about 14) to get your weekly word count goal: about 4,600 words per week.

That will give you a sense of how much progress you’re making each week, so you won’t be in a huge rush to finish right at the end of your deadline. After all, no one can pull an all-nighter and finish a book! Create a writing habit that will enable you to actually finish your book.

Keep track of your word count deadlines.

By the way, this is one reason I love Scrivener , my favorite book writing software , because it allows you to set a target deadline and word count. Then Scrivener automatically calculates how much you need to write every day to reach your deadline.

It’s a great way to keep track of your deadline and how much more you have to write. Check out my review of Scrivener to learn more.

3. Create Consequences to Make Quitting Hard

I’ve learned from experience that a deadline alone isn’t enough. You also have to give your deadline teeth .

Writing a book is hard. To make sure that you show up to the page and do the work you need to finish, you need to make it harder to not write.

How? By creating consequences.

I learned this from a friend of mine, writer and book marketing expert Tim Grahl .

“If you really want to finish your book,” he told me, “write a check for $1,000 to a charity you hate. Then give that check to a friend with instructions to send it if you don’t hit your deadline.”

“I don’t need to do that,” I told him. “I’m a pro. I have discipline.” But a month later, after I still hadn’t made any progress on my memoir, I finally decided to take his advice.

This was during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. So I wrote a $1,000 check to the presidential candidate that I most disliked (who shall remain nameless!), and gave it to a friend with instructions to send the check if I didn’t hit my final deadline.

I also created smaller consequences for the weekly deadlines, which I highly recommend. Here’s how it works:

Consequence #1 : Small consequence, preferably related to a guilty pleasure that might keep you from writing. For example, giving up a game on your phone or watching TV until you finish your book.

Consequence #2 : Giving up a guilty pleasure. For example, giving up ice cream, soda, or alcohol until you finish your book.

Consequence #3 : Send the $1,000 check to the charity you hate.

Each of these would happen if I missed three weekly deadlines. If I missed the final deadline, then just the $1,000 check would get sent.

After I put in each of these consequences, I was the most focused and productive I’ve ever been in my life. I finished my book in just nine weeks and never missed a deadline.

If you actually want to finish your memoir, give this process a try. I think you’ll be surprised by how well it works for you.

4. Decide What Kind of Story You’re Telling

Now that you’ve set your deadline, start thinking about what kind of book you’re writing. What is your story really about?

“Memoir is about something you know after something you’ve been through,” says Marion Roach Smith, author of The Memoir Project .

I think there are seven types of stories that most memoirs are about.

• Coming of Age. A story about a young person finding their place in the world. A great example is 7 Story Mountain  by Thomas Merton.
• Education. An education story , according to Kim Kessler and Story Grid, is about a naive character who, through the course of the story, comes to a bigger understanding of the world that gives meaning to their existing life. My memoir, Crowdsourcing Paris , is a great example of an education memoir.
• Love. A love story is about a romantic relationship, either the story of a breakup or of two characters coming together. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert is a great example of a love story memoir, as it tells the story of her divorce and then re-discovering herself and love as she travels the world.
• Adventure/Action. All adventure stories are about life and death situations. Also, most travel memoirs are adventure stories. Wild by Cheryl Strayed is a great example, and Crowdsourcing Paris is also an adventure story. (You can apply the principles from our How to Write Adventure guide here , too!)
• Performance. Performance memoirs are about a big competition or a competitive pursuit. Julie and Julia , Julie Powell’s memoir about cooking her way through Julia Child’s recipes, is a good example of a performance memoir. Outlaw Platoon , about the longest-serving Ranger platoon in Afghanistan, is another great performance story.
• Thriller. Memoirs about abuse or even an illness could fall into the crime, horror, or thriller arena. (Our full guide on How to Write a Thriller is here .)
• Society. What is wrong with society? And how can you rebel against the status quo? Society stories are very common as memoirs. I would also argue that most humor memoirs are society stories, since they talk about one person’s funny, transgressive view on society. Anything by David Sedaris, for example, is a society memoir.

For more on all of these genres, check out Story Grid’s article How to Use Story Grid to Write a Memoir .

Three Stories

Note that I included my memoir in two categories. That’s because most books, including memoirs, are actually a combination of three stories. You have:

• An external story. For example, Crowdsourcing Paris is an adventure story.
• An internal story . As I said, Crowdsourcing Paris is an education story.
• A subplot . Usually the subplot is another external story, in my case, a love story.

What three stories are you telling in your memoir?

5. Visualize Your Intention

One of the things that I’ve learned as I’ve coached hundreds of writers to finish their books is that if you visualize the following you are much more likely to follow through and accomplish your writing goals:

• Where you're going to write
• When you're going to write
• How much you're going to write

Here I want you to actively visualize yourself at your favorite writing spot accomplishing the word count goal that you set in step two.

For example, when I was writing Crowdsourcing Paris , I would imagine myself sitting at this one café that was eight doors down from my office. I liked it because it had a little bit of a French feel. Then I would imagine myself there from eight in the morning until about ten.

Finally, I would actively visualize myself watching the word count tracker go from 999 to 1,000 words, which was my goal every day. Just that process of imagining my intention was so helpful.

What is your intention? Where, when, and how much will you write? Imagine yourself actually sitting there in the place you’re going to write your memoir.

6. Who Will Be On Your Team?

No one can write a book alone. I learned this the hard way, and the result was that it took me five years to finish my memoir.

For every other book that I had written, I had other people holding me accountable. Without my team, I know that I would never have written those books. But when I tried to write my memoir, I thought, I can do this on my own. I don’t need accountability, encouragement, and support. I’ve got this.

To figure out who you need to help you finish your memoir, create three different lists of people:

• Other writers. These are people who you can process, with who know the process of writing a book. Some will be a little bit ahead of you, so that when you get stuck, they can encourage you and say, “I’ve been there. You’re going to get through it. Keep working.”
• Readers. Or if you don’t have readers, friends and family. These will be the people who give you feedback on your finished book before it’s published, e.g. beta readers.
• Professional editors. But you also need professional feedback. I recommend listing two different editors here, a content editor to give feedback on the book as a whole (for example, I recommend a Write Practice Certified Coach), and a proofreader or line editor to help polish the final draft. (Having professional editing software is smart too. We like ProWritingAid. Check out our ProWritingAid review .)

Just remember: it takes a team to finish a book. Don’t try to do it on your own.

And if you don’t have relationships with other writers who can be on your team, check out The Write Practice Pro. This is the community I post my writing in to get feedback. Many of my best writing friends came directly from this community. You can learn more about The Write Practice Pro here .

7. What Other Books Will Inspire You?

“Books are made from books,” said Cormac McCarthy. Great writers learn how to write great books by reading other great books, and so should you.

I recommend finding three to five other memoirs that can inspire you during the writing process.

I recommend two criteria for the books you choose:

• Commercially successful. If you want your book to be commercially successful, choose other books that have done well in the marketplace.
• Similar story type. Try to find books that are the same story type that you learned in step four.

For my memoir, I had four main sources of inspiration.

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert; The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain; A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway; and Midnight in Paris , the film by Woody Allen.

I referred back to these sources all the time. For example, when I was stuck on the climactic scene in the memoir, I watched one scene in A Midnight in Paris twenty times until I could quote the dialogue. I still didn’t come up with the solution until the next day, but understanding how other writers solved the problems I was facing helped me figure out my own solutions for my story.

8. Who Is Your Reader Avatar?

Who is your book going to be for? Or who is the one person you’ll think of when you write your book? When the writing gets hard and you want to quit, who will be most disappointed if you never finish your book?

I learned this idea from J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote his novel The Hobbit for his three boys as a bedtime story. Every day he would work on his pages, and every night he would go home and read them to his sons. And this gave him an amazing way to get feedback. He knew whether they laughed at one part or got bored at another.

This helped him make his story better, but I also imagine it gave him a tremendous amount of motivation.

This Can Be You, Sort Of

I don’t think your reader avatar should be you. When it comes to your own writing, you are the least objective person.

There’s one caveat: you can be your own reader avatar IF you’re writing to a version of yourself at a different time. For example, I have friends who have imagined they were writing to a younger version of themselves.

Who will you write your memoir for?

9. Publishing and Marketing

How will you publish your book? Will you go the traditional route or will you self-publish? Who is your target market (check your reader avatar for help)? What will you do to promote and market your book? Do you have an author website ?

It might be strange to start planning for the publishing and marketing of your book before you ever start writing it, but what I’ve discovered is that when you think through the entire writing process, from the initial idea all the way through the publishing and marketing process, you are much more likely to finish your book.

In fact, in my 100 Day Book program, I found that people who finished this planning process were 52 percent more likely to finish their book.

Spend some time thinking about your publishing and marketing plans. Just thinking about it will help you when you start writing.

Start Building Your Audience Before You Need It

In the current publishing climate, most memoir agents and publishers want you to have some kind of relationship with an audience before they will consider your book.

Start building an audience before you need it. The first step to building an audience, and the first step to publishing in general, is building an author website. If you don’t have a website yet, you can find our full author website guide here .

(Building a website doesn’t have to be intimidating or time-consuming if you have the right guide.)

10. Outline Your Memoir

The final step of the planning process is your memoir outline . This could be the subject of a whole article itself. Here, I’ve learned so much from Story Grid, but if you don’t have time to read the book and listen to over 100 podcast episodes, here’s a quick and dirty process for you.

But First, for the Pantsers

There are two types of writers: the plotters and the pansters . Plotters like to outline. Pantsers think outlining crushes their creative freedom and hate it.

If you identify with the pantsers, that’s okay. Don’t worry too much about this step. I would still recommend writing something in this section of your memoir plan, even if you only know a few moments that will happen in the book, even recording a series of events might help as you plan.

And for you plotters, outline to your heart’s content, as long as you’ve already set your deadline!

Outlining Tips

When you’re ready to start outlining, here are a few tips:

• Begin by writing down all the big moments in your life that line up with your premise. Your premise is the foundation of your story. Anything outside of that premise should be cut.
• S eparate your life events into three acts. One of the most common story structures in writing is the three-act story structure. Act 1 should contain about 25 percent of your story, Act 2 about 50 percent of your story, and Act 3 about 25 percent.
• Act 1 should begin as late into the story as possible. In Crowdsourcing Paris , like most travel memoirs, I began the story the day I arrived in Paris.
• Use flashbacks, but carefully. Since I began Crowdsourcing Paris so late into the action, I used flashbacks to provide some details about what happened to lead up to the trip. Flashbacks can be overused, though, so only include full scenes and don’t info dump with flashbacks.
• Start big. The first scene in your book should be a good representation of what your book is about. So if you’re writing an adventure story (see Step 4), then you should have a life or death moment as the first scene. If you’re writing a love story, you should have a moment of love or love lost.
• End Act 1 with a decision. It is you, and specifically your decisions , that drive the action of your memoir. So what important decision did you make that will drive us into Act 2?
• Start Act 2 with your subplot. In Step 4, I said most books are made up of three stories. Your subplot is an important part of your book, and in most great stories, your subplot begins in Act 2.
• Act 2 begins with a period of “fun and games.” Save the Cat , one of my favorite books for writers, says that after the tension you built with the big decision in Act 1, the first few scenes in Act 2 should be fun and feel good, with things going relatively well for the protagonist.
• Center your second act on the “all is lost” moment. Great stories are about a character who comes to the end of him or herself. The all is lost moment is my favorite to write, because it’s where the character (in this case you ) has the most opportunity to grow. What is YOUR “all is lost” moment?
• Act 3 contains your final climactic moment. For Crowdsourcing Paris , this was the moment when I thought I was going to die. In a love story memoir, it might be when you finally work things out and commit to your partner.
• Act 3 is also where you show the big lesson of the memoir. Emphasis on show. Back in Step 1, you identified the lesson of your memoir. Act 3 is when you finally demonstrate what you’ve learned throughout the memoir in one major event.
• A tip for the final scene: end your memoir with the subplot. This gives a sense of completion to your story and works as a great final moment.

Use the tips above to create a rough outline of your memoir. Keep in mind, when you start writing, things might completely change. That’s okay! The point with your plan isn’t to be perfect. It’s to think through your story from beginning to end so that you’ll be prepared when you get to that point in the writing process.

Want to make this process as easy as possible? Get the memoir plan in a downloadable worksheet. Click to download your memoir plan »

That’s the end of the planning stage of this guide. Now let’s talk about how to write your first draft.

How to Write the First Draft of Your Memoir

If you’ve followed the steps above to create a memoir plan, you’ve done the important work. Writing a memoir, like writing any book, is hard. But it will actually be harder to not be successful if you’ve followed all the steps in the memoir plan.

But once you’ve created the “perfect” plan, it’s time to do the dirty work of writing a first draft.

In part two of our guide, you’ll learn how to write and finish a first draft.

1. Forget Perfection and Write Badly.

First drafts are messy. In fact, Anne Lamott calls them “shitty first drafts” because they are almost always terrible.

Even though I know that, though, any time I’m working on a new writing project, I still get it into my head that my first draft should be a masterpiece.

It usually takes me staring at a blank screen for a few hours before I admit defeat and just start writing.

If you’re reading this, don’t do that! Instead, start by writing badly.

Besides, when you’ve done the hard planning work, what you write will probably be a lot better than you think.

2. Willpower Doesn’t Work. Neither Does Inspiration. Instead, Use the “3 Minute Timer Trick.”

My biggest mistake when I began Crowdsourcing Paris was to think I had the willpower I needed as a professional writer and author of four books to finish the book on my own. Even worse, I thought I would be so inspired that the book would basically write itself.

I didn’t. It took not making much progress on my book for more than a year to realize I needed help.

The best thing you can do to help you focus on the writing process for your second draft is what we talked about in Step 4: Creating a Consequence.

But if you still need help, try my “3 Minute Timer Trick.” Here’s how it works:

• Set a timer for three minutes. Why three minutes? Because for me, I’m so distractible I can’t focus for more than three minutes. I think anyone can focus for three minutes though, even me.
• Write as fast as you can. Don’t think, just write!
• When the timer ends, write down your total word count in a separate document (see image below). Then subtract from the previous word count to calculate how many words you wrote during that session.
• Also write down any distractions during those three minutes. Did the phone ring? Did you have a tough urge to scroll through Facebook or play a game on your phone? Write it down.
• Then, repeat the process by starting the timer again. Can you beat your word count?

This process is surprisingly helpful, especially when you don’t feel like writing. After all, you might not have it in you to write for an hour, but anyone can write for three minutes.

And the amazing thing is that once you’ve started, you might find it much easier to keep going.

Other Tools for Writers

By the way, if you’re looking for the tools I use and other pro writers I know use, check out our Best Tools for Creative Writers guide here .

3. Make Your Weekly Deadlines.

You can’t finish your book in an all-nighter. That being said, you can finish a chapter of your book in an all-nighter.

That’s why it’s so important to have the weekly deadlines we talked about in Part 1, Step 2 of this guide.

By breaking up the writing process into a series of weekly deadlines, you give yourself an achievable framework to finish your book. And with the consequences you set in Step 3 of your memoir plan, you give your deadlines the teeth they need to hold you accountable.

And as I mentioned above, Scrivener is especially helpful for keeping track of deadlines (among other things). If you haven’t yet, check out my review of Scrivener here .

4. Keep Your Team Updated.

Having a hard time? It’s normal. Talk to your team about it.

It seems like when you’re writing a book, everything in the universe conspires against you. You get into a car accident, you get sick, you get into a massive fight with your spouse or family member, you get assigned a new project at your day job.

Writing a book would be hard enough on its own, but when you have the rest of your life to deal with, it can become almost impossible.

Without your team, which we talked about in Step 6 of your book plan, it would be.

For me, I would never have been able to finish one book, let alone the twelve that I’ve now finished, without the support, encouragement, and accountability of the other writers whom I call friends, the readers who believe in me, and most of all, my wife.

Remember: No book is finished alone. When things get hard, talk about it with your team.

And if you need a team, consider joining mine. The Write Practice Pro is a supportive encouraging community of writers and editors. It’s where I get feedback on my writing, and you can get it here too. Learn more about the community here.

5. Finally, Trust the Process.

When I walk writers through the first draft writing process, inevitably, around day sixty, they start to lose faith.

• They think their book is the all-time worst book ever written.
• They get a new idea they want to work on instead.
• They decide the dream to write a book and become a writer was foolish.
• They want to quit.

A few do quit at this point.

But the ones who keep going discover that in just a few weeks they’ve figured out most of the problems in their book, they’re on their last pages, and they’re almost finished.

It happens every time, even to me.

If you take nothing else from this post, please hear this: keep going. Never quit. If you follow this process from start to finish, you’re going to make it, and it’s going to be awesome.

I’m so excited for you.

How to Finish Your Memoir

More than half of this guide is about the planning process. That’s because if you start well, you’ll finish well.

If you create the right plan, then all that’s left is doing the hard, messy work of writing.

Without the right plan, it’s SO easy to get lost along the way.

That’s why I hope you’ll download my Memoir Plan Worksheet. Getting lost in the writing process is inevitable. This plan will become your map when it happens. Click to download the Memoir Plan Worksheet.

More than anything, though, I hope you’ll never quit. It took me five years to write Crowdsourcing Paris , but during that time I matured and grew so much as a writer and a person, all because I didn’t quit.

Even if it takes you five years, the life lessons you’ll learn as you write your book will be worth it.

And if you’re interested in a real-life adventure story set in Paris, I’d be honored if you’d read Crowdsourcing Paris . I think you’ll love it.

Good luck and happy writing.

More Writing Resources:

• How to Write a Memoir Outline: 7 Essential Steps For Your Memoir Outline
• 7 Steps to a Powerful Memoir
• The Memoir Project by Marion Roach Smith
• Crowdsourcing Paris by J.H. Bunting

Are you going to commit to writing a memoir (and never quitting, no matter what)? Let me know in the comments .

Summarize your memoir idea in the form of a one-sentence premise. Make sure it contains all three elements:

• A character
• A situation

Take fifteen minutes to craft your premise. When you’re finished, share your memoir premise in the Pro Practice Workshop for feedback. And if you share, please be sure to give feedback to three other writers. Not a member? Join us .

Joe Bunting

Joe Bunting is an author and the leader of The Write Practice community. He is also the author of the new book Crowdsourcing Paris , a real life adventure story set in France. It was a #1 New Release on Amazon. Follow him on Instagram (@jhbunting).

Want best-seller coaching? Book Joe here.

Work with Joe Bunting?

WSJ Bestselling author, founder of The Write Practice, and book coach with 14+ years experience. Joe Bunting specializes in working with Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Historical Fiction, How To, Literary Fiction, Memoir, Mystery, Nonfiction, Science Fiction, and Self Help books. Sound like a good fit for you?

One of my book chapters has been accepted for publication, but I lack confidence in the accuracy of what I have written. I have completed the chapter, but I would appreciate your assistance in improving its quality.

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• 3 Rules to Write World-Changing Memoir - The Write Practice - […] Here are my three “rules” about how to write a memoir: […]
• 4 Essentials for Writing Memoir That Resonates With Readers - The Write Practice - […] How do you write memoir and tell a story that is compelling to you, but might not be to…
• 19 Tips on Writing Memoir from The Memoir Project by Marion Roach Smith - The Write Practice - […] Marion Roach Smith has solid advice on how to write your own stories. Let me share nineteen tips on…
• The One Secret to a Deeper Memoir - The Write Practice - […] if you’re wondering how to write a memoir, what if you interviewed people–friends, family, community members–about the events on…
• How to Unlock the Power of the Present Tense in Memoir - The Write Practice - […] Writing memoir in the present tense suits grief in ways that the past tense simply cannot provide. […]
• Read Memoirs to Understand Character Motivation - […] about you? Do you want to know how to write a memoir? Check out our complete guide, Write a…
• How to Satisfy Your Reader With a Great Ending - The Write Practice - […] you’re figuring out how to write a memoir or a novel, creating an ending that is satisfying for the…
• How to Write About Your Family… Without Getting Disowned - […] this it true, through writing my own memoir, I have come to find that we can handle these situations…
• Write a Great Memoir: How to Start (and Actually Finish) Your First Draft – Books, Literature & Writing - […] “When you’re getting started writing a memoir, don’t just start writing about the first thing you remember.Tweet thisTweet […]
• 10 Memoir Writing Prompts to Get You Started - […] to take the next step and learn how to write a memoir? Check out my complete guide, Write a…
• How to Write a Short Memoir Story : The Write Practice - […] Then, when you’re ready to write a full memoir, check out our complete guide, Write a Great Memoir: How…

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Every ordinary life story is extraordinary!

How should your memoir end.

When you (finally!) write the last chapter of your memoir, you have two decisions to make: at what point to stop writing, and what type of sentence will supply a fitting end to your story. I think the first decision is easier than the second.

