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One aspect which has turned out to be really important to me lately: Stick the landing. By this I mean that the ending of the book has to be satisfying — it has to work with the story as a whole. (...
Answer
#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2019-12-13T12:00:43Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26790 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T06:08:04Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26790 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
One aspect which has turned out to be really important to me lately: **Stick the landing.** By this I mean that the ending of the book has to be satisfying — it has to work with the story as a whole. (That doesn't always mean a happy ending, by the way; _Brokeback Mountain_ is a deeply sad story, but the ending is appropriate.) Susan Cooper's _The Dark Is Rising_ sequence was really great until literally the last 20 pages or so. Over the five books the heroes assemble and have to decipher a riddle. When the event which the riddle foretells happens, it is _so_ completely mundane and anticlimactic that I actually dropped the book. It absolutely soured me on the whole series, and I'm sort of sorry I read it now. I won't read it again now that I know the macguffin is so ridiculous. It totally undercut the entire experience of the series. So for me, the overall experience of the book (c.f. Mark Baker's answer) has to work as a whole. If 90% of it is good but the ending fails, I won't re-read the book. (Now, separately, I _have_ read series of books where I liked the first one, or few, but disliked the last book, and I've tossed the end book/s and kept and reread the one/s I liked.)
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2017-02-17T23:21:24Z (over 7 years ago)
Original score: 7