How to Write Unforgettable Last Lines for a Novel (And Why It Matters)

After spending months or years crafting the novel of your dreams, you don’t want to undo all that hard work with a poor last scene or last lines that vanish from readers’ memories. These final components of your novel are just as important as your opening lines and chapter. So here’s how to write unforgettable last lines for a novel and why it matters.

Why do the last lines matter so much?

The last scene and lines of your novel are your last message to your readers. We writers want our stories to stick with our readers. We gift them these final parts of the novel as a reward for reaching the last page. The last lines should also encourage readers to look up our previous novels and look forward to our future ones.

3 tips for writing unforgettable last lines

Your final scene and lines are like the final arguments lawyers present to a jury. They can’t introduce new evidence. That part of the trial is over. They can only sum up what the jury has already heard, but they can put their own spin on that evidence. That’s what writers do in the last scene.

Echo the major plot, relationship, or theme you set up earlier in the book. The final scene must deal with the point or purpose of the novel. All subplots should have been wrapped up by now. The final scene and lines should round off and amplify what your novel has been about. In my second novel, A Storm of Doubts, Rae wrestles with doubts that she may be calling the wrong man Dad as she tries to solve a mystery that involves questions of paternity concerning a family friend. The final scene and lines wrap up this theme of fathers and family.
Set the mood you want to leave with your readers. When readers close your book, what mood do you want to linger with them? I want my readers to feel like they’ve had a satisfying meal, and the last lines are those last bites of an excellent desert. To give them this feeling, I end on an upbeat note that fits with solving a mystery that revolves around the strength of faith and family. This upbeat note must be earned and make sense with the story that’s preceded it. If my amateur sleuth’s best friend has betrayed her during the course of the mystery, then my upbeat note will be very different from the one I’d use if her friend has saved her life during the climax.
Use final lines that let readers think over the novel. If your final lines do a great job of summing up your novel, it should give reader points that linger in their mind. In A Storm of Doubts, the final lines will make readers consider the nature of fatherhood, aspects like what makes a good father.

What’s your opinion on what makes unforgettable last lines for a novel?

Here are all the tips and prompts this month on writing endings for novels.

July 30, 2026 0

Key Plotting Technique to Save Your Novel From the Sagging Middle

Even the newest writers have heard of the dangers when writing the middle of a novel. The middle makes up the bulk of the story, and like an unexplored jungle, it can swallow writers whole, leaving them hacking away at useless subplots and extraneous characters without the end in sight. To avoid this catastrophe, here is the key plotting technique to save your novel from the sagging middle.

The Roller Coaster Method of Plotting

In my post on the 3 steps to mastering your novel’s beginning, I stated that the beginning chapters have two jobs: introducing and establishing the story. The middle also has two jobs: exploring and complicating what we’ve introduced and established. We can do that through the roller coaster method of plotting.

We plot events that are both favorable and unfavorable to the protagonist’s quest to reach her goal. Below is a graphic of the roller coaster method for plotting a mystery.

The turns of the plot not only have to be favorable and unfavorable, but the events need to grow more intense as we reach the climax. Using the above chart as an example, the detective isn’t in danger until toward the end. If one of my first unfavorable events put the detective in danger, then by the end I have to have a climax that’s even more intense, has even more at stake.

So we should plot our favorable and unfavorable events with increasing intensity or higher stakes. We also need to decided how fast these events should occur within the story and how much time we need to give the reader to consider what they’ve learned from the last event. Even in a thriller, a writer has to hit the brakes at some point, even just slightly, so readers have time to digest what’s happened.

So the middle is a combination of events that help and hinder the protagonist to achieve his or her goal as well as breaks for the protagonist to consider what’s happened. And while the protagonist is trying to make sense of events, so is the reader.

But how do I know how fast to pace my novel?

First, we should read the books in genre we’re writing. The genre will guide us in the pace readers expect. Historical fiction usually unfolds at a more leisurely speed than a contemporary mystery.

Second, if as the writer, we find ourselves bored with our own novel, we need to pick up the pace.

Here’s my review of Write Your Novel from the Middle by James Scott Bell, which is another way to shape the middle.

June 11, 2026 1

Using Uncomfortable Settings to Develop Characters and Advance Plot

So what do I mean by using uncomfortable settings to develop characters and advance plot? The bedrock under this questions is tension–tension is the engine that propels readers from line to line, page to page, chapter to chapter. An effective way to created tension is to plunk your protagonist in a setting that makes him or her uncomfortable or uneasy. But how does this setting create tension, develop characters, and advance plot? Read on!

Creating Tension with Uncomfortable Settings

When we experience tension, we want to relieve it. Hence all the activities people engage in as stress-relievers. The same is true when reading fiction. When a reader experiences tension, she wants that tension relieves and there’s only two ways to do it: keep reading or set aside the book for good.

Placing your protagonist in a setting that makes them uncomfortable ignites questions in the readers’s mind: Why doesn’t the protagonist like where he is? Did something happen in his past? Are the people he usually find here a threat? What’s going on?