If your memoir is more of a full autobiography, you’ll probably end it at the present time. If the story concerns one period of your life or just one episode of your life, you can either end it naturally when the time period or episode is complete, or you can jump ahead to present day and end with a sort of epitaph that lets the reader know how you feel about it now or how things turned out in the long run.

On her website Live Write Thrive , C.S. Lakin, author of The Memoir Workbook , writes, “You should end your story at the place where the lessons have hit home—when you’ve taken those epiphanies you’ve gleaned from your experiences and now use them to light the way forward.”

It’s tougher to settle on the one exact sentence to end your memoir that will feel satisfying to readers and, even better, stick with them a while. Last year, Buzzfeed asked people to submit great ending sentences from literature. Here are some from famous fictional works that strike me as instructive for a memoir:

After all…tomorrow is another day.— Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

“Darling,” replied Valentine, “has not the count just told us that all human wisdom is summed up in two words? — Wait and hope.”— The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Now I understand that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.— My Ántonia by Willa Cather

But now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.— Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

But I don’t think us feel old at all. And us so happy. Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt. Amen.— The Color Purple by Alice Walker

These aren’t just sentences; they’re poetry. They’re poignant and thoughtful. You should craft every sentence in your book with care, but the final sentence is even more special. Take time to come up with something that caps off your story just right.

Like this article?

Then just set up a chapter and start writing your memoir. Don’t worry about rules. There are no rules to writing your memoir; there are only trends. These trends are based on techniques and features identified in current top-selling memoirs. At best, they’re the flavor of the month. If you’re capturing your life in print for your family, for your own gratification or to inspire readers, rather than aiming to set off Hollywood screenplay bidding wars, these trends don’t even apply to you. You’ll write the memoir that suits you best, and it will be timeless, not trend-driven.There are no rules, but there are four steps:

1. Theme/framework 2. Writing 3. Editing/polishing 4. Self-publishing

You’ve researched this, too, and you’ve been shocked at the price for getting help with any one of those steps, much less all four. That’s because most memoir sites promise to commercialize your work. They’ll follow a formula based on current memoir trends, because they want to convince you that they can turn your memoir into a best-seller. These sites overwhelm you with unnecessary information not to help you, the memoir author, but to address Search Engine Optimization (SEO) algorithms so they can sell more.

That’s not what we do at Write My Memoirs. Our small community of coaches, writers and editors are every bit as skilled as any you’ll find, and we charge appropriately for their expertise and the time they’ll spend helping you craft a compelling, enjoyable read. But you won’t pay an upcharge for other websites’ commercialization, the marketing that follows, and the pages of intimidating “advice.” You can sell your book if you like—we have ISBNs available for you—but our organic process of capturing your story takes a noncommercial path.

If you want help with any or all of the four steps above, choose from our services or save money by selecting one of our packages. If you’d like to talk about what’s right for you, schedule a call. One year from now, you can be holding your published memoir in your hand. And at that point, it will be a big deal!

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How To End A College Essay For Admission: 12 Tactics & Tips

Ending your college essay with a strong conclusion is crucial for making a lasting impression on the admissions committee.

In this guide, we’ll explore 12 effective tactics and tips to help you craft memorable and impactful endings. From connecting to your core values to employing the twist/reveal technique, these strategies will ensure your personal statement stands out.

Whether you’re looking to evoke emotion or highlight future aspirations, these tips will provide the perfect way to conclude your college essay and enhance your admission prospects.

How To End A College Essay For Admission

Why your college application essay ending is important.

We all know the reason why you write your college application essay – to convince the university of your choice to admit you. One part that may make the difference and help you stand out is the ending.

Your college application essay ending is crucial for several reasons. It’s your final chance to impress the admissions officer and leave a lasting impression. 

Encapsulates Your Personal Growth

One reason your college essay conclusion is important is that it encapsulates your personal growth. Instead of merely summarising the points you made, use this part of your essay to reflect on how you’ve evolved.

If you’ve written about overcoming a challenge, conclude by highlighting what you’ve learned and how it’s shaped who you are today. This gives your essay a sense of closure and shows maturity.

Creates A ‘Full Circle’ Effect

Another reason is that a strong ending can bring your essay full circle. If you started with a compelling anecdote or a vivid image, refer back to it at the end.

This technique creates a cohesive narrative and helps to underscore the main point of your essay.

You can write about your memory of your first science fair, and then ends it by connecting that experience to your aspirations in scientific research. This not only wraps up the essay neatly but also reinforces your passion and goals.

Creates Positive Perceptions

The way you end a college essay can significantly impact the admissions committee’s perception of you. Admissions officers read countless essays, so an ending that stands out can make your application memorable.

Avoid clichés and general statements. Instead, use your conclusion to leave the reader with a powerful thought or question. This strategy not only makes your essay unique but also showcases your creativity and critical thinking skills.

How To End A College Essay For Impact – 12 Ways

Connect to your values.

Connecting to your values is an effective way to end your college application essay. Reflect on the values shown throughout your essay and name them explicitly in your conclusion.

This technique can leave a lasting impression on the admissions officer by highlighting your core beliefs.

If your essay describes various community service activities, you might conclude by stating:

“Through these experiences, I learned the importance of empathy, commitment, and leadership.

These values will continue to guide me as I pursue my college education and beyond.”

This approach not only wraps up your essay neatly but also reinforces the main point of your personal statement. It gives a sense of closure and shows your ability to self-reflect, which is something admissions committees appreciate.

Avoid simply summarising what you’ve already said. Instead, emphasise the key values that have driven your journey, making your essay ending resonate more deeply. 

The Bookend or Callback

The Bookend or Callback technique is a powerful way to end your college application essay. By referring to something you set up earlier in the essay, you create a sense of closure that leaves a lasting impression on the admissions officer.

If you started your essay with a story about a childhood experience, you could conclude by linking back to that moment. Here’s an example:

“I began my journey with a simple question from my younger self, ‘Why do the stars shine?’

Now, as I pursue a degree in astrophysics, I find that same curiosity driving me to explore the universe’s mysteries.”

This technique allows you to restate the main point of your essay in a way that feels cohesive and complete. It’s an effective way to end a college essay because it brings your narrative full circle, making the essay feel well-structured and thoughtful.

Avoid common essay endings to ensure your conclusion reflects the essence of your personal statement, leaving the reader with a strong and memorable final impression.

The Road Forward

Ending your college application essay with “The Road Forward” technique can create a hopeful and positive outlook, showcasing your future potential. 

Use this strategy to leave the admissions officer with a lasting impression of your ambition and readiness for exploration.

Say after discussing your passion for environmental science and the projects you’ve undertaken, you might end your essay like this:

“As I look to the future, I see myself at the forefront of innovative solutions to combat climate change. I am excited to join a community that fosters impactful research.

The journey ahead is filled with opportunities to learn, grow, and make a significant difference in the world.”

This type of ending not only summarises the main point of your essay but also gives a glimpse into your aspirations.

It helps to wrap up your essay by emphasising your readiness to embrace new challenges and your commitment to your chosen field. 

Save Your Thesis for the End

Saving your thesis for the end of your college application essay can create a powerful and surprising conclusion.

This technique allows you to build your narrative and then reveal the main point, leaving a lasting impression on the admissions committee.

If your essay details various volunteer experiences, you could end with a statement that ties them all together. Here’s an example:

“After years of organising community clean-ups, and tutoring underprivileged kids, I realised that my true passion lies in public service.

I am committed to creating impactful change, driven by the belief that small acts of kindness can transform lives.”

This method works because it keeps the reader engaged, wondering how all the pieces fit together. When you reveal your thesis at the end, it brings the essay full circle and provides a satisfying conclusion. 

Connect to Your Career

Connecting to your career is a way to end your college application essay. Here, you tie your experiences to your future aspirations. Here’s an example: 

“Working as a camp counsellor taught me leadership, patience, and convinced me to pursue a career in pediatric medicine.

I am eager to bring the same dedication and compassion to medical school, knowing that I am prepared to make a difference in children’s lives.”

This method shows your clear vision and ambition. It demonstrates how your past experiences have shaped your career goals, providing a sense of purpose and direction.

This approach can make your essay memorable and showcase your readiness for the challenges ahead.

The “Why Us?” Set-Up

Using The “Why Us?” Set-Up to end your college admission essay can effectively bridge your personal story with the specific offerings of your chosen college. Highlight how your experiences align with the school’s:

• opportunities.

Here’s an example:

“My passion for environmental science grew through community clean-ups and research projects. I’m excited to bring this dedication to the University of X’s Environmental Sciences program, where I can work with leading researchers.

The interdisciplinary approach and community focus at Michigan align perfectly with my goals of creating sustainable solutions and driving impactful change.”

This type of ending not only wraps up your essay but also sets the stage for a compelling “Why Us?” essay. It shows the admissions committee that you’ve done your research and see a clear fit between your aspirations and what the college offers.

Back to the Beginning, but Something’s Changed

You can consider to end your college admission essay by reflecting on how you’ve changed since the beginning.

Start by mirroring language from your opening to create a full circle effect. Here’s an example:

“I began my essay describing the fear I felt when I first stepped into the debate room, unsure of my voice and place. Now, after countless debates and finding strength in my convictions, I realize that fear was the catalyst for my growth.

I’ve learned that my voice can inspire change and foster understanding. This journey has not only shaped my confidence but has also ignited my passion for law and advocacy.”

This way to end your college essay showcases personal growth and highlights your journey. It provides a sense of closure and demonstrates to the admissions committee your ability to reflect and evolve. 

The Twist/Reveal

Using The Twist/Reveal to end your college admission essay can create a memorable and impactful conclusion.

Set up an expectation throughout your essay and then pivot against it for a surprising reveal. 

“Throughout my essay, you’ve seen my dedication to becoming a doctor, shadowing physicians, and volunteering at hospitals. You might think my path is set in stone. But the truth is, these experiences taught me that my true calling lies in medical research.

I realized this while working in a lab, where I found a passion for discovering new treatments and understanding diseases at a molecular level. This pivot from patient care to research was unexpected, but it’s where my heart truly lies.”

This technique engages the reader by setting up a narrative and then revealing a surprising conclusion, showcasing your ability to reflect deeply and adapt. 

The “Theater of the Oppressed” Ending

Using The “Theater of the Oppressed” Ending can make your college admission essay stand out by leaving the conclusion unresolved, putting the power in the reader’s hands.

This technique engages the admissions officer, making them a participant in your narrative. Here’s an example:

“As I stood before the judge, testifying for my community, I felt a surge of hope and fear. Would my words make a difference?

My journey, filled with moments of advocacy and learning, leads me to wonder: What impact can one voice truly have? The next chapter of this story isn’t written yet, and perhaps you, the reader, will be part of its unfolding.”

This method prompts the reader to think deeply about your story and its potential outcomes.

To me, this is  a powerful way to end your college application essay. It leaves a lasting impression by highlighting your unresolved questions and inviting the admissions committee to envision your future potential.

This approach emphasises your engagement with complex issues and your commitment to ongoing growth and change.

The Ellipsis

Ending your college admission essay with an ellipsis can leave a lasting impression by creating an open-ended conclusion that leaves some questions unanswered.

This technique invites the reader to ponder your future and the potential paths you might take. Here’s an example:

“After years of exploring the world of robotics, from building my first simple machine to leading a team in a national competition, I stand on the brink of new discoveries.

Will I create the next groundbreaking technology? Only time will tell…”

This approach draws the admissions officer into your journey, leaving them curious about what comes next. It’s an effective way to end your college essay, highlighting your sense of potential and unfinished business.

The ellipsis suggests that your story is still unfolding, emphasising your readiness for growth and exploration.

This type of ending not only keeps the reader engaged but also underscores your ambition and drive, making your personal statement memorable.

Address the College Directly

Ending your college admission essay by addressing the college directly may sound simple. But there’s power in simplicity and being explicit about things.

Conclude by explaining how the college aligns with your future plans and why you’re excited to attend. Here’s an example:

“The interdisciplinary approach at Stanford, with its unique blend of engineering and environmental studies, perfectly fits my goal of developing sustainable technologies.

I am thrilled at the prospect of working with Dr. Smith, whose research on renewable energy sources has inspired my own projects. Joining Stanford means collaborating with like-minded individuals who share my passion for innovation and sustainability.”

This approach shows the admissions officer that you’ve done your homework and understand how the college’s offerings align with your goals. It demonstrates genuine enthusiasm and a clear vision for your future.

By addressing the college directly, you create a strong, personalised ending to your essay that leaves a lasting impression on the admissions committee.

This technique effectively wraps up your personal statement, highlighting your commitment and readiness to contribute to the college community.

End on an Action

Ending your college admission essay with a decisive action or dialogue can leave a strong impression on the admission committee.  

This approach adds a dynamic conclusion that showcases your initiative and forward-thinking attitude. Here’s an example:

“As I stood on the edge of the stage, ready to present my research on renewable energy, I felt a surge of confidence.

“Let’s change the world together,” I began, looking directly at the audience, knowing this moment marked the start of my journey in environmental science.”

This method not only wraps up your essay with a vivid scene but also highlights your readiness to take action. It avoids common essay endings to ensure your personal statement stands out to the admissions committee.

By concluding with a specific action or piece of dialogue, you demonstrate your proactive nature and commitment, leaving a lasting impression on the admission committee.

4 Types Of College Essay Endings To Avoid

While you are certainly free to end your college essay in any way you want, here are three very common ones that may not only looks lazy, but could be detrimental to your application:

Writing A General Summary

Ending your essay with a summary of what you’ve already said can feel redundant and uninspired.

Admissions officers read countless essays, and a summarising conclusion doesn’t add any new value or insight. Here’s an example of a summary ending to avoid:

“To summarize, my experiences have made me hardworking, dedicated, and eager to learn.”

This approach merely restates what you’ve already shared without offering a fresh perspective. Instead, aim for a conclusion that provides a sense of closure and reflects on your journey or aspirations.

Dropping General Quote(s)

Using a famous quote to wrap up your essay might seem like a good idea, but it often comes across as cliché and impersonal. The admissions committee wants to hear your voice, not someone else’s.

Ending with a quote like “Be the change you wish to see in the world” doesn’t tell the reader anything unique about you.

Instead, use your own words to express your thoughts and reflections. Make sure your essay ending is original and showcases your personal growth or vision.

Show Your Neediness

Avoid ending your essay by begging for admission or excessively expressing your desire to attend the college.

Phrases that sound desperate are like these:  

• “Please accept me”,
• “I really want to go to your school”, or
• “Can I join your school”

Instead, demonstrate why you are a good fit for the college through your experiences and aspirations.

Show, don’t tell, why you belong there by highlighting how the college aligns with your goals and how you can contribute to its community.

Show You Have Options

While ending your college admission essay by being needy can be a turn off to admissions committee, going the opposite can also backfire significantly.

In this case, we are talking about showing you have options. This means you mention that you plan to apply to multiple schools and universities , and know you will receive multiple offers to go to several universities. 

Some may think writing this way shows their value, and how many universities want them. But in general, this approach may more likely to achieve the opposite, instead of the intended effect.

Writing in this manner shows disrespect, which can be a turn-off to admissions committee. It also shows you do not take your applications seriously, which can be a reflection of poor personal character .

Your essay, and application may likely be discarded right away by the admission committee.

Instead, focus on how you and the university are aligned in values, and how you can contribute to the university or school’s overall aims and objectives.

End Your College Essay In Style – And Get Admission

Crafting a strong ending for your college essay can leave a lasting impression on the admissions committee. By employing one of the 12 tactics and tips, such as connecting to your values or ending on a decisive action, you can ensure your personal statement stands out.

These strategies not only provide a sense of closure but also highlight your unique qualities and aspirations, making your essay memorable and impactful. 

Use these tips to effectively wrap up your essay and make a compelling case for your admission.

Dr Andrew Stapleton has a Masters and PhD in Chemistry from the UK and Australia. He has many years of research experience and has worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Associate at a number of Universities. Although having secured funding for his own research, he left academia to help others with his YouTube channel all about the inner workings of academia and how to make it work for you.

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Writing the Memoir (Moxley): Introduction

• Introduction
• Tips for Writing the Memoir
• Annotated Memoirs
• Describing a Person
• Describing a Place
• Sample Topics and Essays

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How to Write a Conclusion For an Essay: Tips and Tricks

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Writing a Research Paper: Steps to Begin

Writing a personal essay from the start, overcoming challenges in analytical essay writing, how should i format my college essay properly.

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A strong conclusion is just as important as any other essay component, as it’s the last part of the essay that leaves a lasting impression on your reader. Or doesn’t. A well-crafted conclusion does. It ties together your essay’s main points, demonstrates the significance and relevance of your arguments, and leaves the reader with a memorable closing thought. This guide will provide you with tips and tricks on what to do and what to avoid while writing effective essay conclusions.

The Purposes of A Conclusion

The conclusion of an essay has several goals, all of which contribute to the overall quality and success of your work. Although it may look similar to a summary of the essay, it actually is an important component that strengthens your argument and brings closure to your discussion. Understanding the following objectives of a conclusion will help you write one that improves your essay and intensifies its impact. Here are the main goals of a conclusion:

Connect the essay’s main points

A conclusion should briefly tie together the main points of your essay, reminding the reader of the key arguments presented. This helps your professor or other audience get a clear understanding of your main ideas and arguments and how they connect. Summarizing the main points, you reinforce your argument and provide a logical end to your paper.

Prove the Significance and Relevance of Your Arguments

Your conclusion should emphasize why your arguments matter, highlighting their importance and relevance. Summarizing your points isn’t enough for a well-written conclusion. There also should be an explanation of their broader impacts or implications. Demonstrating significance helps the reader understand the value of your argument and why it is worth considering. It also shows the relevance of your points to the overall topic or issue.

Leave the Reader with a Lasting Impression

The final sentences of your conclusion should leave a strong, lasting impression, encouraging the reader to dedicate more time and think deeper about the topic. This can be achieved by ending with a thought-provoking statement, a call to action, or a quote that highlights your main argument. An impactful closing makes your essay memorable and distinguishes it from others.

How to End an Essay

To effectively end your essay, you need to consider all the features that a successful conclusion should have and make sure to present them accurately and in the proper sequence. Only in this way will you not lose but rather deepen your impact and connection with your reader.

Restate your thesis: Begin your conclusion by restating your thesis in a new way. This backs your main argument without simply repeating it directly or paraphrasing what’s already been said in the body paragraphs. Restating the thesis helps remind the reader of your central argument and shows how the evidence and analysis in the body of the essay support this thesis. By rephrasing it, you provide a fresh perspective on your main point, reinforcing its importance.

Summary of synthesis: Summarize the main points of your writing, synthesizing the information instead of repeating it. You can use a summary generator tool for it. Highlight how the evidence you presented supports your thesis. Synthesis involves combining the key points and evidence to show how they interrelate and support your overall argument. 

Provide context: Add context to your conclusion by discussing the broader essence of your argument. Explain how your essay contributes to a larger conversation or addresses an important issue. Providing context helps the reader understand the significance of your argument in a wider scope. It can also involve suggesting areas for further research or highlighting the relevance of your points to real-world situations.

How to Conclude an Essay: Things to Avoid

At the same time, keep in mind that while you’re trying to write the perfect conclusion, you may accidentally make meaningful mistakes and add things that should not be there. Look at the common pitfalls and try to avoid the following mistakes:

Avoid Introducing New Information. Your conclusion is not the place to introduce new arguments or evidence. Stick to summarizing and synthesizing what has already been discussed. Introducing new information can confuse the reader and distract from the main points of your essay. It is important to keep the conclusion focused on wrapping up your argument and reinforcing what has already been said.

Avoid Overly Emotional Statements. While it’s important to leave an impression, avoid using overly emotional language or making sweeping statements that aren’t backed by anything. Emotional language can undermine the credibility of your argument and distract from your main points. Stick to logical and reasoned statements in your essay.

Avoid Repetition. Don’t repeat your introduction or body paragraphs. Instead, rephrase your key points and present them in a fresh way. Repetition can make your conclusion feel redundant and uninspired. By rephrasing your points, you can strengthen your argument in a more engaging way, keeping the reader interested until the very end.

What is a good way to end an essay?

A good way to end an essay is to restate your thesis in a new light, summarize the main points you’ve made, and provide a final thought or call to action that leaves an impression on the reader. You might use a quote, a question that encourages further thinking, or a call to action that emphasizes the relevance of your topic. The goal is to tie everything together and reinforce the significance of your argument.

How to end a conclusion?

To end a conclusion effectively, summarize the main points of your essay and restate your thesis in a rephrased manner. Follow this with a closing thought that underscores the importance of your discussion. This can be a final insight, a broader perspective of your argument, or a suggestion for future research or actions. The final sentence should leave a memorable impression and provide a sense of closure.

