if you are a writer who is puzzling over how to end your story, and your great idea is to have your protagonist have a life‐altering conversation which changes their perspective and resolves all the tensions currently present in the narrative
stop, please, and don’t
it does not work
if you are going to have your protagonist have a life‐altering conversation, first of all you should stick it at the BEGINNING of the work
i think a lot of writers write themselves into impossible situations because they rely entirely on the narrative for tension, and narrative tension can never be completely resolved without it sounding like somebody is running a con
in fact, the only utility narrative tension has for the writer is in giving weight to the tension in the story’s structure; the goal of the writer is to convert narrative tension which is structurally entwined into narrative tension which is structurally free, at which point the story reaches its close
for example star wars converts the narrative tension of the impending threat of the death star, around which the story is structured, into the narrative tension of the rebels launching an all‐out war against the empire, about which the story structure has nothing meaningful to say
anyway final, reveal‐all or sudden‐change‐in‐perspective or even brilliant‐moment‐of‐persuasion conversations solve the wrong problem and attempt to resolve the narrative tensions of the story in place of the structural ones. they very rarely take place in structural time and closing out your story that way is footgun which spits in the face of all your hard work actually trying to architecture something pleasing or meaningful, effectively saying “none of that structure actually matters because in the end these words were the key”
at which point you might as well toss out the entire rest of the story and just print that, if that’s what you think