What is a good concluding word for an essay?

There are phrases that signal to the reader that you are wrapping up your discussion. Good concluding words or phrases for an essay include:

• In conclusion
• In the final analysis
• All things considered
• To conclude

How to conclude a paragraph?

To conclude a paragraph, you should summarize the main idea discussed in the paragraph and show how it supports your overall thesis. Use a closing sentence that ties the paragraph’s content back to your main argument. This could involve restating the key point of the paragraph in a concise manner or linking it to the next paragraph for a smooth transition.

How do you use closing sentences in an essay?

Closing sentences in an essay reinforce the main points discussed in each paragraph or section and help transition to the next idea. In the body paragraphs, use closing sentences to succinctly summarize the paragraph’s key point and link it to your thesis. In the conclusion, use a closing sentence to leave an impression, emphasize the significance of your arguments, and provide closure to your essay. Effective closing sentences are clear, concise, and relevant to the main argument.

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Teaching Autoethnography

5. Memory/Character Essays

One of the hardest things to master, and a hurdle to overcome for many students, is learning how to show and not tell. This may seem like a tired subject, but it is an important one. Most students—who at this point have written many documents in their academic lives to prove they have read something, done research or are worthy of attending a college, receiving a scholarship or getting a job—have a hard time mastering techniques that allow experiences to “speak for themselves.” It’s clear why this is so hard for them to understand: In college writing classes, we are not asking them to prove they are doing or reading something. We assume they have done their readings and preparation. We are asking them to take the next step and to create meaning, a new skill for many college student writers and one that takes time to master.

When much of your writing life has been devoted to summing things up and proving things, it can be hard to avoid the habit. I prohibit students from “summing up” their essays for class. How tiresome the world would be if everyone constantly had to sum up their purpose in life. So my students are never allowed to tell their readers what something means. They must create strong enough connections and reflections so that by the end of the writing, readers understand the significance of their narrative. A lot of developing this skill is learning to choose details, identify the “So what?” factor of the writing, and, most importantly, trust the reader.

Through using devices and cues and most importantly creating scenes, writers are able to convey ideas and messages to us without thrusting their purpose in our faces in the form of summaries and underlined theses. Students can do the same thing by coming to understand that once they know and explore the purpose of their writing, others will be able to follow their meaning. As I mentioned in the “Who cares?” section, if students don’t know why they are writing something, most often their audience will not know either. Intention in writing is key. Students must work on understanding why they are choosing a topic, other than that they need to complete an assignment to earn a grade. That way, they can work as they write to tease out important ideas and themes through the details they choose to include and the voice they use to convey it to their intended audience.

Students must also understand that memory is fallible. As a rule, people remember only a very small amount of what they experience. If this were not true, we would not be able to function on a daily basis. I often ask students in class if they have a memory of something that others dispute—maybe something that happened in childhood or an experience with a friend on which they disagree about what actually occurred. Most students will raise their hands and acknowledge that this has happened to them, and I invite a few students to share these stories with the class.

It is important to establish that just because memories differ does not mean they are invalid. There is a fine line between remembering something to the best of our ability and willfully misremembering something. In class, we work on remembering to the best of our ability and intending to be truthful. Talking to others who were involved in memories, if possible, can be helpful in fleshing out details. Readings in which authors use examples of childhood memories can be helpful in understanding the finer points of these distinctions, especially with memoir.

Joan Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook” is very effective for helping students analyze the concept of truth and what that means for the reader. Our class is not studying philosophy, but I try to devote a fairly large amount of time right off the bat to discussing how and what truth means to us as writers. Didion both lies to her readers and convinces us of her truthfulness. How does she achieve this?

In this essay, Didion cleverly analyzes her reasons for keeping a journal, holding on to notes and images from her life. She shares some of the stories she has created from these moments and how they differ from the recollections of her family and friends. This reading usually makes students reflect on what the term truth mean for them in their everyday life and what power it contains. Didion reflects, “Not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters” (333). In discussing her process of journaling and creating stories, she aims for a specific kind of truth, “How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook” (333). Didion explains that the truth in her writing is how a situation felt to her at the time; in this way she is being accurate to her experience. This highlights an important aspect of all nonfiction writing—an obligation for the writer to maintain an ethical regard for the reader and represent the experience in a way that is true, not always to facts and chronology, but to experience. It is a thought Carolyn Ellis uses to define autoethnography in a piece I will analyze in Chapter 7 .

I also use this discussion as a time to ask people if they have ever journaled, blogged, or maintained Twitter or Facebook feed. We discuss the importance of capturing important moments in our lives for personal reasons while also tailoring them to elicit a response from an audience.

As a warm-up exercise to practice showing and not telling, I ask students to draw on a specific memory and try to re-create it vividly for the reader. I keep this first assignment short and vague, to allow them to approach it informally and organically. They are encouraged to use their five senses as well as to incorporate any remembered dialogue in the writing. This work should be conducted in weeks five to seven.

The Memory Assignment

Briefly describe a memory that is important to you. Try to avoid explaining why the memory is important and focus on showing the importance of the memory. Use your five senses, and include dialogue, if possible.

Sometimes these initial memory pieces will be very difficult for the students to share. Reading them aloud can be the first time a student cries in the classroom, since when asked to remember something, many students will reflexively turn to difficult or painful experiences, such as the death of a family member or a humiliating incident. On the other extreme, this writing can be very generic and predictable and involve topics such as being accepted to college or any event of achievement that might appear in a college application essay.

This is an important exercise because it often demonstrates that while a memory seems significant to an individual writer, it will not necessarily seem important to the audience. Students may have accomplished something very impressive, but there must be a point of entry for an audience to understand the value of this achievement as a topic for reading. Also, when writing about difficult situations that are intensely personal, we have to find ways to allow an audience to relate to the narrative.

I use the results of the shorter assignment as a way to introduce more details for students to consider as they write longer memory pieces. In extending their writings, students will need to take the time to explore the subtext of the memory, the details, persons involved, dialogue and settings to demonstrate the meaning for the reader. The longer memory essay will be a chance to practice these skills. Using the examples students generate in the shorter assignments is an effective way to point out strengths and weaknesses before moving forward in the writing. I invite students to use the ideas from this short assignment in the longer essay or to feel free to choose a completely new topic for the extended essay. I emphasize focus on the creation of characters for their first extended essay. The focus will be on incorporating the skills they have worked on in their deep observation, perspective and self-as-character assignments.

Examples of these essays can be found in Chapter 12 .

The Importance of Creating Scenes and Using Dialogue

One way to strengthen the showing-and-not-telling aspect of writing is to create scenes. In creating a scene, it is important not just to describe what is seen with the five senses, as students practiced in their observation exercises, but also to let the people in the scene speak for themselves. This is not always possible, but using dialogue is an important skill to master, and the extended memory assignment will be a great place to try it out. This will be the first time students consider how they can create a perspective that readers will trust by incorporating other voices.

Using dialogue in nonfiction writing for the first time can be tricky and unnerving. Re-creating conversations, allowing people’s speech to come through, using direct quotes or overheard language can help students see that it is important not only to present their take on the event but to let readers experience the direct voice of the players. This will allow a piece to seem more balanced in perspective. Readers are often turned off if writers are not able to present a measured view or confident voice. Students need to convince the reader that they are truthful, believable, worthy of trust. By allowing more voices to speak, they are insinuating the veracity of the situation through no insistence of their own. A very small amount of well-chosen dialogue can go a long way.

As with anything involving memory, it is important to urge students to be as accurate as possible when using speech. Including speech in projects researched in real time is easier than writing about dialogue in the past. Encourage students to do their best to re-create moments of speech accurately and to keep voices consistent.

Researching Your Own Experience

The memory essay is also a good place to introduce the idea that many memoir writers research their own pasts. Since memory is fallible, interviewing others who were present at important events or speaking to multiple people directly involved in the memories can be an important part of the writing. It will come as a surprise to many students that writing about their own lives can require research.

That research won’t necessarily be essential for this essay, but it is important to inform the students that for extended and complicated pieces they intend to publish, drawing on multiple sources for accuracy can be informative and essential to ensure the veracity of details including timelines, locations, and players.

The Memory/Character Essay Assignment

A memory is not necessarily something that happened a long time ago. Rather, a memory is something that is past, something that is reflected upon. It can be something that happened last week or a moment from your childhood, but for our purposes, it is something that has happened before this assignment was given.

For this assignment, choose a memory that has multiple levels of meaning for you. It is important not just to create a narrative about one particular thing but to think about the complexities of the memory and why you find it worthy of exploring in an essay. Subtext and intention are crucial.

You should re-create details as accurately as possible, even talking to friends or family members who might help you remember aspects of a memory. All good writers of memoir research their own histories. This is because memory is fallible and other people might be able to shed important light on our experiences.

Focus especially on re-creating characters, yourself included, who were involved in the memory. Use dialogue to let these characters speak, and choose details to convey the nature of relationships.

As with the shorter memory assignment, students will often use the memory/character essay to explore something that has become a part of their rehearsed life narrative. It may be one of the hardest pieces for them to revise, since it may be based on a story they have repeated many times. Getting students to reconsider a somewhat fixed narrative to demonstrate its potential for expansion can be challenging. As with the shorter piece, the range of experiences is likely to go from the very sad and tragic to the mundane. It will be important for the students to share these pieces with one another through the drafting process so they have models to consider for expansion of their ideas. This also will allow them to see that memory does not have to be something very large to be important and can be very small if treated properly.

With the assignments in this chapter, you might have some setbacks in the quality of the students’ writing in initial drafts. When asked to put together all of the elements for the first time in larger, extended pieces, students may feel overwhelmed. The extended memory essay is the first time they are attempting to employ everything they have learned simultaneously. It is natural, therefore, that this will be difficult for them. By working from invention to draft to final version and possibly revision in peer groups and one on one, students will gain confidence and start to master the voice they will need for the next series of assignments.

Teaching Autoethnography: Personal Writing in the Classroom Copyright © by Melissa Tombro is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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100 Ways to End a Story (with examples)

But where do you stop? Which sentences are the last sentences?

In this post, we’ll look at 100 ending lines from a diverse group of authors, both novelists and short story writers. We’ll identify how different types of endings contribute to a story. And, ultimately, we’ll determine how the author crafts a sense of satisfaction in their closing phrases.

After collecting many, many endings, the following categories emerged:

Cliffhanger

Normally, writers think of using a cliffhanger at the end of a chapter. But they absolutely can be used at the end of a story or book, for a few reasons:

• Pique the reader’s interest for the next book in the series
• Uses the “in media res” technique to go out on a high point, rather than dribble to a conclusion
• Extend the reader’s imagination beyond the story, so they finish hungry for more, and curious about the future of the storyline. It keeps the story alive, rather than closing it off.

“Lie back, Michael, my sweet.” She nodded briskly at Pauline. “If you’ll secure the strap, Nurse Shepherd, then I think we can begin.”

— Ian McEwan, “Pornography”

“I turned and looked past the neighborhood kids — my playmates — at the two men, the strangers. They were lean and seedy, unshaven, slouching behind the brims of their hats. One of them was chewing a toothpick. I caught their eyes: they’d seen it too.

I threw the first stone.”

— T. C. Boyle, “Rara Avis”

“Then his father walks toward the door stooping slightly and B stands aside to give him room to move. Tomorrow we’ll leave, tomorrow we’ll go back to Mexico City, thinks B joyfully. And then the fight begins.”

– Roberto Bolano, “Last Evenings on Earth”

Whatever you’re ending on, it’s something you want to emphasize, right? So heighten that emphasis with repetition.

Here’s an exercise: take all the examples below and try rewriting them without any repetition. Just say the key word once. Doesn’t have the same ring, does it? In fact, it makes it seem like the middle of the story, just another unremarkable line.

It takes two or three repetitions before there’s a finality to it, like a bell tolling for the conclusion of the story.

“His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”

— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

“Big flakes not falling in orderly rows, a dervishing mob that swirls, lifts, goes limp, noiselessly spatters the glass. Snow obscuring the usual view greeting me when I’m up at crazy hours to relieve an old man’s panicked kidneys or just up, up and wondering why, staring at blank, black windows of a hulking building that mirrors the twenty-story bulk of ours, up prowling instead of asleep in the peace. I hope you’re still enjoying, peace I wish upon the entire world, peace I should know better by now than to look for through a window, the peace I listen for beside you in the whispering of our tangled breaths.”

— John Edgar Wideman, “Microstories”

“I imagined the story of a girl made human. I imagined Tallie’s grave, forsaken and remote. I imagined banishing forever those sentiments that she chastened and refined. I imagined everyone I knew sick to the point of death. I imagined a creature even more slow-hearted than myself. I imagined continuing to write in this ledger, here; as though that were life; as though life were not elsewhere.”

— Jim Shepard, “The World to Come”

“Sometimes all humanity strikes me as lovely. I just want to reach out and stroke someone, and say, ‘There, there, it’s all right honey. There, there, there.’”

— Sandra Cisneros, “Never Marry a Mexican”

“That would be the man we’d spare. That would be the man who’d drop to his knees in the mud and, in the cloud of gun smoke, raise his hands in surrender. That would be the man who’d tell us who he was, where he’d come from and why.”

— Will Mackin, “Crossing the River No Name”

“In the desert, in the lightning, in his crumbling duplex, in the field, in the many rooms of night, Wild Turkey wakes up, he wakes up, he wakes up.”

— Arna Bontemps Hemenway “The Fugue”

“Then sometimes I get up and don my robe and go out into our quiet neighborhood looking for a magic thread, a magic sword, a magic horse.”

— Denis Johnson, “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden”

“Your time’s not up. Your time’s not even close to being up.”

— David Means, “The Chair “

Sense of Sound

Good writers understand that sensory details are the lifeblood of fiction. And just as images are crucial ways to end a story (that’s the next section), you can also use sound as a way to dial up or dial down the end of your story.

A crescendo ends a story well because it makes the story’s end feel climatic. While a decrescendo eases you out of the story, giving a sense of closure to the reader. 

If you look at the examples below, especially Jones and Bausch, you see how they use sound as a stand-in for a character — a deceased mother’s footsteps echoing through time, a wife’s domestic duties that make the husband feel estranged from her.

So sound can often a way to wrestle with complex character conflicts.

“And even when the teacher turns me toward the classrooms and I hear what must be the singing and talking of all the children in the world, I can still hear my mother’s footsteps above it all.”

— Edward P. Jones, “The First Day”

“The mastiff’s howl tears through the estate, setting off the usual thousand and twelve strange little circuses that disrupt the science of slavery.”

— Patrick Chamoiseau, “The Old Man Slave and the Mastiff”

“A long silence and then, slowly, applause, soft at first, then waves of it, which on this old recording came across like a pounding rain. I was shivering. There was no question we were under water.”

— Daniel Alarcón, “The Bridge”

“She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of a cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, the musky odor of pinks filled the air.”

— Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“He shut his eyes. Listened to the small sounds she made in the kitchen, arranging her flowers, running the tap. Mary, he had said. But he could not imagine what he might have found to say if his voice had reached her.”

— Richard Bausch, “Aren’t You Happy for Me?”

Descriptions

When you end a story, you’re helping the reader transition from the world of the story back into the real world. Sometimes that transition is easier if the last lines of the story don’t deal with the main characters, or plot, or themes, but instead talk about the universe of the story.

Namely: description. Try to describe a particular thing in the story which resonates with the main themes of your story. If you’re writing about father/son relationships, then end on the description of your character seeing a father walk with his son.

If you have a character sacrificing everything in the hopes of a big payday, then show that same idea in the animal world, for instance, pelicans divebombing for fish, like the Taylor Antrim example below. 

“They’ve forgotten, or left on purpose, a few things they don’t need, things I hold on to. Pictures the girls drew, shells they picked up at the beach, the last drops of a perfumed shower gel. Shopping lists in the faint, small script that the mother used, on other sheets of paper, to write all about us.”

— Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Boundary”

“His eyes went upward, looking again for some civilizing sign — better yet, for the rectangular peak of his building, like the needle of a compass, the darkness down here, the shadow of his life up there. Friedrich and Lana resting up for tomorrow. Paulette waiting for him posed on all fours in bed. They were trying. He was trying. But above him there was just sky and trees in all directions.”

— David Gilbert, “The Sightseers”

“And in the morning when the sun came up and the colors of the hill and its valley accelerated from gray and brown to red and green to white, the company agent gathered stones for his family and they breakfasted on snow.”

— Jim Crace, “The Prospect from Silver Hills”

“Boom-splash. The pelicans take these kamikaze plunges into the water. The way they hit, not one should survive — but of course they all do. They come up with their beaks full of fish.”

— Taylor Antrim, “Pilgrim Life”

Unspoken Dialogue

Unspoken Dialogue is very similar to a cliffhanger. While a cliffhanger refuses to resolve plot , this Unspoken Dialogue technique refuses to resolve the dialogue .

There’s tension when a character wants to say something, but doesn’t.

If you’re trying to learn how to write good dialogue, it’s always important to remember that characters don’t often say exactly what they’re thinking, or even what they want to say.

Why does this work to conclude a story? Well, it highlights the weakness of the character, how they are not doing what they want to be doing. They are holding back, and perhaps they will regret it later. 

“I wanted to say she’d lied to us all, she’d faked it about the dog, as if it mattered whether the animal spoke, as if love were about the truth, as if he would love her less — and not more — for pretending to talk to a dog.”

— Francine Prose, “Talking Dog”

“Tell more, more, I want to say to Eduardo but do not say because he seems ready to leave. Tell me about Garcilaso and about how things went well for him.”

— Joseph O’Neill, “The Sinking of the Houston”

“They are always very interested to hear that you don’t read music. Once, you almost said— to a sneaky fellow from the Daily News, who was inquiring— you almost turned to him and said Motherfucker I AM music. But a lady does not speak like that, however, and so you did not.”

— Zadie Smith, “Crazy They Call Me”

“She begins to scream, her face turning even redder, you cannot hear or understand what she is saying but you know she hates your father, hates you, hates many, many people. You want to help your father, the man who has only recently come back into your life, clean-shaven and speaking of God, you want to run toward him and defend him and protect him, but now he is holding out his hand to the man again, he has taken off his hat and is holding it out toward the man. The woman is now silent. The man takes the hat, a brand-new fedora with a feather, and puts it on his head. And looks at you, as if for the first time.”

— Justin Bigos, “Fingerprints”

Asking Questions

A question is one of the most popular ways to end a story (look at all the examples below!). I could even add more quite easily, like the question to conclude Margaret Atwood’s book, “Handmaid’s Tale”: “Are there any questions?”

But if you use this technique, I would recommend following these three guidelines:

• Must not have an easy answer
• Must resonate with the main themes of your book
• Must strike an emotional chord (look at the Russel Banks example). 

“But why are you invested in other people’s stories? You too must be unable to fill in the gaps. Can’t you be satisfied with your own dreams?”

— Antonio Tabucchi, “A Riddle”

“And who would she tell her stories to while he was gone? Who would listen?”

— Russel Banks, “My Mother’s Memoirs, My Father’s Lie, and Other True Stories”

“Then in the space of a wet blink, the gap between the trees would close and the mown grass disappear, a violent indigo cloud would cover the sun and history, gross history, daily history, would forget. Is this how it would be?”

— Julian Barnes, “Evermore”

“I imagined John-Jin’s girder underneath me. I wondered, in my rage, if you took that one piece away, would everything fall?”

— Rose Tremain, “John-Jin”

If a blind man could play basketball, surely we…If he had known Doc’s story would it have saved them? He hears himself saying the words. The ball arches from Doc’s fingertips, the miracle of it sinking. Would she have believed any of it?”

— John Edgar Wideman, “Doc’s Story”

“Safer and better to have no freedom, maybe, but no, you wouldn’t say that. The humming stopped when he flicked the light switch by the door. No you wouldn’t say that, would you? In the dark of the hall he could not see his way; he went toward the vague light of the front window with one hand on the wall. No you wouldn’t but what would you say?”

— Madison Smartt Bell, “Witness”

“Who was it that thought up that idea, the idea that had made today better than yesterday? Who loved him enough to think that up? Who loved him more than anyone else in the world loved him?

— George Saunders, “Puppy”

“Where was she now, this Clara? What had become of her, this ardent, hopeful girl in her white dress, surrounded by her family, godparents, friends, that her Bible should end up in a Goodwill bin? Even if she no longer read it, or believed it, she wouldn’t have thrown it away, would she? Had something happened? Ah, girl, where were you?”

— Tobias Wolff, “Bible”

“He reached for the telephone and dialed his home number. ‘Rhona,’ he said in the quaking receiver. ‘Would you like to see the juvenile tuataras? The babies?’”

— Barbara Anderson, “Tuataras”

“But for the other man, who would be watching the night fall around the orange halo of the street lamps with neither longing nor dread, what did the future offer but the comfort of knowing that he would, when it was time for his daughter to carry out her plan of revenge, cooperate with a gentle willingness?”

— Yiyun Li, “A Man Like Him”

You can’t write good fiction without making your characters feel things (and your reader feel things). So here, we see authors ending stories by showing the final arc of their character’s emotions.

Some of these characters have emotional epiphanies, feeling something for the first time. Others have felt it all along but perhaps only now have been able to admit it to themselves. 

But if character arc and character change are essential for stories, it makes sense that their emotional journey would conclude the narrative.

“Even so, I sat there gazing up at the granite outcrops of Spruce Clove streaked in evening gold, I had an almost overpowering sense of being looked at myself, stared at in uncomprehending astonishment by some wild creature standing in the doorway.”

— James Lasdun, “Oh Death”

“I stand here shameless in ways he has never seen me. I am free, afloat, watching somebody else.”

— Bharati Mukherjee, “A Wife’s Story”

“She has done an outrageous thing, but she doesn’t feel guilty. She feels light and peaceful and filled with charity and temporarily without a name.”

— Margaret Atwood, “Hairball”

Paul Harding, who won the Pulitzer Prize for “Tinkers,” said that contrast is the essential technique of music, painting, and storytelling. 

Below, we see contrasts between:

• chill cats and stressed-out humans
• the busyness of day with the solitude of night
• the flowers of love with the chants for the dead. 

When you contrast something, you throw it into higher relief. A happy person doesn’t seem exceptionally happy until you see her side by side with a depressed person.

Contrast offers that extra emphasis — much like repetition — to make the reader feel satisfied that this ending resolves the story.

“She hears a distant siren, the wind in the trees, the bass beat from a passing car. Please, she thinks. Please. She is about to go inside for a flashlight when she hears the familiar bell and then sees the cat slinking up from the dark woods, her manner cool and unaffected.”

— Jill McCorkle, “Magic Words”

“Susanne sat on the couch, surrounded by her family while out in the night, partner to the extraordinary, Roy held a shovel made for digging deeper in the dirt.”

— Samantha Hunt, “The Yellow”

“By day she entertained a constant stream of visitors. At night her father kept vigil beside her bed.”

— Jennifer Haigh, “Paramour”

“Violins and lit candles revolved in the sky. Leo ran forward with flowers outthrust. Around the corner, Salzman, leaning against a wall, chanted prayers for the dead.”

— Bernard Malamud, “The Magic Barrel”

Marcel Proust’s memories brought back by the taste of a madeleine are probably the most famous memories in literature, but stories have always used memory to make readers nostalgic, evoke the senses, and make us feel the bite of time.

When you end a story with memory, it ties the whole story together — past is united with the present.

In some ways, ending a story with a memory is the opposite of a cliffhanger — memory looks at the past, while a cliffhanger anticipates the future.

Memory allows the writer to skip around in time to find the perfect character moment to end the story — which could be much, much earlier in their life, or only a few years back, or only last week.

Perhaps in the character’s current life, there’s no event that perfectly captures the emotion you’re going for, so mine the past for it. 

“I no longer remembered the day we married. Only the day I knew we would, those moments with my heart warm and rapt, the silent promise of the frozen world, the elm chafing in its coat of ice.”

— Karen Brown, “Galatea”

“…She will be secretly glad, relieved that time is passing, that Paris is again becoming nothing more than a word she might see on the cover of a glossy magazine or on a cable travel channel, certainly not a place where she once spent a few breaths of her life, and she will hardly remember the way the Seine sliced the city in half, a radiant curving knife, merciless and perfect.”

— Victoria Lancelotta, “The Anniversary Trip”

“He remembers waking up the morning after they bought the car, seeing it, there in the drive, in the sun, gleaming.”

— Raymond Carver, “Are These Actual Miles”

“Who will remember?”

— Alex Rose, “Ostracon”

“She will see the garden that day and the tears shining in her sister’s large blue eyes and remember her unanswered cry for help.”

— Sheila Kohler, “Magic Man”

“And as for the scar, I’m glad it is not on Nyamekye. Any time I see it I only recall one afternoon when I sat with my chin in my breast before a Mallam came, and after a Mallam went out.”

— Ama Ata Aidoo, “A Gift from Somewhere”

The Epiphany

The epiphany ending is the classic story ending. After everything the character has gone through, what have they learned?

This is the chance to show that the journey has not been in vain, that your characters have changed and learned and grown because of this journey. 

Epiphanies are particularly useful for short stories, rather than novels, because short stories have less runway for plot. So you can’t have a huge murder or birth or world catastrophe solved at the end of a short story (the way most novels do), but you can show the character realizing something about themselves, others, or the world. 

“He closed the door carefully, not slamming it. Clea and I waited an appropriate interval, then turned and clung to each other in a kind of rapture. Understanding, abruptly and at last, just what it takes to be a King. How much, in the end it actually costs.”

— Jonathan Lethem, “The King of Sentences”

“He was shot five or six times, but being such a big man and such a strong man, he lived long enough to recognize the crack of the guns and know that he was dead.”

— Nathan Englander, “The Twenty-Seventh Man”

“Years later, as an adult, I realized that what my little sister had confided to me in a quiet voice in the wind cave was indeed true. Alice really does exist in the world. The March hare, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat— they all really exist.”

— Haruki Murakami, “The Wind Cave”

“— How d’you like my lion? Isn’t he beautiful? He’s made by a Zimbabwean artist, I think the name’s Dube.

— But the foolish interruption becomes revelation. Dumile, in his gaze — distant, lingering, speechless this time — reveals what has overwhelmed them. In this room. The space, the expensive antique chandelier, the consciously simple choice of reed blinds, the carved lion: all are on the same level of impact phenomena undifferentiated, undecipherable. Only the food that fed their hunger was real.”

— Nadine Gordimer, “Comrades”

“Sarah looked at him with an intent, halted expression, as though she were listening to a dialogue no one present was engaged in. Finally she said, “There are robbers. Everything has changed.”

— Joy Williams, “The Farm”

“And that was it. Somehow it didn’t really matter, finding out. Two years earlier, it would have changed my life. But on that day, I suppose the only thing I felt was some small measure of contentment for her: that he had, indeed, come back for her, just like she always said he would. They were different after all, destined to be together. I thanked Allen for bringing her things, watched him ride away on his motorcycle, and went inside to have dinner with my father.”

— Jess Walter, “Mr. Voice”

“And then, as if he had forgotten that she had already moved on to other things, as if we were still sitting across from each other, deep in one of our conversations without beginning, middle, or end, Room wrote that the last thing that had surprised her was that when Ershadi is lying in the grave he’s dug and his eyes finally drift closed and the screen goes black, it isn’t really black at all. If you look closely, you can see the rain falling.”

— Nicole Krauss, “Seeing Ershadi”

“‘No problem,’ the waitress sang, ‘no problem at all,’ replacing the girl’s fork, bending to snatch the soiled one off the floor. Smiling hard but not making eye contact with anyone. When she retreated leaving Richard alone with his son and the crying girl, it occurred to him, with the delayed logic of a dream, that the waitress must have thought he was the bad guy in all this.”

– Emma Cline, “Northeast Regional”

“But I remember you. I remember when we were so close that people couldn’t tell us apart. I remember your parents’ phone number, your neatly folded cutoffs and your constant fear of not being special. I remember when you started claiming that fictive characters are way better than friends, since they are less annoying, more interesting and never die. You stopped returning my calls. When I needed you the most you were nowhere to be found and when I died you started seeing me everywhere. On sidewalks, in shop windows, on balconies. So you decided to write my story. You dress me in cutoffs. You force extreme amounts of apple juice into me. You retell the most painful week of my life as it were a never-ending bachelor party. And it is not until the end. About. Here. That you realize what you’ve done. I’m not bitter, Miro. I’m just dead.”

— Jonas Hassen Khemiri, “As You Would Have Told It to Me (Sort Of) If We Had Known Each other Before You Died”

“It took some time for me to understand that Elida’s body had not been satiated on mine, that she wasn’t purring because she swallowed my heart.”

— Louise Erdrich, “The Big Cat”

“I used to think that all my emotions belonged in the past, to history, but I know that I yearn for the future just like everyone else. Even as life draws to close, I realize that I have never understood myself completely.

But now it certainly is too late to do more, to be more, in this lifetime.”

— Zhang Jie, “An Unfinished Record”

I am born at noon the next day. My mother tells me this is the first thing she did: she checked the clock. I am still attached to her when she looks. We are not yet two when she begins to keep track of me, the seconds I have been alive and then, after she cuts through the cord herself, cleaving my body from hers with a kitchen knife, the seconds I have been on my own.

This is what women do, she says.

By which she means she understands that one day I will leave her too. Lift off the ground, think myself beyond gravity.

—Aria Beth Sloss, “North”

The Unhappy Ending

The ending is one of your last chances to make the reader feel something. And while the happy ending is always a classic crowd-pleasing, I find that it’s often easier to make the reader feel sorrow.

Happiness is a tough sell, particularly when writing short stories. I think if you were going to survey 1000 short stories, a lot more would end sad than would end happy. Novels are probably the opposite — many more end happy than sad. 

It’s mainly because of the length. When you’re writing short, you don’t have the time to acheive happiness without it feeling cheesy. While in the space of a novel, the happy ending feels earned. 

“Now they were both dead, and the city was dirty and crumbling, and the man I was traveling with was sero-positive, and so was I. Mexico’s hopes seemed as dashed as mine, and all the goofy innocence of that first thrilling trip abroad had died, my boyhood hopes for love and romance faded, just as the blue in Kay’s lapis had lost its intensity year after year until it ended up as white and small as a blind eye. ”

— Edmund White, “Cinnamon Skin”

“Things are as they have always been. Whoever seeks a fixed point in the current of time and the seasons would do well to listen to the sounds of the night that never change. They come to us from out there.

— Amos Oz, “Where the Jackals Howl”

“She would be invisible, of course. No one would hear her. And nothing has happened, really that hasn’t happened before.”

— Margaret Atwood, “Wilderness Tips”

“There were women around Jesus when He died, the two Marys. They couldn’t do anything for Him. But neither could the men, who had all run away.”

— Robert Olen Butler, “Mr. Green”

“I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.

In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign to her newborn.

Baby, drink milk.

Baby, play ball.

And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby, come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.”

— Amy Hempel, In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried

“It was not a happy life, but it was all that was left to them, and they took it up without complaint, for they knew they were powerless against some Will infinitely stronger than their own.”

— Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods

“What would burst forth? A monkey’s paw? A lady? A tiger?

But there was nothing at all.”

— Lorrie Monroe, “Referential”

The Waiting Ending

What does it mean when you have a character waiting at the end of a story? Well, they are expecting the future. But the reader can’t go to the future with them.

It signals a small break in the storyline: this current story has ended, but the future one has not begun. It’s like the character is about to step into narrative limbo.

A “waiting” ending is definitely a quiet ending. It takes advantage in a lull in the storyline to bow out and conclude. 

If you write a waiting ending, pay careful attention to subtext:

• Perhaps this character will be waiting a long time. 
• Perhaps they are the waiting type of character — a passive character. 
• Perhaps waiting signals a sad ending — what they wanted most didn’t arrive by the end

“I measured the passing of time by the progress of the fires in the distant north. My old man gave me daily updates, and I pretended to listen. Five hundred, a thousand, two thousand fires. After a month they had burned out, and I was still waiting.”

— Daniel Alarcón, “The Idiot President”

“He looked toward the eastern sky. It seemed he’d been running a week’s worth of nights, but he saw the stars hadn’t begun to pale. The first pink smudges on the far Ridgeline were a while away, perhaps hours. The night would linger long enough for what would come or not come. He waited.”

— Ron Rash, “Into the Gorge”

“The ice plant was watery-looking and fat, and at the edge of my vision I could see the tips of my father’s shoes. I was sixteen years old and waiting for the next thing he would tell me.”

— Ethan Canin, “The Year of Getting to Know Us”

“Wait here, wait here!” he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a cluster of light she saw in the distance ahead of him. “Help! Help!” he shouted, but his voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried him nowhere. The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.”

— Flannery O’Connor, “Everything that Rises Must Converge”

“Walking to the end of the hallway by the kitchen, he seated himself against the wall. He sat there quietly, waiting for Case to emerge.”

— Bradford Tice, “Missionaries”

“Joshua wondered what they would do now. The need he felt was like when he stepped on the sliver of glass, and his mother pulled at the skin with her tweezers, and pushed them inside, until she found the glass. It was like when she told him to get ready, to squeeze his father’s hand. Clenching his teeth, closing his eyes, waiting.”

— Mike Meginnis, “Navigators”

Figurative Language & Poetic Devices

Aristotle said that comparison of two unlike things was the essence of genius. If so, the writers below are all geniuses. 

Beauty has its own charm. The examples below use extended metaphors, multiple similes, and other examples of literary devices to cast a spell of beauty over the reader. 

And these comparisons are often symbolic of the characters and the events of the story (for instance, the birds in the Ann Beattie story).

“She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”

— Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Nettie lay there beside him, her breath blowing on his shoulder as they studied the stars far above the field — little pinpoint holes punched through the night sky like the needle holes around the tiny stitches in the quilting. Nettie. Nettie Slade. Her dress had self-covered buttons, hard like seed corn.”

— Bobbie Ann Mason, “Wish”

“Angela was remembering all this, and feeling such a strong surge of sorrowful loss, and at the same time she was studying with interest the miraculous rescue of St. Placidus from drowning, painted on the wall in the sacristy in San Miniato. St. Placidus was rolling fatalistically amid the blue waves of his pond while one of his comrades, endowed with special powers by St. Benedict, came walking across the water to save him. In the picture it looked like such a harmless little point, carved into the earth as neatly as a circle of stamped-out pastry, or a hole cut into the ice for fishing.”

— Tessa Hadley, “Cecilia Awakened”

“He looked at his wife, whom he loved, whom he looked forward to convincing, and felt as though he were diving headfirst into happiness. It was a circus act, a perilous one. Happiness was a narrow take. You had to make sure you cleared the lip.”

— Elizabeth McCracken, “Thunderstruck”

“In the flood of flame-colored light their flesh turned coral.”

— Helen Simpson, “Heavy Weather”

“Louisa sat, prayerfully numbering her days, like an uncloistered nun.”

— Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, “A New England Nun”

“When she turned back into the empty room she looked as though youth had touched her on the lips.”

— Edith Wharton, “The Angel at the Grave”

“In time, his breathing changed, and hers did. Calm sleep was now a missed breath — a small sound. They might have been two of the birds she so often thought of, flying separately between cliffs— birds whose movement, which might seem erratic, was always private, and so took them where they wanted to go.”

— Ann Beattie, “In Amalfi”

Brene Brown’s TED talk about vulnerability is one of the most watched TED talks of all time. Her thesis is simple: people respond to vulnerability.

It holds true in real life just as it does in fiction.

When a character keeps a secret, reveals a secret, or makes a confession, the reader feels closer to them. Even if we disagree with them, we feel like we know them. 

“The secret died with him, for Pavageau’s lips were ever sealed.”

— Alice Dunbar-Nelson, “The Stones of the Village”

“Very often I sold my blood to buy wine. Because I’d shared dirty needles with low companions, my blood was diseased. I can’t estimate how many people must have died from it. When I die myself, B.D. And Dundun, the angels of God I sneered at, will come to tally up my victims and tell me how many people I killed with my blood.”

— Denis Johnson, “Strangler Bob”

Powerful Dialogue

Here’s some advice on how to write a good dialogue ending:

• Pay attention to subtext . If any place in your story needs dialogue with a double meaning, it’s the ending. It should have a plain interpretation, but also resonate with some deeper issues of plot.
• Make sure it’s the protagonist who gets the final word . In almost all cases, it’s the protagonist or one of the main characters who speak last. A minor character wouldn’t make sense.

“Please come back inside mom! Please get out of the street!”

— Antonya Nelson, “Chapter Two”

“Darling, the angels have themselves a lifetime to come to us.”

— Edwidge Danticat, “Night Women”

“Nemecia held a wineglass up to the window and turned it. “See how clear?” Shards of light moved across her face.”

— Kirstin Valdez Quade, “Nemecia”

“But I had my eyes closed. I thought I’d keep them that way for a little longer. I thought it was something I ought to do.

‘Well?’ He said, ‘Are you looking?’

My eyes are still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.

‘It’s really something,’ I said.”

— Raymond Carver, “Cathedral”

“My dear,” replied Valentine, “has not the Count just told us that all human wisdom is contained in the words ‘Wait and hope!”

— Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“There were lots of old people going around then with ideas in their heads that didn’t add up — though I suppose Old Annie had more than most. I recall her telling me another time that girl in the Home had a baby out of a big boil that burst on her stomach, and it was the size of a rat and had no life in it, but they put it in the oven and it puffed up the right size and baked to a good color and started to kick its legs (Ask an old woman to reminisce and you get the whole ragbag, is what you might be thinking by now.)

I told her that wasn’t possible, it must have been a dream.

‘Maybe so’ she said, agreeing with me for once. ‘I did used to have the terriblest dreams.’”

— Alice Munro, “A Wilderness Station”

A Character in Denial

The reader gets a sick sense of delight when final lines reveal something a character refuses to acknowledge.

“Maybe it wasn’t such a terrible idea. Maybe it could make them happy. He found a mark on Miriam’s shimmering pale dress and followed it through the trees.”

— Sarah Kokernot, “M & L”

“His gut told him that his mother-in-law knew what had happened that day in the car. Come to think of it, she had never once mentioned the day of the accident to him. She had never even asked about it. His mother-in-law turned her cold gaze back to the plant. To put his crazy thoughts to rest, Oghi told himself that he just really liked plants. He could not think why that might be.”

— Hye-young Pyun, “Caring for Plants”

The Unknown

These final lines endear readers as characters reveal what remains mysterious:

“But as I write this it occurs to me that I don’t know where I ever got that idea. In fact, I have no memory of whether the desk arrived to me with the drawer locked. It’s possible that I unknowingly pushed in the cylindrical lock years ago, and that whatever is in there belongs to me.”

— Nicole Krauss, “From the Desk of Daniel Varsky”

“’Listen to me,’ he said, expelling all his breath with the words. Two ragged breaths later he tried again, but Jill moved her hand from his forehead to his mouth. ‘Help me,’ he said into her fingers. But the words were whispered, and she mistook them for a kiss and smiled.”

— Angela Pneuman, “Occupational Hazard”

“He knew he was at the beginning of something, though just then he couldn’t say exactly what.”

— Bret Anthony Johnston, “Encounters with Unexpected Animals”

“I do not know where this voyage I have begun will end. I do not know which direction I will take. I dropped the package on a park bench and started walking.”

— Bharati Mukherjee, “The Management of Grief”

If anywhere it’s time to tell the truth, it’s the ending.

Have your characters spill their guts and reveal everything at the end. Or have the narrator offer wisdom or the naked truth. 

“It’s the kind of impossible story that holds a family together. You tell it over and over again; and with the passage of time, the tale becomes more unbelievable and at the same time increasingly difficult to disprove, a myth about the life you carry.”

– Greg Hrbek, “Sagittarius”

“As the manual often states, it’s my future. And it’s the only one I get.”

— Diane Cook, “Moving On”

“I’ve begun to appreciate just how much work parents invest in their children, and wives in their husbands; it’s only fair for the investor to become the beneficiary.”

— Katie Chase, “Man and Wife”

“…I survive. It’s only one thing. But it’s also everything.

Pick yourself up.

Start over again.”

— Megan Miranda, All the Missing Girls

“She was knickerless. She was victorious. She was a truly modern female.”

— Nicola Barker, “G-string”

“I can stay. I can lie down. Let the snow fall on my face. Let its hands be tender.

Or I can walk, try to find my way in darkness.

I’m a grown woman, an orphan, I have these choices.”

— Melanie Rae Thon, “The Snow Thief”

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One thought on “ 100 Ways to End a Story (with examples) ”

Excellent collection of endings, types… and quite clear and efficient comments. Thank you.

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How to End a Story: 7 Different Kinds of Endings

by Fija Callaghan

Imagine this: you’re reading a thrilling, breakneck story full of deep thematic resonance and memorable characters. The plot is powering towards its climax, and you’re clutching the pages as the clock beside your bed careens past one o’clock in the morning. And then—! The book suddenly grinds to a puzzling, disappointing, and ultimately unsatisfying halt because the writer didn’t know how to end a story the right way.

Don’t be that writer.

Knowing how to end a story is one of the most important, yet undervalued, skills in a writer’s toolbox. Let’s look at why a satisfactory ending matters and how to find the right ones for your own stories.

Why is the ending of a story important?

The ending of a story matters because it’s the final note that the reader will walk away with. Your story’s ending shows the reader what to feel as they leave your story world behind and return to the real one, what lessons to learn from and incorporate into their own lives, and what to expect from you, the author, as they wait impatiently for your next book.

Knowing how to write a good story ending is the key to “closing the deal” with your reader.

How are story endings connected to genre?

You might have noticed that some of your favourite books end in the same way. If you read a lot within the same genre, you might even be able to predict the ending before it happens! This is because certain literary genres come with predetermined expectations based on the patterns we see most often.

You don’t have to use the classic ending for your own story, but it’s good to have an idea of what your readers will be expecting when they open your book. Familiarising yourself with their expectations will also help you subvert them in new, creative ways.

Here are some of the classic literary genres you’ll see most often, and the endings that usually go with them.

1. Romance endings

In romance novels, we’ve been conditioned to look for happy endings. From the opening scene through all the clever plot twists and machinations, everything in the book is working towards a happily ever after for the two romantic leads.

The protagonists go through their own character arcs as they discover more about themselves and their relationship with the world, but ultimately they’ll end up doing pretty okay by the story’s conclusion.

This doesn’t mean you can’t challenge genre norms and give your main characters a bittersweet ending or leave their love story unresolved; however, in this case you might end up moving away from writing a traditional romance and towards something more like literary fiction (we’ll look at that below too).

2. Mystery endings

The golden rule of mystery novels is “expect the unexpected.” If the story you’re writing follows a clear, logical path from start to finish and lays everything out for the reader, they may come away with a frustrating experience. Mysteries and thrillers will be filled with plot twists that keep readers turning pages to find out who done it, or why.

These types of stories aren’t a great match for open or unresolved endings. Even though the reader wants to be surprised, they also want to know exactly what happened and what’s going to happen next. Did the murderer go to prison, escape, or die trying? Did the protagonist uncover the truth and bring the criminal to justice?

There is no right or wrong answer, but the answer does need to be a definitive conclusion rather than something left to interpretation.

3. Horror endings

Horror novels are more flexible than mysteries. They might have a happy or unhappy ending; they might answer all the remaining questions, or they might leave some open to keep the reader mulling things over after the book is closed.

Horror stories are particularly well-suited to ambiguous or unresolved endings. You’ll probably recognise this in some of your favourite horror films or TV series finales:

The heroes finally defeat the monster and celebrate with an extra-cheesy pizza and plans for the future they now have. In the corner of the screen, the dirt where the monster was buried begins to shift ominously. Roll credits.

By leaving a few lingering questions, you make a lasting impression on your reader.

4. Tragic endings

Tragedies are defined by their sad ending. Unlike mysteries, which are filled with twists and turns, the tragic ending should feel inevitable; the hero, through their own weaknesses or choices, brought it on themself.

Tragedies have fallen somewhat out of fashion in contemporary literature (probably because they’re kind of a downer to read), but Shakespeare loved writing them. These types of stories are designed to teach us something about human nature and what happens when we let our weaknesses control us.

Tragedies might use a resolved ending or an implied ending, leaving the final conclusion of the story to happen off the page.

5. Literary endings

Really, all fiction is “literary.” But when we say “literary fiction,” we usually mean books that are marketed as “contemporary,” “women’s fiction,” or realistic historical fiction. This type of story tends to be introspective and thematic, and is suited to both long-form novels and short stories.

In a short story, you generally won’t have the space to flesh out an ambiguous or unresolved ending. These are best suited to a circular ending—for instance, if your story begins and ends in the same location (we’ll take a closer look at circular endings below!)—or a clear ending that show how your main character has undergone some personal transformation.

If you’re writing a novel of literary fiction, you have more room to play with ambiguous, unresolved, or extended endings—so long as they support the broader theme you’re trying to communicate through the work.

We’ll look at all of these types of endings in more detail below!

What about sci-fi and fantasy?!

We didn’t forget, don’t worry! But science fiction and fantasy are actually more marketing genres than literary genres—they tell a reader to expect elves, robots, sorcerers, portals to other worlds, etc, etc. But , they don’t tell you much about what to expect from the plot. You can have a fantasy novel that’s also a romance, mystery, horror, tragedy, or literary story.

Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes is a good example of a book that subverts expectations by cramming every possible high fantasy trope into a work of literary fiction.

This means that a sci-fi or fantasy book can comfortably close with any one of the seven story endings we’ll look at below.

7 different ways to end a story

When it comes to figuring out how to end your story and tie up its lingering loose ends, there are a few different paths you can take in your writing. Let’s look at the different types of endings in stories you’ll find throughout literature, so you can find the perfect ending that works best for you.

1. Circular ending

Sometimes called a tie-back ending or a full circle ending, a circular ending brings the story “full circle” back around to where it began—with subtle differences that show how your characters have grown within their world.

Most stories that follow the Hero’s Journey story archetype have a circular plot structure with a tied ending. The protagonist goes on a grand adventure, learns and experiences new things, and then returns to the life they once had, but changed.

In larger works, such as a novel, your circular elements might be a place where your story starts and stops, a thematic idea that your protagonist was working to understand at the beginning of the story, or a metaphor that has taken on new meaning.

2. Resolved ending

Sometimes called a “tied ending,” a resolved ending ties up all the loose ends in your story. Shakespeare was a big fan of resolved story endings; so was Jane Austen. Romance readers have grown to expect a resolved ending, which usually involve everyone living happily ever after (except the villain, who slinks off into obscurity).

Your resolved ending doesn’t necessarily have to be a happily ever after, but it should give the reader a sense of conclusion and fulfillment. For now, at least, everyone’s story has reached its finish line and there’s nothing left to say.

This means tying off all your artfully crafted subplots, addressing all of the dramatic questions raised at the beginning of the story, and ensuring that any lingering secrets have been laid to rest. If your main characters deserve a happy ending, this is the moment they finally reach it.

Giving your story a resolved ending doesn’t mean that your characters’ lives won’t go on beyond the last page in the book. It means that this particular chapter of their lives has come to a close, and now they can embrace a blank slate from which to begin a new one.

3. Unresolved ending

Unresolved story endings leaves loose threads so that the story can continue after the book is closed. This is especially popular with books in a longer series. When you end your story on a cliffhanger , your readers remain engaged with your story until they get a chance to read what happens in the next installment.

Even when you use an unresolved ending to close your story, it should still have that essential sense of completion by the end. You wouldn’t finish the whole story the way you’d finish a chapter. By the time you reach the ending to a story, the major, central conflicts of the plot should be resolved and your players should reach a resting place between battles.

However, an unresolved ending will leave some questions unanswered, and raise new ones about the future of your characters and their world. It’ll always give the reader the feeling that the story continues after the last page.

4. Ambiguous ending

The purpose of an ambiguous ending is to make your readers think. Like an unresolved ending, ambiguous story endings leaves some lingering questions at the end of the book.

The difference is that with an unresolved ending, the reader needs to wait to get the answers from the writer later on. With an ambiguous ending, the readers can reflect on the story and look for answers within themselves.

The best ambiguous endings offer two or more equally conceivable possibilities. For example, your story may end with a separated couple agreeing to meet for coffee. The readers are left wondering: Do they get back together? Or do they get the closure they need so they can move on? Both are within range, and it’s up to the reader to decide what they believe the real truth to be.

Ending the story ambiguously is also a great way to bring your readers together. It will make them want to compare ideas in forums, discussion groups, or with friends. Ambiguous endings engage the reader in a creative and cognitive way.

5. Unexpected ending

Commonly known as the “twist ending,” this ending gives the story one dramatic, final turn as it reaches its close. This works like a literary sleight-of-hand—you tell the reader, “Look, here, at this perfectly incongruous hat!” while your story mechanics are working to create something much more powerful and surprising.

Even though your story ending may be unexpected, it still has to make sense within the world you’ve created. This means laying the groundwork in bits and pieces through plot, character, and setting in a way that slips beneath the reader’s notice, but that they can easily refer back to in their memory so that everything makes sense as they consider the unexpected ending of your story.

This type of ending is the cornerstone of mystery novels. Through genre convention, readers have grown to expect a twist ending that will shock and delight them, but in a way that feels like a natural progression of the story. Done skillfully, the unexpected ending can pack a huge emotional punch and secure you a fan for life.

6. Expanded ending

Also known as an epilogue, this is a second, smaller story built out of your story’s ending. This gives the writer space to explore what happens after the story’s close, and to address any last questions the readers may have.

Do the hero and heroine ever see each other again after they save the world? Does the little girl really grow up to be a doctor like she always wanted? Does the misogynistic young pilot ever grow out of his flaws and become a better person? These are all things that you may not have space for inside your story, but you still want to share with the reader to give them a fuller understanding of your story world. An expanded ending will give your readers the answers they’re craving.

The expanded story ending gives your readers a little more time with your characters before they have to say goodbye. As readers, we understand that their story goes on even after our role of observer has ended. The expanded ending isn’t meant to be a resolution to your plot, but rather a window into what the next chapter of life holds in store for the characters we’ve grown to love.

7. Reflective ending

A reflective ending happens when the protagonist is able to look back at their experiences and consider them through the lens of their growth over the course of the story. They may ask themselves, “Was it really worth it, in the end? Did I do the right thing? How different does the world appear, now that I know the things I do?”

This creates one final, intimate connection with the reader as they explore these ideas together.

This reflection might happen if the character is looking back at an event from their youth, or if their circumstances have changed dramatically through the events of the plot. This type of ending is popular in fantasy and science fiction—for instance, if the character returns to the “real world” after a period of intense fantastical experiences—as well as in creative nonfiction, where the author may be reflecting on some formative events in their real life.

How to find the ending to your story

Now that you know the seven major ways to end a story, how do you decide which one is right for you? Knowing how to end a story is one of the most important steps in finding your story’s trajectory . Let’s look at three ways to write a story ending as you work through your plot from its opening scene to its powerful last lines.

1. Start with the end in mind

Many writers begin with an idea of how their story ends, and build their plot around it. This is particularly true for murder mysteries, where many writers will identify the crime they want to write about, and then form the rest of the story around clues leading up to it.

In other genres such as romance you may have an idea of where you want your characters to end up, and then you’ll spend the rest of the time figuring out the best ways to bring them there.

Starting with the end of your story already in mind is useful for keeping your writing on track and not getting pulled away from the story’s path. You already know that your characters are going to end up together, that they’re going to find the buried treasure in the end, or that they’re going to vanquish the forces of darkness that have risen up against them.

Knowing where your story is going to lead takes away some of the pressure, so that you can enjoy maneuvering your characters through obstacles and life lessons before they reach the finish line.

2. Match your ending to your character arc

Since all story is born out of character , part of your story planning will involve looking at the ways your character is going to learn and grow over time. Often, this will help you see where they need to end up.

For example, if your protagonist is avaricious and sacrifices his relationship with his family to excel at his job, you may decide that by the end he’ll need to have shuffled his priorities and learned the value of what really matters in life. This creates a natural character arc to carry your story from beginning to end.

In a romance, you may have a character who has spent their life disenchanted by love after watching their parents’ messy divorce. Therefore, a natural ending to their story may be that they learn how to avoid their parents’ mistakes and take a chance on a healthy, happy relationship.

By exploring what your character needs, the inevitable ending to their story will become clear.

3. Let the ending surprise you

Some writers find they work best if they explore their story as they write. As in life, the events of a great story may be things we could never have predicted.

As you move through the events of your plot, you may find that your characters take on a life of their own and pull you in directions you didn’t expect.

The great thing about this method is that you can be as fluid as you like; no one ever said you have to write every page in the proper order. As you discover new things about your story world and get a clearer and clearer idea of what the ending is going to look like, you can go back into the early stages of your story and lay the groundwork.

If you decide to incorporate an unexpected twist into your ending, or the people you had planned on ending up together wound up being completely wrong for each other after all, you can return to earlier scenes and gently shift things around so that your ending looks like a natural progression of everything that came before.

Neil Gaiman famously (and wisely) said, “The process of doing your second draft is a process of making it look like you knew what you were doing all along.”

Go out with a bang or a whisper, but go out the right way

With so many different ways to end a story, and so much riding on your story’s big finish, deciding how to end a narrative can be a little intimidating.

Knowing how to write a good ending is essential in finding success as a storyteller, but fortunately, we’ve got your back. With these tips, tricks, and examples, you’ll find that figuring out how to end a story can be the most fun and rewarding part.

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How to Memorize an Essay

Last Updated: January 24, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Christopher Taylor, PhD . Christopher Taylor is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Austin Community College in Texas. He received his PhD in English Literature and Medieval Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. There are 9 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 124,921 times.

Memorizing an essay is a great way to ace tests, rock presentations, and increase your overall knowledge. If you want to memorize an essay word for word, take things slowly by studying short parts one at a time. Memorization techniques such as visualization and physical cues can help you recall this information on demand. Of course, sometimes you don’t need to memorize things exactly. You may find it more useful to memorize the main ideas or important quotes instead.

Learning Each Part of the Essay

• Use a partner to test you on what you've memorized. If you miss a word or forget a line, they can prompt you by telling you the next word or two.
• You might also want to arrange to practice in front of an audience of a few people. This will help to add some pressure, which may be beneficial to you later.

• For example, you might study it for 15 minutes and take a 10-minute break before studying for another 15 minutes.
• Try writing out the essay once or twice. This can improve your memory. [7] X Research source
• Avoid cramming the night before. Memorizing something in 1 session is not the most effective way to learn it. Repetition in small chunks will help more than cramming the essay all in 1 long session.

Recalling Information

• For example, the first part of the essay might be about tiger conservation, so you might visualize tigers as you go through this part. The second part may be about their habitat, so you might think about a jungle.

• For example, if the main parts of the essay are about family, cooperation, and communication, you might imagine a photograph (family), a table (cooperation), and a telephone (communication).
• When you need to recall the essay, imagine yourself walking from the photograph to the table and then to the telephone in the proper order.

• Pacing can help improve recall. Some people even find doing a simple dance to be useful as they try to memorize the essay.

• Practice hand gestures with your speech. Put certain gestures at specific spots in the essay.
• If you are allowed to use flashcards, you might write the basic outline on a series of cards. Glance down at these as you go along.
• You might ask a friend in the audience to give a signal if you are forgetting a line.

Remembering the Main Ideas of an Essay

• When you need to remember the essay, you can redraw the chart to help you remember all the different pieces you need to recall.
• You can also draw images in your chart or sketch out the main events of the essay in comic form.
• ↑ https://www.stevenaitchison.co.uk/how-to-memorise-an-entire-essay-or-speech/
• ↑ https://www.improvememory.org/blog/how-to-improve-memory/memorization-techniques/how-to-retain-information/
• ↑ https://www.bw.edu/Assets/conservatory/wellness/memorization-tips.pdf
• ↑ https://www.nyfa.edu/student-resources/7-easy-monologue-memorization-tips/
• ↑ https://www.themuse.com/advice/4-ways-to-memorize-a-speechwithout-sounding-like-a-nervous-robot
• ↑ https://effectiviology.com/external-memory-cues/
• ↑ https://collegeinfogeek.com/flash-card-study-tips/
• ↑ https://zapier.com/blog/best-book-note-taking-system/

Community Q&A

• Sleep and a healthy diet can improve your memory overall. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 1
• If you need to present the essay, try practicing in front of family and friends. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• Record yourself reading the essay out loud and listen to it repeatedly Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

• Cramming the essay the night before may not help you remember the entire essay. It is better to start early. Thanks Helpful 16 Not Helpful 4

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About This Article

Memorizing your essay can be a great way to nail your test without having to think about it on the day of. Try to learn small chunks, like a paragraph or a few sentences, at a time since they'll be easier to remember. You can also try reading your essay out loud to remember it faster. If you find memorizing the whole essay too difficult, break it down and memorize only the main points. Then, you’ll be able to write your essay around them on the day of your test. If you need to remember quotes, try writing them on flashcards and memorizing them one at a time. For more tips from our Teaching co-author, including how to visualize your essay in a memory palace to help you remember it, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Opinion: Why we must keep the memory of D-Day alive

What we’ll fight for is who we are..

(Louis Weintraub | AP) Members of an American landing unit help their comrades ashore Utah Beach during the Normandy invasion, June 6, 1944.

Day by passing day, the Greatest Generation is coming toward its end. D-Day, June 6, 1944, had more than two million Allied personnel on the move across Operation Overlord, and today perhaps a few thousand veterans remain.

In 2021, Harry Parham, believed to be the last Black combat veteran of D-Day — about 2,000 Black troops landed that day — died at 99. Last July, Leon Gautier, the last surviving French commando at the Normandy landings, died. In December, it was Maureen Sweeney, the Irish weather observer whose reports of storms over the Atlantic changed the course of D-Day. In April, it was Bill Gladden, who had been part of the British Sixth Airborne Division’s glider landing on that day and had hoped, at age 100, to survive to return to Normandy, France, for Thursday’s 80th anniversary.

As we mark the final passing of those who won that war, it’s easy to get caught up in gauzy romanticism and lose sight of how the Axis powers unified the free world against them and showed Americans, specifically, what we are capable of.

Every serviceman headed to Normandy was handed a “Pocket Guide to France” that read, in part: “We democracies aren’t just doing favors in fighting for each other when history gets tough. We’re all in the same boat. Take a look around you as you move into France and you’ll see what the Nazis do to a democracy.”

This election year it is worth asking what we are doing with the legacy that the Greatest Generation defended and bequeathed to us. American freedom has always been imperfect — a nation seeking, generation after generation, to be better, more equal, more inclusive and still more free. It is a story of hard-fought rights and bloodily defended liberties that each generation of Americans has handed down to the next, a vision for a future in which each successive generation will improve upon the past.

We now face the very real question of whether America will embrace a vision of a country less free and less democratic, more divided and more unequal. It would be a step backward unlike almost anything else in American history.

We can hold on to the past to be reminded of what America, and its allies, were once able to achieve. D-Day was a titanic enterprise, perhaps the largest and most complex single operation in human history — an effort to launch a force of more than a million men across the English Channel on more than 3,000 planes and more than 7,000 ships; to methodically transport entire floating harbors, a herculean secret project known as the Mulberries, as well as 300,500 gallons of drinking water and 800,000 pints of blood plasma, a stockpile carefully segregated, as mandated at the time, between white and Black donors.

The day, fought across five beaches and a roughly 60-mile-wide front, is too vast to comprehend and, in that sense, is best understood at the level of the individual. Take the story of Albert Mominee serving with the 16th Infantry Regiment. He was a slight 28-year-old from Southbridge, Mass., who had cleared the Army’s five-foot height minimum by a mere inch. Two years into his military service, D-Day would already be his third foreign invasion.

He was among the older of the troops at the time; many of the “veteran” sergeants on D-Day were just in their early 20s, while the paratroopers and soldiers they commanded were often still in their teens. The coxswain of LCT-589, Edward Bacalia, known as “Bugs,” was 17 years old. “We owed our skins to Bugs’s seamanship, too, that day,” recalled his crew mate Martin Waarvick. “How about that: 17 years old and piloting a landing craft onto Omaha Beach on D-Day? Not just once, but twice.”

Pvt. Frank Palys, of the 101st Airborne’s 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment — the regiment whose Easy Company was later immortalized in the mini-series “Band of Brothers” — recalled, “I was just a young kid, like the rest of them, trying to free the world from the Nazis.” Or, as Pvt. Ernest Hilberg, of the 18th Infantry Regiment, put it: “I was doing a job that had to be done, that we were going to get rid of the bastard Hitler.”

What that Greatest Generation fought for on D-Day was noble — the first successful cross-Channel invasion from Britain in history, launched not to subjugate or seize but to liberate a continent darkened by authoritarianism. As the supreme allied commander, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, told CBS’s Walter Cronkite, when they returned to Normandy in 1964 for the 20th anniversary, “These men came here — British, and our other allies, Americans — to storm these beaches for one purpose only, not to gain anything for ourselves, not to fulfill any ambitions that America had for conquest, but just to preserve freedom.”

It took another 20 years for the heroism of what would come to be called the Greatest Generation to be appropriately lionized. For decades, few had spoken openly or boastfully of the fights of World War II. Veterans, ripped early from their already hard peacetime childhoods during the Great Depression, had been deposited back in the country after 1945 flush with hard-earned experience, youthful energy and G.I. Bill cash. They settled into aggressively pursuing their daily lives and an American economic boom that created, as politicians often celebrated, the strongest middle class in world history.

In their adulthoods, they held the line against the Communists and the Soviet Union in the Cold War, again defending freedom from authoritarianism. First Sgt. Leonard G. Lomell, of the Second Ranger Battalion, who had climbed the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc in Normandy to disable a threatening German battery, captured the sentiment of many: “I’ve kept a low profile for 50 years, as have most of my men. We didn’t write articles, books, make speeches or publicize the performance of our duties. We knew what each other did and we did our duty like professionals. We weren’t heroes; we were just good Rangers.”

It was President Ronald Reagan’s speech at Pointe du Hoc in 1984, celebrating the exploits of Lomell and his comrades, that began to properly honor and memorialize the fight of World War II. Follow-on work by writers like Stephen Ambrose, Douglas Brinkley and Tom Brokaw changed forever how history will view the sacrifices of both the living and the dead of World War II.

Mr. Brokaw found himself transformed by his journey at the 40th anniversary through the cafes and villages of Normandy, speaking to veterans who had returned to view the beaches they had fought so hard to capture. “I was deeply moved and profoundly grateful for all they had done. I realized that they had been all around me as I was growing up and that I had failed to appreciate what they had been through and what they had accomplished,” Mr. Brokaw wrote in the introduction of his 1998 book, “The Greatest Generation.”

Now it feels almost trite to label World War II the “Good War,” but, in so many ways, for America it was — arguably the last war America fought that ended with a clear victory, waged against an enemy that united America more than it divided us, the last war that clearly pitted good against evil in the pursuit of the ideals of freedom and democracy, which in today’s America feels ever more elusive, unfortunately controversial, and too often negotiable or situational.

America’s role in World War II was far from perfect — recent years have seen an overdue reckoning with the internment of Japanese Americans, to name just one dark chapter. But it was a war we understood and one that gave meaning to those who fought in it. It was a war for an ideal, where our leaders and politicians asked clearly and confidently for sacrifice for noble reasons.

Across the next few months we will be hearing a lot of argument about what America is and what it isn’t. There’s a simpler answer to that question than many would like to admit: What we’ll fight for is who we are. And, as we look ahead, we must decide if we’re still as willing today to fight for democracy as the generation who stormed Normandy was 80 years ago.

Garrett M. Graff is a journalist, a historian and the author, most recently, of “When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times .

Donate to the newsroom now. The Salt Lake Tribune, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) public charity and contributions are tax deductible

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3 simple ways to improve memory and combat mild cognitive impairment

The strongermemory program targets older people, but the principles work at any age, experts say.

By Lois M. Collins

Nancy Trant is standing in front of a whiteboard, talking about her fear of heights — not ladders, of course, but vast expanses like the Grand Canyon, which was “breathtaking” but frightening without the benefit of something to hold onto. That leads to other fear-filled tales as 16 older adults and a class facilitator at the Tenth East Senior Center in Salt Lake City begin to share stories.

Harvey Boyd tells a hair-raising tale of driving a truck on a steep switchback road so twisty and narrow that an inattentive driver could plunge off one side or scrape along the other. He had offered to drive a truck up that road to camp on a mountain biking trip. A woman he didn’t know who rode along in the truck was on the drop-off side and was so terrified she kept trying to climb over him. He had to hold her back with one hand while steering with the other, and couldn’t stop for fear the vehicle would stall.

Gayle Tippets describes being stuck on the water in a boat where sharks circled. “I was thinking about how I would taste to a shark,” she says with a little shiver.

They’re sharing memories.

And that’s what brings this group together on Thursday afternoons for a class called StrongerMemory, a program that was pioneered at the Goodwin Living Center in Virginia but is now being used in many programs that serve older people, including in Salt Lake County Aging, which has three senior centers with the classes going right now.

The program is built around the idea that if folks will do three simple 10-minute practices every day, their focus will sharpen and they’ll engage parts of the brain that are key to memory and recall. Despite the three tasks’ almost childlike simplicity, they’re said to work at any age, triggering more activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain.

• Read aloud every day for 10 minutes.
• Write by hand for 10 minutes.
• Do simple math fast for 10 minutes.

The goal is to do all three daily and if you can figure out how to do them in a way that engages more senses, it’s even better, class instructor Annie C. Cox, a certified health education specialist for Salt Lake County Aging, told Deseret News.

You don’t have to take a class to benefit from doing the tasks. But there are some advantages.

Tackling mild cognitive impairment

Rob Liebreich and his mom, Wendy, had both started to notice that she was forgetting things and repeating things she’d already said. When she drove, she sometimes got turned around. She was showing worrisome signs of mild cognitive impairment, which in some cases advances to full-blown dementia. The younger Liebreich was working at a Seattle assisted living center at the time — he’s now the president and CEO of Goodwin Living. He went searching for solutions, concluding that he needed to find a way for his mom to stimulate her prefrontal cortex to bolster recall and processing. At a conference, he learned about reading aloud, writing by hand and simple math.

She agreed to give them a try and they helped her.

As the Goodwin Living blog reports, “She wasn’t repeating herself nearly as often and her memory sharpened. After three months, her math skills improved, along with her ability to focus. She has continued her commitment to daily mental exercises, and in the years since she began this steady practice, Wendy has been able to pick up new skills like learning to play Mahjong, birding and playing better bridge.”

Rob Liebreich was so taken with the results that he wanted to broaden the reach, trying it with the residents with whom he worked in assisted living. With help from a former teacher with occupational therapy experience, they created a program. Liebreich’s goal was simple: Delay cognitive decline and give families more time to build memories together.

The curriculum was taken to George Mason University for validation in a pilot project. The quest to help Wendy Liebreich launched what’s now called the StrongerMemory program, a free brain health resource for families from Goodwin Living.

The program is now offered in many places and anyone interested can also download the program book if they want to work it alone at home or there’s no class offered nearby. George Mason tested it as a 12-week program; Salt Lake County Aging boiled it down to 10. Programs are given great flexibility.

Back to basics

Trant takes a lot of classes at multiple senior centers, delighted by learning and growing. This one, with its three tasks, reminds her of when she was in grade school. Her brain was busy developing and absorbing back in first grade, she said, and she figures this lights up the brain the way it did all those years ago, which has to be good.

Cox has unpacked the elements of the program and how they’re supposed to work, first in an orientation session the first week of each class, and also in an interview with Deseret News. Here’s why the three tasks are believed to help:

Reading aloud : There’s no set assignment for reading; people can read whatever they want. One couple, who didn’t want to be named, said they write from the prompts in the StrongerMemory Workbook — by hand, of course — and then read what they wrote aloud to each other. The woman said she’s learned a lot of things she didn’t know about her husband that way.

Cox said reading comprehension improves when you read aloud. You don’t skip words. Your mind doesn’t wander. “Just those basic things that we learned in elementary school reinforces memory recall.”

Studies back up the memory-enhancing effects of reading aloud, particularly for children and older adults. A study in Australia divided groups of kids ages 7 to 10 into read-aloud and read-silently groups and gave them a list of words. The read-aloud group recognized 87% of the words, compared to the silent readers’ 70%.

The Speechify blog offers one of the best explanations of why reading aloud is good for the brain: “The act of reading aloud triggers a dual memory process. As you read, you engage the visual memory associated with the written words on the page. Simultaneously, the act of vocalizing the text activates the auditory memory, associating the spoken words with their meanings. This combined effort strengthens memory retention, making it easier to recall information later. Through consistent practice of reading out loud, individuals can enhance their ability to retain and remember details, fostering a more robust memory.”

Some participating in the StrongerMemory program read scripture aloud, others novels. People can read a book together over the course of days over the phone. You can read to your dog or cat if it feels awkward just reading aloud.

Simple math: People think math should be challenging, Cox said. Not in this case. The math is almost flashcard style, super easy and fast. That’s what clicks the memory into gear. Harder math involves other parts of the brain with other goals. Same with things like puzzles and sudoku. This math exercise is about memory. And the workbook has lots and lots of math problems, which get a little harder as you go, but not too much.

All math has underpinnings in memory. Children memorize basic addition and learn their times tables. Revisiting simple math calls up those memories and uses the prefrontal cortex as well. It also uses implicit memory, according to Komodomath.com . Per the article, “Implicit memory is the unconscious memory of skills and how to do things, such as playing guitar or riding a bike. These memories are typically acquired through repetition and practice, and are composed of automatic skills so deeply embedded that we’re no longer aware of them.”

When children master the skills, they move from explicit memory into implicit memory, which creates math fluency.

Older adults employing those skills strengthen their memory and their focus.

Writing by hand: The workbook has 250 prompts for people who can’t decide what they want to write. Those prompts often key into memory, too: Did you have a favorite job? What was it? Or what are some of your greatest achievements?

A new study in Frontiers in Psychology is among the most recent to show that writing by hand is key to learning and memory. Taking notes by hand, as Deseret News reported on the findings, “stimulated more electrical activity in the brain across regions that control movement, vision, sensory processing and memory.”

Cox said some of the folks in the classes she teaches keep journals, which is great. One woman likes to copy Bible verses. But there are some who complain they can’t think of anything to write. What matters is forming the letters with your hands, remembering how to write, as opposed to the up-down of key tapping on a computer.

Doing all three things regularly helps memory. Having a class setting is additive, says Cox, who notes the importance of social connection and the chance to check in. It’s also additive because she offers a few tricks or ideas to help folks stay on track. Last week, they discussed motivation and how to break a task down so it’s manageable. This week’s tip was to “live today the way you want to be.” Cox reminds them that you can’t just eat healthy foods temporarily, then stop and expect the benefits to last. It’s the same with these practices. Next week, they’ll talk about nutrition.

The exercises themselves get done at home, but the classes forge some connections. Then they engage in remembering, which is how they got on the topic of fear.

Kathy Musgrove said she’s an old hand at forgetting, with memory problems since she suffered a big fall and required dozens of surgeries. It’s a wonder she lived, she said, so she takes the class to boost her recall.

Man Diep and her husband, Dat Phan, take the class together. She saw her own mom suffer from memory loss, so she’s doing the reading and writing and math as a preventive tool, Diep said.

Ann Cheves said she’s “looking for new ways of living, of dealing with life.”

Judy Bramlage has a very specific goal in mind: She wants to increase her memory, because she loves doing genealogy, but she has trouble easily capturing all the information she finds. She hopes it will be easier to hold onto multiple facts as she works through the family tree.

They all want stronger brains and they say they’re already seeing some results.

You can download the booklet free or buy a copy for $17.50 by visiting Goodwinliving.org . The workbook doesn’t promise everyone will see cognitive improvement. But there are no negative side effects, either, it adds, “so give it a try!”

To learn more about the Salt Lake County class and whether there’s one upcoming in your area, contact Cox by calling 385-468-3295. The class is free for those enrolled as a member of a senior center. That’s just a matter of filling out paperwork and membership is free. For others, including those younger than 60, the cost of a day pass is $2.

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Meet the two legendary mets’ beer-slinging vendors who have been around almost as long as the team.

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These two have had an Amazin’ run.

A pair of beer-slinging Citi Field vendors said there’s no secret what’s made them Mets stadium legends with close to a century of service between them – like a Dwight Gooden Uncle Charlie, it’s all in the delivery.

“After 10,000 events, you don’t have to practice,” said Raymond Acceta, who along with his colleague Bobby Lee has been selling suds and food to the Mets faithful since the mid-70s. That’s a good 20 years before current star first basemen Pete Alonso was even born for those keeping track.

“Get your hot dogs here! Coney Island chickens! Ice-cold beer! Who’s hungry?” is Acceta’s go-to pitch.

Instead, Lee relies on the classic: “Hey, cold beer! Get your ice-cold beer!” as he lugs the hefty cooler through the concourse level seats to the right of home plate.

“I’m a graduate of VTI: the Vendor Training Institute,” Lee joked, adding that the success of a concessions salesman really boils down to their voice – and the Flushing native has a New Yorker bellow on his side.

Ya gotta believe in the duo’s credentials: Acceta and Lee are third-generation stadium vendors who each started their craft at age 15, and whose shouts are now as familiar to Mets diehards as the roar of the 7-train and the never-ending “Let’s Go Mets” chant.

The Post spoke with the vendors before a recent game against the Los Angeles Dodgers on Wednesday, getting an inside peek into their 99 years combined at Citi Field and its predecessor Shea Stadium that have been packed with ups and downs and really downs.

Much like the Amazins themselves, Acceta and his concessions colleagues huddled up for a pre-game pep-talk, where they reviewed how many fans were in the stands that night, where the focus for the selling should be and how they could improve from the previous homestand’s numbers.

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Also like the Mets, the vendors, working for food company Aramark, adhere to a strict ranking system where the most senior hocker gets their choice of beer, candy or hot dogs to sell.

With a firm foothold as No. 9, Acceta consistently opts for all three. Every game, he takes his hefty rolling cart to Section 405 on the stadium’s sixth-level pavilion, where the crowds are quieter but always come hungry.

And the Old Mill Basin native – who has been selling beers at baseball games since before he could drink them – has earned the peace of the upper deck. Acceta worked through the ’70s recession, a World Series win, a stadium change, a global pandemic and plenty of rowdy crowds.

“There’s some good stories,” Acceta said – an understatement, to say the least.

“Once at Shea, I was selling beer and I had a beer bucket over the head. Foul ball came and I was actually able to catch the foul ball in the bucket. Few and only times that’s ever happened! I went back down to see, ‘Oh look at that!’ and next thing I know, I saw a fan’s hand grab it and take the ball out.”

It runs in the family

Acceta started his five-decade-long career at just 15 years old – when legendary pitcher Tom Seaver played his penultimate season as a Met before taking a nine-year hiatus from the team – but his intrigue with the sport started at a much younger age.

Working in concessions is something of a family affair for the Accetas: The “family history started in 1921” when his grandfather started working as a groundskeeper at the then-New York Giants homefield of the Polo Grounds, influencing his father to take up a job as a vendor until the Manhattan stadium closed in 1963. His grandfather retired, but his dad moved right to Shea Stadium.

“My father was taking me into the stadiums with him to show me the craft a little bit,” Acceta recalled.

What started as a side gig to pay for his New York University School of Dentistry education turned into something much greater – and even shaped the course of his life to come. When a young Acceta realized the doctor path wasn’t right for him, a fellow vendor helped him realize his true passion as a special needs educator.

He worked 12 months out of the year at the Brooklyn developmental disability school – while still showing up to the dozens of home games to sell his “Coney Island chicken” – which he says is a leftover from the New York Dodgers days when vendors used the strange phrase to draw in curious crowds just to sell them a Nathan’s hot dog.

That connection may be lost on some – and Bobby Lee says he doesn’t understand it, despite also clocking in 50 years as a concessions vendor, most of that time alongside his buddy Acceta.

Lee, like Acceta, is a third-generation vendor whose grandfather worked for the Yankees and whose father at the Polo Grounds. He vividly remembers his first day working a Jets football game at Shea Stadium as a 15-year-old in 1974, selling Sun Dew Orange Drink for $0.35.

He stuck with the gig through 50 years, two other careers – first as a mailman and then as a New York City firefighter – and somehow even moving to Kansas City, Missouri, a dedicated journey that puts the most dramatic super-commuters to shame.

“The Mets have basically 12 homesteads a year, ranging between five and 10 games. Each January schedules already out I start looking at the best prices on flights and work my magic. If you look at my phone, I got all my flights set for the year,” Lee said, boasting that he’s only missed one game thanks to a flight delay in his 22 years of making the 2-and-a-half hour commute.

Mets memory makers

The tedious trip is worth it for Lee, who cherishes the “camaraderie” of his fellow vendors and the relationships he’s forged over the decades with patrons.

He recalled one game during his 15-year stint hocking cotton candy when a young lady approached him and asked him for a picture. Although surprised, Lee obliged before asking her what the picture was for.

“Every Sunday my dad would come to the game and buy cotton candy from you,” the young woman told Lee.

“There’s people that we hear from all the time. If you miss a couple of games, people come up and ask, ‘What are you doing? Is something wrong? Is everything OK?'”

Plenty of Lee’s joyous memories have become synonymous with the Mets, and his time working the stands has also served as a reprieve from his time in the FDNY.

The retired firefighter was one of hundreds who rushed to the destruction zone after the Twin Towers came down, an experience he described as “unimaginable” and “pretty brutal.”

Baseball games across the nation were canceled for five days until the Mets reignited the season with an emotional game that saw Marc Anthony sing the National Anthem, Liza Minelli belt “New York, New York” and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani honored with a standing ovation.

“It’s pretty tough,” Lee said. “Every anniversary, the stadium always does something here and it’s always a little tough for me because I’m usually coming from the ceremony in the city.”

The hero retired in 2002 and soon after moved to Missouri, but has continued coming back several times each year, the trips providing a good excuse to also catch up with his FDNY buddies.

When asked about a family memory from his time as a vendor, Lee offered up two: watching the notoriously shaky upper deck at Shea Stadium bounce fervently during a World Series game, and being the first one to respond when a foul ball sailed into the stands and smacked a young boy square in the face.

“The best thing they did for us was putting those nets up. We don’t have to worry about ducking anymore,” Lee said.

Game changers for a changing game

There are few who would be better to tell the story of how New York City baseball evolved over the last five decades than Acceto and Lee.

The duo has watched the roster change dozens of times over, the drinking age change to 21, COVID-19 put an end to the use of cash and, of course, the Mets move into an entirely new stadium in 2009.

The move was bittersweet for the pair, both of whose fathers also hocked beer in the very same stands: “You never like to see your memories leave,” Acceto said aptly.

The massive physical environmental switch also spurred an emotional one, however, that has encouraged a more invigored energy inside Citi Field.

One of the biggest, but most subtle, changes is the type of people who come to watch the Amazins’ play. With more interactive games for fans to play and goodies to munch on, the venue now attracts much more than typical baseball fans.

“It’s not just a ball game anymore. There are so many opportunities to do so many different things in the stadium,” Acceto said. “It’s more than just coming to the game, getting a beer and watching the game.”

With more years put in than most others would dream, Acceto and Lee still have a few more years in them of carrying their hefty beer bins and carts around – but both agree that retirement is on the horizon.

What it will take for the pair — who have each retired from their civil service jobs — to call it quits at Citi Field, however, is a mystery.

“I always said I would stay until they won a World Series. Of course, they did that and I said, ‘Okay, I’ll stay for the Subway Series,’ ‘I’ll stay utill they build the new stadium, ‘I’ll stay for an all-star game,'” Lee said. “I’m still here!”

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The Sports Report: Lakers aren’t going to rush into hiring a new coach

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Howdy, I’m your host, Houston Mitchell. Let’s get right to the news.

Go beyond the scoreboard

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From Dan Woike : With the NBA Finals set to begin Thursday in Boston, the Lakers still don’t have a head coach and, according to people with direct knowledge of the search who are not authorized to speak publicly, are in “no rush” to end the process.

While the internal messaging remains that the process is ongoing and any finality is premature, speculation continues to be focused on JJ Redick and the strong likelihood he ends up as the team’s next head coach.

People familiar with the search said Redick, his representatives and the Lakers have not had conversations about contract details.

On Tuesday, the Athletic reported the Lakers “are zeroing in on JJ Redick as the frontrunner” for their coaching vacancy.

Redick, according to The Times and multiple other outlets, had been considered a strong favorite for most of the last month, with his name tied to the Lakers repeatedly by front office and coaching insiders around the league during the early stages of the search. Internally, the Lakers have maintained they’ve been conducting a thorough search with conversations involving several candidates.

Redick is working the NBA Finals as a television analyst, and it’s widely believed that is playing a role in how everyone will proceed in the closing stages of the search.

The Times reported last week that the team held in-person meetings with New Orleans assistant James Borrego , who impressed staffers across multiple departments.

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From Jack Harris : As a reporter noted the considerable amount of conversation dedicated to the scandal surrounding Shohei Ohtani’s ex-interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, this year, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts cut the query off mid-sentence.

“I know we’ve talked about this a lot…” the question began.

“Yes,” Roberts quipped, flatly. “We have.”

After Tuesday, Roberts, Ohtani and the entire Dodgers organization are hoping they won’t have to waste such breath again.

Hours before the Dodgers lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates, 1-0, in yet another quiet day at the plate for the two-way star, Ohtani at least seemed to receive some official closure off the field in the scandal involving Mizuhara.

Shohei Ohtani formally cleared by MLB of any involvement in gambling

Ippei Mizuhara, ex-interpreter for Shohei Ohtani, pleads guilty to fraud in betting case

‘A mini-bulldog.’ Why Gavin Stone’s breakout season is reminding Dodgers of Orel Hershiser

Dodgers box score

MLB standings

Zach Neto had a tiebreaking two-run double in the seventh inning, and the Angels won their first home series of the season with a 4-2 victory over the San Diego Padres on Tuesday night at Angel Stadium.

Luis Rengifo drove in an early run for the Angels, who will win a series for the first time in 10 tries after back-to-back victories over the Padres. The Angels improved the majors’ worst home record to 9-21 after holding San Diego to three runs in 18 innings.

Adam Mazur pitched six innings of one-run ball in a strong major league debut for the Padres, who have lost three straight for only the second time since April. Manny Machado had an early run-scoring single, but San Diego’s powerhouse lineup struggled against the Angels.

Angels box score

NBA PLAYOFFS SCHEDULE

All times Pacific

Thursday at Boston, 5:30 p.m., ABC Sunday at Boston, 5 p.m., ABC Wed., June 12 at Dallas, 5:30 p.m., ABC Friday, June 14 at Dallas, 5:30 p.m., ABC *Monday, June 17 at Boston, 5:30 p.m., ABC *Thursday, June 20 at Dallas, 5:30 p.m., ABC *Sunday, June 23, at Boston, 5 p.m., ABC

*-if necessary

From Gary Klein : He was a two-time All-American at Michigan and the offensive most valuable player in the Wolverines’ national championship game victory over Washington .

So running back Blake Corum had pedigree when the Rams selected him in the third round of the NFL draft.

Yet Corum has gone through the Rams’ offseason program with an attitude that tilted more neophyte than seasoned performer.

“You just have to go in with a humble heart, and the mindset of, ‘I don’t know anything,’” Corum said Tuesday after practice, adding, “I’m going to grow from the good I do and whatever bad I do. … I’m never going to stop growing — so it was easy for me to come in and basically start over.”

NFL trial to begin this week in Los Angeles over Sunday Ticket antitrust claim

From Jeff Miller : He has refused to let it go, the pass that Quentin Johnston , as a rookie last season, most famously failed to catch.

At Green Bay in Week 11, in the game’s final 30 seconds, Johnston couldn’t secure a ball that would have put the Chargers at least in range for a tying field-goal attempt.

One fourth-down incompletion later, their 23-20 loss was official and an underwhelming first NFL season for Johnston crept painfully forward.

On Tuesday, after the team’s latest spring practice, Johnston said he has rewatched the play in recent months as a means of motivation, especially on days when he’s searching for a spark.

“[I’ll] pull it up real quick,” he explained, “kind of got mad at myself again.”

Johnston called the drop “just straight-up unacceptable” as he tries to rebound

From Marissa Kraus : The morale was low on Tuesday after a particularly intense practice at the Galen Center, with Sparks players eyes downcast amid looks of frustration as head coach Curt Miller told them they needed to do better.

With a 2-6 record and a game against the Minnesota Lynx, one of best teams in the league, on Wednesday, the feeling of urgency to improve was palpable.

“We need to work on everything,” first-year forward Cameron Brink said Tuesday. “Physicality, turnovers, the list goes on. But you know, it’s a young team and we are trying to rebuild. We are always going to work our hardest, always.”

That’s just how it is for young teams sometimes. New players bring a period of adjustment for the whole team, and the Sparks are no exception with a young squad that includes two first-round picks from this year’s draft.

Brink and fellow rookie forward Rickea Jackson are going though their own period of adjustment, particularly to the physicality of play in the league. Luckily, they have veteran players who have made the transition to professional ball a bit easier.

“It’s a very physical league,” Jackson said. “Phoenix was physical and Minnesota will be even more physical but I feel like I’ve been adjusting. I might wait a little too long sometimes because in college I would get too physical and then get a lot of fouls so learning that this is a physical league and that’s the way you’re going to get buckets, get screens, get open. Nobody cares that I’m a rookie so I just have to stay strong and be physical back.”

Sixteen-year-old Lily Yohannes scored in her national team debut and the United States defeated South Korea 3-0 in an exhibition Tuesday night.

Crystal Dunn and Sophia Smith also scored for the U.S., playing its second game under coach Emma Hayes.

Hayes was hired as coach last November but remained in Europe to finish the season with Chelsea. She replaced Vlatko Andonovski, who stepped down after the U.S. was knocked out of the Women’s World Cup last summer in the round of 16.

The U.S. also won the first friendly match over South Korea 4-0 on Saturday in Commerce City, Colorado. Mallory Swanson and Tierna Davidson each had a pair of goals.

Hayes will now turn her attention to selecting an 18-player roster for the U.S. Olympic team. The U.S. opens the Olympics on July 25 against Zambia in Nice.

FRENCH OPEN

Novak Djokovic withdrew from the French Open with an injured right knee on Tuesday, ending his title defense and meaning he will relinquish the No. 1 ranking.

The tournament announced the news , saying Djokovic has a torn medial meniscus in his right knee. The extent of the injury was found during an MRI exam a day after Djokovic was hurt during a fourth-round victory against No. 23 Francisco Cerundolo that lasted five sets spread across more than 4½ hours.

The 24-time Grand Slam champion was supposed to face two-time French Open runner-up Casper Ruud in the quarterfinals on Wednesday. Instead, Ruud gets a walkover into the semifinals, where he will face No. 4 Alexander Zverev or No. 11 Alex de Minaur.

NHL PLAYOFFS SCHEDULE

Stanley Cup Final

Saturday at Florida, 5 p.m., ESPN Monday at Florida, 5 p.m., ESPN Thursday, June 13 at Edmonton, 5 p.m., ESPN, Saturday June 15 at Edmonton, 5 p.m., ESPN *Tuesday, June 18 at Florida, 5 p.m., ESPN *Friday, June 21 at Edmonton, 5 p.m., ESPN *Monday, June 24 at Florida, TB5 p.m.D, ESPN

THIS DATE IN SPORTS

1925 — Willie McFarlane beats Bobby Jones by one stroke in the second round of a playoff to capture the U.S. Open. Macfarlane shoots a 291 at Worcester (Mass.) Country Club.

1927 — Johnny Weissmuller sets 100-yard & 200-yard free-style swim record.

1937 — War Admiral, ridden by Charles Kurtsinger, wins the Triple Crown with a three-length victory over Sceneshifter in the Belmont Stakes.

1943 — Count Fleet, ridden by Johnny Longden, wins the Triple Crown by 25 lengths in the Belmont Stakes. Count Fleet goes at off at 1-20 odds in a race with no place or show betting.

1977 — The Portland Trail Blazers hold off the Philadelphia 76ers 109-107 to win the NBA championship in six games. Portland becomes the first team in the 31-year history of the league to win four straight after losing the first two games.

1985 — Steve Cauthen wins the Epsom Derby aboard Slip Anchor and became the only American jockey to win both the English Derby and Kentucky Derby. Cauthen had ridden Affirmed to victory in the 1978 Kentucky Derby.

1993 — Julie Krone guides Colonial Affair to victory in the Belmont Stakes, becoming the first female jockey to win a Triple Crown race.

1994 — Arantxa Sanchez Vicario and Sergi Bruguera produce the best day of tennis in Spanish history. Sanchez Vicario beats Mary Pierce 6-4, 6-4 in the French Open final and Bruguera retains his title by defeating another Spaniard, Alberto Berasategui, 6-3, 7-5, 2-6, 6-1.

1999 — Steffi Graf wins her sixth French Open title and her first Grand Slam championship in almost three years, beating top-ranked Martina Hingis 4-6, 7-5, 6-2.

2005 — Spanish teenager Rafael Nadal beats unseeded Mariano Puerta of Argentina in four sets to win the French Open men’s singles title. The No. 4-seeded Nadal becomes the youngest men’s Grand Slam champion since Pete Sampras won the U.S. Open at 19 in 1990.

2011 — Rafael Nadal wins his record-equaling sixth French Open title, beating Roger Federer 7-5, 7-6 (3), 5-7, 6-1 in the final.

2016 — Novak Djokovic becomes the first man in nearly a half-century to win four consecutive major championships and finally earned elusive French Open title to complete a career Grand Slam, beating Andy Murray 3-6, 6-1, 6-2, 6-4.

Compiled by the Associated Press

Until next time...

That concludes today’s newsletter. If you have any feedback, ideas for improvement or things you’d like to see, email me at [email protected] , and follow me on Twitter at @latimeshouston . To get this newsletter in your inbox, click here .

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Middle East Crisis Gaza Offensive Will Last at Least Through End of Year, Israeli Official Says

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• Mothers of Israeli soldiers serving in Gaza blocking a street in Tel Aviv to call for an end to the war. Oded Balilty/Associated Press
• Smoke rising from an Israeli airstrike on the southern Lebanese village of Khiam, near the Israeli border. Rabih Daher/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
• Awaiting a United Nations Security Council meeting on the war in Gaza. Justin Lane/EPA, via Shutterstock
• A Palestinian boy who was wounded in an Israeli strike receiving treatment at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza. Mohammed Salem/Reuters
• An Israeli army tank is deployed along Israel’s southern border with Gaza. Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
• A power outage in Khan Younis. Mohammed Salem/Reuters

Follow news updates on the crisis in the Middle East .

A senior Israeli official said that the war would last at least through the end of the year.

Israel’s national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, said Wednesday that he expected Israel’s military operations in Gaza to continue through at least the end of the year, appearing to dismiss the idea that the war could come to an end after the military offensive against Hamas in Rafah.

“We expect another seven months of combat in order to shore up our achievement and realize what we define as the destruction of Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s military and governing capabilities,” Mr. Hanegbi said in a radio interview with Kan, the Israeli public broadcaster.

Israeli officials have told the public to expect a protracted campaign that would progress in phases toward lower-intensity fighting. Mr. Hanegbi’s assessment, however, appeared to be at odds with earlier projections by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said in April that the country was “on the brink of victory” in its war against Hamas. In recent weeks, Israeli troops have repeatedly returned to areas of northern Gaza in an attempt to tamp down a renewed insurgency there by Hamas militants.

Israel faces rising pressure to wind down its campaign and reach a cease-fire deal with Hamas that would include the release of hostages held in Gaza. The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has requested arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defense minister; the World Court has ordered Israel to rein in its offensive in Rafah; and the Biden administration has expressed frustration with the lack of a clear Israeli endgame for postwar Gaza.

The outcry has only sharpened in recent days, after an Israeli bombardment — which sparked a conflagration in an area where displaced Palestinians were sheltering — killed at least 45 people in western Rafah, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The Israeli military said the airstrike had targeted two Hamas commanders and that it was looking into what could have caused the blaze.

Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, said the incident demonstrated the dangers and challenges of waging war in a crowded area where Hamas is embedded with the civilian population. And he reiterated the Biden administration’s criticism that Israel has not laid the groundwork for Gaza’s governance and security after the war, and that Israel occupying and controlling the territory would not be viable.

“I think this underscores the imperative of having a plan for the day after because in the absence of a plan for the day after there won’t be a day after,” Mr. Blinken told reporters on Wednesday on a trip to Moldova. “If not, Hamas will be left in charge, which is unacceptable. Or if not, we’ll have chaos, lawlessness, and a vacuum.”

At least 290 Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza and over 3,600 wounded since the ground invasion began in late October, according to military statistics. The military said another three soldiers were killed and three more seriously wounded on Tuesday in Rafah, where Israeli forces have been advancing in a long-anticipated assault.

Over one million Gazans have fled the city in the face of the onslaught, according to the United Nations. Israel has called the operation essential to take out Hamas forces arrayed in the city, while the Biden administration and human rights groups have voiced concern over the plight of the civilians who had sought shelter there.

Over 36,000 Palestinians have been killed since the Hamas-led surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7, according to Gazan health officials. Roughly 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed in Israel during the attack, according to the Israeli authorities, and Palestinian militants took around 250 people back to Gaza as hostages.

Since the Israeli operation in the Rafah area began in early May, ground forces have slowly advanced toward the coast, with firefights generally confined to neighborhoods in eastern Rafah. But deadly strikes over the past few days appear to have targeted western Rafah and nearby areas where Israel has not formally ordered an evacuation. Dozens of Palestinians have been killed over the past few days in Rafah alone.

Two days after the strike in western Rafah that killed dozens, Gazan health officials said another bombardment had taken place, killing at least 21 . The Israeli military denied striking within the borders of the Israeli-designated humanitarian zone for evacuees in al-Mawasi, which is northwest of the city of Rafah.

Edward Wong contributed reporting.

— Aaron Boxerman and Gabby Sobelman

Israel declares it has ‘tactical control’ over a strategic Gaza corridor on the border with Egypt.

The Israeli military said on Wednesday night that it had taken “tactical control” over the Philadelphi Corridor — a sensitive strip of Gaza along its border with Egypt — in a move that could further tax Israel’s already strained ties with Cairo.

Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, said the zone was “Hamas’s oxygen tube” and had been used by the Palestinian armed group for “smuggling munitions into Gazan territory on a regular basis.” He said that Hamas had also built tunnels near the Egyptian border, calculating that Israel would not dare strike so close to Egyptian territory.

Israeli officials have said seizing the narrow, roughly nine-mile-long area holds crucial importance for preventing Hamas from rearming itself through cross-border smuggling. “It must be in our hands; it must be closed,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel told reporters in December, after being asked whether Israel still intended to capture the zone.

An Israeli military official, who briefed reporters Wednesday on condition of anonymity to comply with military protocol, said that troops had identified at least 20 tunnels running from Gaza into Egypt, some of them only recently discovered.

But in briefing reporters later on Wednesday night, Admiral Hagari stopped short of claiming that the tunnels crossed the border.

“I can’t say now that all of these tunnels cross into Egypt,” he said. “We’ll inspect that, pass along the intelligence” to Egypt. The tunnel shafts in Gaza “are located in proximity to the border with Egypt, including in buildings and homes,” he added. “We’ll investigate and take care of each of those shafts.”

After the Israeli announcement, Egypt’s state-run Al-Qahera News channel quoted an unnamed senior official saying “there is no truth” to claims of tunnels under the border.

“These lies reflect the magnitude of the crisis facing the Israeli government,” the official said, adding, “Israel continues its attempts to export lies about on-the-ground conditions for its forces in Rafah in order to obscure its military failure and to find an escape for its political crisis.”

Israel’s 1979 peace treaty with Egypt tightly regulated how many troops either country could place in a series of zones — including the Philadelphi Corridor — in an attempt to create a buffer between the two sides.

Egypt has previously warned that an Israeli occupation of the border corridor would pose a “serious threat to Egyptian-Israeli relations.” On Monday, at least one Egyptian soldier was killed in a shooting incident with Israeli forces near the Rafah crossing; both sides have said they are investigating the matter.

Israeli troops are not present everywhere in the Philadelphi Corridor, the Israeli military official said, but they now had the ability to effectively cut off Hamas’s ability to move through tunnels under and near the border. During the operation, Israeli troops destroyed a tunnel network that ran for nearly a mile underground in eastern Rafah, Admiral Hagari said.

Egypt’s government has disputed that cross-border tunnels are a problem, saying that its own forces had eliminated them in recent years.

A limited number of Israeli forces had also deployed in the area of Tel al-Sultan, in western Rafah, the official said. That is the deepest advance into the city of Rafah confirmed by Israel since its ground offensive there began in early May.

Egypt and Israel have traded blame over who is responsible for the continued closure of the Rafah crossing, a key conduit for bringing aid into Gaza and allowing the sick and wounded to leave. Israeli troops captured the crossing in early May and Israeli, Egyptian and Palestinian officials have been unable to strike a deal to resume operations there.

Emad Mekay and Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.

— Aaron Boxerman

A new cease-fire proposal circulates at the U.N., driven by outrage over Israel’s strike on a tent camp.

Seeking to harness the outrage over an Israeli strike on Sunday that set fire to an encampment and killed at least 45 displaced Palestinians, including children, many diplomats at the United Nations Security Council are backing a new resolution this week that would demand an immediate cease-fire and a halt to Israel’s military operations in the city of Rafah.

But they will have to overcome the objections of the United States, which has veto power on the Council and has signaled it will not support the resolution in its current form.

Algeria, the only Arab representative in the current makeup of the Security Council, drafted and circulated the one-page resolution, which says that “Israel, the occupying Power, shall immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in Rafah.” It calls for “an immediate cease-fire respected by all parties, and also demands the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.”

The Council held back-to-back meetings on the war in Gaza on Tuesday and Wednesday, first an emergency session behind closed doors about the strike on the encampment in Rafah and then a scheduled monthly open meeting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Algeria’s resolution was expected to go to a vote in the coming days.

“The human cost is self-evident and appalling,” Algeria’s ambassador, Amar Bendjama, told the Council on Wednesday. “These crimes speak for themselves.”

One U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the United States would block the current version of the resolution, which it views as unbalanced and problematic. He said that the United States had proposed a number of revisions.

In particular, the official said, the United States does not want to endorse a resolution that calls on Israel to completely halt its military offensive in Rafah, which Israeli commanders maintain is still a stronghold for the armed group Hamas. The Biden administration supports limited Israeli operations there.

As one of the five permanent members of the Council, the United States holds veto power and has wielded it against three previous cease-fire resolutions since the war started in October. In March, the United States allowed a resolution to pass that called for a humanitarian cease-fire for the month of Ramadan by abstaining from the vote.

In recent weeks, as the civilian toll in Gaza has mounted, U.S. officials have become more openly critical of Israel’s conduct of the war. At least 36,000 people have been killed in the Israeli bombardment and ground operations, according to the Gazan Ministry of Health, which does not differentiate between fighters and civilians in its count. Health officials have said a majority of the people killed are women, children and other noncombatants.

Gazan authorities say at least 45 people were killed in Sunday’s strike and its fiery aftermath as a fire tore through the Kuwait al-Salaam camp, where displaced people were living in tents. Among the casualties was a toddler whose burned and headless body was shown in a video verified by The New York Times.

“The continued pattern of significant civilian harm resulting from incidents like Sunday’s airstrikes undermines Israel’s strategic goals in Gaza,” Robert A. Wood, the U.S. deputy ambassador to the United Nations, told the Council on Wednesday. Mr. Wood added Israel had the right to defend itself but also had “obligations to protect civilians.”

On Tuesday, senior Biden administration officials expressed horror over Sunday’s strike but said that it was not a part of a major ground operation and so did not cross President Biden’s red line for withholding weapons shipments to Israel.

The Algerian resolution also cites an emergency ruling last Friday by the United Nation’s top court, the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The ruling ordered Israel to immediately halt its military operation in Rafah, though Israeli officials have argued its wording left some room for interpretation. The ruling came after arguments by South Africa, which late last year brought a case accusing Israel of genocide to the court.

Several Security Council diplomats said that they hoped to vote on the resolution soon to capture the momentum and outrage generated by the Sunday night strike and to prevent, if possible, harm to more civilians in Gaza. Drawn-out negotiations to appease the United States, the diplomats said, would send the wrong signal about the Council’s resolve to take action.

“This Council must express itself urgently on the situation in Rafah and demand an end to this offensive,” France’s ambassador, Nicolas de Rivière, said.

— Farnaz Fassihi

Israel used U.S.-made bombs in the strike that killed dozens in Rafah.

The bombs used in the Israeli strike that killed dozens of Palestinians in a camp for displaced people in Rafah on Sunday were made in the United States, according to weapons experts and visual evidence reviewed by The New York Times.

Munition debris filmed at the strike location the next day was remnants from a GBU-39, a bomb designed and manufactured in the United States, The Times found. U.S. officials have been pushing Israel to use more of this type of bomb, which they say can reduce civilian casualties.

The key detail in the weapon debris was the tail actuation system, which controls the fins that guide the GBU-39 to a target, according to Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician, who earlier identified the weapon on X . The weapon’s unique bolt pattern and slot where the folding fins are stowed were clearly visible in the debris, Mr. Ball said.

The munition fragments, filmed by Alam Sadeq, a Palestinian journalist, are also marked by a series of numbers beginning with “81873.” This is the unique identifier code assigned by the U.S. government to Woodward, an aerospace manufacturer based in Colorado that supplies parts for bombs including the GBU-39.

At least 45 people in Kuwaiti Al-Salam Camp 1, which was built in early January, were killed by the blast and subsequent fires, according to the Gazan Health Ministry. More than 240 were wounded.

U.S. officials have been encouraging the Israeli military for months to increase the use of GBU-39 bombs in Gaza because they are generally more precise and better suited to urban environments than larger bombs, including U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs that Israel routinely uses . President Biden said earlier this month that the United States was pausing a delivery of the larger bombs.

“The strike was conducted using two munitions with small warheads suited for this targeted strike,” Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, said during a news conference on Tuesday. The bombs contained 17 kilograms of explosive material, he said. “This is the smallest munition that our jets can use.”

In response to questions from The Times, the Israeli military declined to specify the munition used. The GBU-39 has a net explosive weight of about 17 kilograms, or 37 pounds.

Admiral Hagari said the military had taken steps to narrowly target two Hamas leaders, who he said were killed in the strike, and did not expect the munitions to harm nearby civilians. The bombs were dropped on sheds inside a camp for internally displaced people, and many tents were visible close by. Footage shows that the bombing set off deadly fires.

Admiral Hagari said the Israeli military’s investigation was continuing. He suggested the fire might have been sparked by a secondary explosion, which he said indicated there may have been weapons stored in the area.

“Our munition alone could not have ignited a fire of this size,” Admiral Hagari said.

Frederic Gras, a French consultant on munitions, questioned the Israeli military’s reasoning. “Any explosion or detonation starts a fire as soon as flammable products are in the vicinity,” he said, noting that there are often many gas cylinders and lamps in such camps.

Video shot by witnesses after the attack shows the scale of suffering. People scream as they pull charred bodies from rubble while flames rage behind them. One man holds up the body of a headless child.

“The Israelis have said they used 37-pound bombs,” John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman, said at a briefing on Tuesday. “If it is in fact what they used, it is certainly indicative of an effort to be discreet and targeted and precise.”

Larry Lewis, a former Pentagon and State Department adviser who has written several federal reports on civilian harm , said it seemed as though the Israeli military had in this case taken steps to mitigate danger to civilians.

“Secondary explosions can be hard to anticipate,” Dr. Lewis said.

But he said he was troubled that in surveillance footage released by the military, four people appeared to be outside the targeted buildings before the strike. Dr. Lewis, currently an adviser with the Center for Naval Analyses, said the decision to strike at that time raises questions about whether the Israeli military “knew and accepted a possible civilian toll” or failed to notice the people, suggesting potential problems in its precautionary measures.

Wes J. Bryant, a retired American Air Force master sergeant who served on a task force critical of Israel’s use of weapons in Gaza, told The Times that he had dropped many GBU-39 bombs during his military service and that this strike was problematic.

“It indicates continued targeting negligence — either an unwillingness or inability to effectively safeguard civilians,” Mr. Bryant said. “When you use a weapon that’s intended as precision and low collateral damage in an area where civilians are saturated, it really negates that intended use.”

Neil Collier , Eric Schmitt and Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting. Video production assistance by Ainara Tiefenthäler and Shawn Paik .

— Robin Stein ,  Christiaan Triebert and Haley Willis

Aid groups in Rafah say Israel’s advance is pushing them out.

Israel’s offensive in the southern city of Rafah has strained medical and humanitarian services to the breaking point, aid workers say, with only one hospital still functioning and several aid operations forced to decamp to other parts of the Gaza Strip.

The health care crisis in the city has been compounded by the closure of emergency clinics and other services amid continued clashes and strikes that have killed dozens of civilians.

On Sunday, a strike that Israel said was aimed at a Hamas compound set ablaze a camp for the displaced in Rafah, killing 45 people, according to the Gazan health ministry. Another strike on Tuesday in Al-Mawasi, on the outskirts of Rafah, killed 21 people and injured dozens, the ministry said.

Among the aid operations that have shuttered this week are a field hospital run by the Palestinian Red Crescent, a clinic supported by Doctors Without Borders and kitchens run by World Central Kitchen.

“As Israeli attacks intensify on Rafah, the unpredictable trickle of aid into Gaza has created a mirage of improved access, while the humanitarian response is in reality on the verge of collapse,” 19 aid groups said in a joint statement on Tuesday.

Some of the operations that were forced to move were in Al-Mawasi, where many civilians and aid workers went because Israel designated part of the area as a humanitarian safe zone. Israel’s military said after the strike on Tuesday that it had not fired on that zone. Videos verified by The New York Times indicate that the strike hit near, but not inside, the zone.

Aid workers have noted how difficult it is for people in Gaza to determine whether they are in a designated safe area, as many have limited access to mobile phones or the internet.

“Civilians are being massacred. They are being pushed into areas they were told would be safe only to be subjected to relentless airstrikes and heavy fighting,” Chris Lockyear, the secretary general of Doctors Without Borders, said in a statement .

Ashraf al-Qudra, a spokesman for Gaza’s health ministry, called for safe routes for evacuees, more border crossings for aid and more field hospitals in Rafah.

“There is no medical capacity to deal with the successive massacres in Rafah and in northern Gaza,” he said.

Instead, emergency operations are closing. The Palestinian Red Crescent last night evacuated its Al Quds field hospital, according to a spokeswoman, Nibal Farsakh, because it was too close to recent strikes and artillery fire in Al-Mawasi.

Medical workers are now packing up the equipment there and trying to relocate to an area outside of Khan Younis, farther north, she said.

Seven of the Red Crescent’s ambulances are still operating in Rafah, she said. “But the problem is, where do they go?” she added. “There is no hospital that can handle this many casualties.”

Aid workers estimate that around five field hospitals — movable medical facilities that often use tents — are still operating in Rafah, but they described them as completely overwhelmed. The only regular hospital that remains is a maternity hospital in the Tal as-Sultan district, the same area where heavy fighting forced Doctors Without Borders to close a clinic.

Even getting the wounded to a place where they can be cared for is a challenge.

“The streets are full of debris from the destruction, and even more full of displaced people on the move,” Ms. Farsakh said. “This may be the hardest experience we have had.”

For much of the nearly eight-month conflict, Israeli authorities urged civilians to flee south toward Rafah, swelling its population to roughly 1.3 million before the offensive began. In the last three weeks, around one million have been forced to flee again, the U.N. says.

Patients who need urgent medical care outside of the Gaza Strip have been trapped for three weeks, since Israel seized the Rafah crossing with Egypt, according to recent statements by World Health Organization officials.

The W.H.O. said on Wednesday that it had managed to bring in fuel and medical supplies to meet the needs of some 1,500 patients at Al Ahli hospital in Gaza City in the north. But the overall trend is dire, the 19 aid agencies said: “Gaza’s health system has been effectively dismantled.”

Rawan Sheikh Ahmad contributed reporting.

— Erika Solomon

Thousands around the world protest after the deadly Israeli strike in Rafah.

Thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators rallied in cities around the world on Tuesday days after an Israeli strike that killed dozens of Palestinians in a tent camp in Rafah, southern Gaza.

In Britain , a large protest gathered in central London chanting, “Blood on your hands” and, “Stop arming Israel” not far from Downing Street and the prime minister’s residence. Most of the demonstrators left peacefully but officers arrested 40 people at a breakaway protest that obstructed a highway, according to the Metropolitan Police on Wednesday, and three officers were injured.

In France , thousands of demonstrators converged on the Place de la République, in the heart of Paris, where they waved Palestinian flags and shouted, “We are all children of Gaza,” before spreading out through the city. Some of the protesters briefly blocked the ring road around the French capital. Others scuffled with riot police officers who fired tear gas to prevent demonstrators from approaching the Israeli Embassy.

In Mexico , clashes broke out between small groups of protesters hurling rocks and other objects at police officers outside the Israeli Embassy in Mexico City. Six police officers were injured, according to local news reports citing the capital’s authorities.

In Italy , protesters briefly blocked a train station in Bologna by descending on the tracks. Demonstrators also gathered in Karachi, Pakistan , to protest the Israeli strikes and to express solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.

Mark A. Walsh contributed reporting.

— Aurelien Breeden

‘All eyes on Rafah’ surges on social media after a deadly Israeli strike.

The slogan “All Eyes on Rafah” has ricocheted across social media this week following an Israeli strike in the Gazan city that killed dozens of civilians and provoked international outrage.

For months, the phrase has been a touchstone in the social and cultural dialogue around Israel’s war against Hamas in the region. It has periodically trended on social media, particularly as Israeli military attacks in the city — located in the southern Gaza Strip, along the Egyptian border — have escalated.

On Wednesday, the saying was once again trending, this time through what appears to be an A.I.-generated image showing a field of refugee tents spelling out “All Eyes on Rafah.” One version of the graphic has been shared more than 38 million times on Instagram.

The phrase may have originated in comments made in February by Rik Peeperkorn, who heads the World Health Organization’s office for Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Mr. Peeperkorn was speaking at a news conference as the Israeli military intensified its campaign in the southern Gaza strip.

“All eyes are on Rafah,” Mr. Peeperkorn said at the time .

The comment was almost immediately repurposed by pro-Palestinian and humanitarian groups to draw attention to Gaza and Rafah, which was one of the last remaining destinations for displaced Palestinians from other parts of the territory. Among them were Save the Children International, Oxfam and, later, pro-Palestinian lobbying groups like Jewish Voice for Peace.

The saying was also heard at pro-Palestinian protests that swept across Western universities earlier this month.

The deadly strike in Rafah on Sunday was quickly denounced by world leaders. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said the attack had killed two Hamas officials, and he called the civilian deaths a “tragic accident.”

— Ali Watkins

‘I’ll be strong for you.’ A former hostage awaits her husband’s release.

When Hamas released video last month of Keith Siegel , an American-Israeli hostage held in Gaza, it was the first sign in months that he was still alive. His wife, Aviva Siegel, couldn’t bring herself to watch it.

“It would be too difficult for me to see the sadness in Keith’s eyes,” Ms. Siegel said in an interview in New York last week, where she was meeting with António Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations.

Ms. Siegel, 63, was held captive with her husband until late November, when she was one of 105 hostages released as part of a cease-fire deal. They were taken from their home at Kibbutz Kfar Azza on Oct. 7 during the Hamas-led attacks on Israel.

Nearly eight months into the war, the families of hostages have grown increasingly alarmed. Mr. Siegel, who is 65, has a medical condition, and Israeli soldiers have recently recovered the remains of several hostages in Gaza. For months, Qatar, Egypt and the United States have been trying to get Israel and Hamas to accept a deal for another cease-fire and exchange of captives.

Ms. Siegel understands the hostages’ experience like few others. “Knowing what they’re going through,” she said, “is too much for me to handle.”

She said that she and her husband of over four decades were moved more than a dozen times and were kept in apartments and tunnels, which felt particularly stifling.

Ms. Siegel said that they were denied food and water, while their captors ate, and that she lost over 20 pounds.

She said her captors would hit and push her, blindfold her and pull her by the hair. They shaved Mr. Siegel’s body to humiliate him, she said. The hostages were not allowed to talk.

The captors would play mind games with them, telling them that Israel had ceased to exist, Ms. Siegel said.

Ms. Siegel expressed empathy for Gazans and said she wished Israelis and Palestinians could eventually live alongside each other in peace. She has been alarmed by what she said was a global lack of focus on the hostages.

“Something really bad happened, and we need the world’s help,” she said.

Ms. Siegel often remembers her last conversation with Keith. When the time came for her release from Gaza, she initially refused to leave without him, she said, but soon realized she had to.

“I asked Keith to be strong for me, and I said, ‘I’ll be strong for you’ — and that’s what’s keeping me alive,” she said.

— Nadav Gavrielov

Nikki Haley writes ‘Finish them’ on an artillery shell in Israel.

Nikki Haley, the former Republican presidential candidate and U.N. ambassador during the Trump administration, wrote “Finish them” on an artillery shell in Israel this week.

Danny Danon, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations and a member of the Israeli Parliament, shared a photo on social media on Tuesday showing Ms. Haley signing the shell. Her visit came just days after Israel drew international condemnation for a strike that killed dozens of Gazan civilians in a camp for displaced Palestinians.

“This is what my friend, the former ambassador Nikki Haley, wrote today on a shell during a visit to an artillery post on the northern border,” Mr. Danon wrote, declaring of the Israeli military, “The I.D.F. will win!”

Ms. Haley finished her inscription with a note that “America loves Israel always,” using a heart emoji for “loves.”

She signed the artillery shell not along the Gaza frontier, in the south, but near Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, with which Israel also has a longstanding conflict. She also visited a kibbutz where Israelis were killed on Oct. 7, and her public remarks focused on Gaza.

Her trip included meetings with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, as well as with Yoav Gallant, the country’s defense minister, and Benny Gantz, a member of the war cabinet.

Ms. Haley’s message on the artillery shell drew denunciations from some commentators, including the author and columnist Wajahat Ali, who said in a video on TikTok : “If you think that Biden and Democrats are terrible on Gaza — I think they’ve been terrible — just know Republicans will be far, far worse, and I give you Nikki Haley.”

In an interview published Tuesday by the Israel Hayom newspaper, which is owned by the Republican donor Miriam Adelson, Ms. Haley said Israel had done nothing wrong in its invasion and bombardment of Gaza since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing about 1,200 people. And she said the United States should continue to support it unconditionally.

“Israel, they’re the good guys,” she said. “And you know what I want Israelis to know? You’re doing the right thing. Don’t let anybody make you feel wrong.”

Israel’s military operations have killed more than 36,000 Gazans, including thousands of women and children , according to the Gazan health ministry. Many of the casualties, including those in the tent camp on Sunday , have been caused by bombs provided by the United States. President Biden recently withheld an arms shipment out of concern that it would be used in an offensive on the city of Rafah, where displaced Palestinians are sheltering.

When asked in the Israel Hayom interview about civilians who crossed into Israel during the Oct. 7 attacks, she said: “The rest of the world can’t say, ‘Oh, be nice to the Palestinians,’ when these are some of the people who murdered their brothers and sisters.” She added: “They don’t know who to trust. That’s not Israel’s fault. That’s the Palestinians’ fault now.”

Ms. Haley’s comments are in line with her history of support for Israel and rejection of international criticism of its actions. As U.N. ambassador, she accused the United Nations of “bullying” Israel and led the U.S. withdrawal of funding for an agency that helps Palestinian refugees.

She recently fell back in line behind Mr. Trump after previously refusing to endorse him, and Mr. Trump suggested he might bring her onto his team “in some form.”

Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.

— Maggie Astor

Top U.S. officials say the deadly airstrike in Rafah, while tragic, did not cross Biden’s red line.

U.s. will not withdraw military aid after rafah strike, kirby says, john f. kirby, a white house spokesman, condemned the deadly israeli airstrike in rafah, but said that the attack was not enough to change u.s. policy..

So I just want to just right off the top, talk about these devastating images and reports coming out of Rafah over the weekend following an I.D.F. strike that killed dozens of innocent Palestinians, including children. We still don’t believe that a major ground operation in Rafah is warranted. We still don’t want to see the Israelis, as we say, smash into Rafah with large units over large pieces of territory. And we still believe that. And we haven’t seen that at this point. But we’re going to be watching this, of course, very, very closely. Maybe some people have forgotten what happened on the 7th of October, but we haven’t: 1,200 Israelis, innocent Israelis, slaughtered, mutilated, raped, tortured. And they’re living right next to that kind of threat — still a viable threat in Rafah, by the way. If you think Hamas is just gone, they’re not gone from Rafah or from Gaza. And if you think they’ve abandoned their genocidal intent towards the nation of Israel, think again. They haven’t. So Israel has every right to not want to live next to that kind of threat. And yes, we’re going to continue to provide them the capabilities to go after it.

U.S. officials said on Tuesday that the Israeli strike that killed dozens of Palestinians in southern Gaza was a tragedy but that it did not violate President Biden’s red line for withholding weapons shipments to Israel.

The bloodshed came after Mr. Biden warned earlier this month that the United States would block certain arms transfers if Israel targeted heavily populated areas in Rafah — a warning that has been tested regularly as the war has ground on.

John F. Kirby, a White House spokesman, said the deaths were “devastating” but that the scale of the attack was not enough to change U.S. policy. “We don’t want to see a major ground operation,” Mr. Kirby told reporters. “We haven’t seen that.”

Israeli tanks were on the outskirts of the city “to try to put pressure on Hamas,” Mr. Kirby said. He also offered a measure of specificity about Mr. Biden’s warning to Israel, which critics have said was too vague.

“We have not seen them go in with large units and large numbers of troops in columns and formations in some sort of coordinated maneuver against multiple targets on the ground,” Mr. Kirby said. “Everything that we can see tells us that they are not moving in in a major ground operation in population centers in the city of Rafah.”

Mr. Biden has faced pressure from advocates and members of his own party to use his power to curtail arms to Israel as a way to influence its conduct in the war. The United States is by far the biggest supplier of weapons to Israel, which raises questions about American responsibility as the death toll mounts.

The strike in Rafah on Sunday ignited a deadly fire and killed at least 45 people, including children, and wounded 249, according to the Gazan health ministry. It has prompted international outrage, including from leaders in the European Union, the United Nations, Egypt and China.

Vice President Kamala Harris, asked about Rafah on Tuesday, said “the word tragic doesn’t even begin to describe” the deaths. She did not answer a follow-up question about whether the strike crossed a red line for Mr. Biden.

Still, the Israeli military’s conduct was similar to what Mr. Biden said he would not tolerate when he warned, in an interview on CNN earlier this month, that the United States would not supply Israel with weapons to attack Rafah.

“I have made it clear to Bibi and the war cabinet they’re not going to get our support if, in fact, they’re going into these population centers,” Mr. Biden said in the interview.

In that interview, Mr. Biden emphasized that the United States would still ensure Israel’s security, citing the Iron Dome missile defense system and his support for Israel’s “ability to respond to attacks.” But he said he would block the delivery of weapons that could be fired into densely populated areas of Rafah.

The area that was hit on Sunday was not included in evacuation orders that Israel issued in early May, and some Palestinians sheltering in the camp said they had believed it was a safe zone .

The Israeli military said that the target of Sunday’s strike was a Hamas compound, and that “precise munitions” had been used to target a commander and another senior official there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it was a “tragic accident” that civilians were killed.

Around one million people have fled Rafah during Israel’s assault on the city, according to the United Nations , including many in the western part of the city and in the area around the camp that was struck on Sunday.

A State Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, said the United States was watching Israel’s investigation of the incident closely.

“Israel has said that it might have been that there was a Hamas ammo dump near the area where they took the strike,” Mr. Miller said. “It’s a very important factual question that needs to be answered.”

The Israeli military’s spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, told a news conference that Israeli jets had fired the “smallest munitions” that they could use and added that “our munitions alone could not have ignited a fire of this size.”

Israel invaded Gaza after the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7 killed some 1,200 people in Israel. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed more than 36,000 people, many of them women and children, according to health officials in Gaza.

World leaders, including Mr. Biden, have warned of the dangers of a major military operation in Rafah without a proper plan for evacuating the displaced Gazans taking refuge there.

Mr. Miller was able to provide little detail on hundreds of thousands of people who have fled Rafah in recent weeks.

“Some of them have gone back to Khan Younis,” he said. “Some of them have pushed into western Rafah. Some of them have gone to Mawasi. I don’t think there’s any one answer.” Mr. Miller said he did not know if Israel was assisting those people.

Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and an adviser to Palestinian leaders during past peace negotiations, said the White House was benefiting from its ambiguous descriptions on Mr. Biden’s “red line” for Israel’s military operation in Rafah.

“It’s definitely blurry and by design,” Mr. Elgindy said. “They don’t want to be pinned down. They don’t want to pin themselves down by identifying an exact point or line that gets across because Israel will absolutely cross that line. We’ve seen that over and over again.”

Erica L. Green contributed reporting from Washington, and Michael Crowley from New York.

— Zolan Kanno-Youngs reporting from Washington

U.S.-built pier for delivering aid to Gaza breaks apart in rough seas.

The temporary pier that the U.S. military constructed and put in place to provide much-needed humanitarian aid for Gaza has broken apart in rough seas, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.

The latest calamity to befall the pier endeavor punctuated a particularly grim several days in Gaza, where Israeli forces have ramped up attacks on the city of Rafah just two days after carrying out a deadly strike that killed dozens of people.

“Unfortunately, we had a perfect storm of high sea states, and then, as I mentioned, this North African weather system also came in at the same time, creating not an optimal environment to operate,” Sabrina Singh, the Pentagon deputy press secretary, said at a news conference.

Army engineers are working to put the pier back together and Defense Department officials hope that it “will be fully operational in just a little over a week,” she said.

In early March, President Biden surprised the Pentagon by announcing that the U.S. military would build a pier for Gaza. Defense officials immediately predicted that there would be logistical and security issues .

In the days after the pier became operational on May 17, trucks were looted as they made their way to a warehouse, forcing the U.N. World Food Program to suspend operations . After officials beefed up security, the weather turned bad. American officials had been hoping that the sea surges would not start until later in the summer.

On Saturday, heavy seas forced two small American military vessels that were part of the pier operation to beach in Israel. On Sunday, part of the pier broke off completely, including a wider parking area for dropping off supplies transported by ship, officials said. That part will have to be reconnected.

The pier is now being removed from the coast of Gaza to be repaired after getting damaged in the rough seas, Ms. Singh said. Over the next two days, it will be pulled out and taken to Ashdod, in southern Israel, for repairs.

She said that the fact that the pier, which cost $320 million, was able to get 1,000 metric tons of aid into Gaza before it broke apart demonstrates that it can work.

White House policy does not allow U.S. troops on the ground in Gaza, so the Pentagon was able to start but not finish the mission.

And as the pier project struggles, the situation in Gaza remains dire. Even before Sunday’s deadly Israeli strikes, more than 34,000 people had died and more than 77,000 people had been wounded, according to health officials in the territory.

— Helene Cooper Reporting from Washington

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