If readers are asking questions, that means they feel the tension. Most of the time, they will keep reading to answer their questions and relieve the tension.

Using Uncomfortable Settings to Develop Characters

Revealing what your protagonist doesn’t like is just as important as showing what he does like. For example, your protagonist goes to a very dingy bookstore in a sketchy part of the city. As soon as she enters the store, her thoughts reveal she is uncomfortable. In this situation, an author could introduce some backstory if her discomfort comes from an event in her past. Or she could remember unsavory rumors she’s heard about this bookstore. And yet she’s come anyway. Or the author can make it very clear that the reason the protagonist is uneasy is because of her history with the owner. All these explanations create tension and reveal something important about the main character.

Using Uncomfortable Settings to Advance the Plot

Once you’ve established your protagonist finds a setting uncomfortable, you have to explain why she is facing this setting. Using the example above, the protagonist doesn’t like this part of the city because it’s the poor part her family escaped from years ago. So why is she here? She believes the unsavory rumors she’s heard about the bookstore. So why did she come? The owner is the grandfather who disowned her mother. So why did she come?

All those why questions concern plot. As you write the scene, you can hint at the answer, perpetuating or increasing the tension. Or you can plainly answer it, but that plain answer not only releases the first tension but creates a new one.

For example, the girl visiting the bookstore owned by her estranged grandfather states why she’s come: her mother has disappeared and the cops think she’s just abandoned her. But the girl thinks some harm has come to her mom and she’s asking the only other relative she has for help. So I’ve relieved the first tension and created a second one.

What settings make you uncomfortable? If you’re a writer, how would you use them in a story?

March 19, 2026 1

Use Immersive Settings to Hook Readers and Transform Your Novel

Settings are the overlooked stepsister to characters and plot, and they shouldn’t be. Your selection and description of settings are just as important as the development of characters and plot. If your characters and plot aren’t grounded in a setting, then you don’t have a story. You have dialogue and action, but readers have no frame within which to reference them. Below are three ways to use immersive settings to hook readers and transform your novel.

What do I mean by immersive settings?

These are settings that are described so effectively, that paint such vivid word pictures, that readers feel they are actually experiencing the story along with the POV character. Those kind of settings hook readers and keep them turning pages.

But how do I write immersive settings?

Evoke the five senses. Take a look at a scene you’ve written. What senses have you used to describe it? You don’t, and usually you shouldn’t, use all five senses in every scene. But choose more than just sight for readers to imagine the scene the characters are inhabiting.

What’s the mood? What mood do you want to convey to readers? What is the mood of your POV character in a particular scene? The mood will determine what senses you choose to describe the scene as well as specific words.

For example, my teen sleuth Rae Riley hates hospitals. She visited too many of them while her mother battled a losing fight with cancer. Since Rae is my POV character, I will choose senses and descriptions that show readers Rae’s opinion of hospitals. Here’s an excerpt from A Riddle in the Lonesome October. Rae and her dad are accompanying Rae’s cousin Amber to see her father in ICU as he fights for his life after a riding accident:

Amber shrank into herself as we made our way through the maze that all hospitals adopted as their floor plan. Even if the color scheme was different from the hospitals in North Carolina, the miles of dead white light made it look the same.

In the elevator, Dad put his arm around Amber, and she leaned into him, her breathing loud.

I swallowed for about the hundredth time, trying to ignore the antiseptic stench that permeated every inch of every hospital I’d ever been in.

Now a character who sees hospitals and medical procedures in a positive way might describe this journey to the ICU in more hopeful words, such as the smell was clean or refreshing. Instead of feeling like she’s lost in a maze, she notices the precision and industry of the nurses and staff she walks past.

Limit your description to make the most impact. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve received on describing settings came from romantic suspense author DiAnn Mills. She said that when you invite someone into your home for the first time, you don’t overwhelm them with a history of how you acquired each piece of furniture in your living room. You’d only discuss the items they showed an interest in.

In a similar way, you only describe what a reader needs to orient themselves in a scene with the characters and experience it through their senses. But how do you know what readers need in each scene?

This takes a lot of work–reading novels similar to yours to see how other authors write immersive settings and then practicing the technique over and over in your own writing.

The best tip is to limit your descriptions to the few aspects of the setting that will impart the greatest impact. In the excerpt above, I decided that since Rae is an amateur photographer, she would notice the quality of the light in the hospital. Since smell is the strongest sense to evoke memories, I chose to use that sense to convey Rae’s discomfort in hospitals. Both the light and the smell quickly and clearly immerse readers not only in the setting they’re walking with Rae, but also immerse them in her mind.

Here are more tips on writing immersive scenes for your novel.

March 12, 2026 1

Creating a Home for the Protagonist of Your Novel

This month’s theme is all about writing and exploring settings for your novel, and creating a home for the protagonist of your novel is critically important to it. But wait, you say. My novel is a thriller in which the hero never goes near his home. He races from his office in D.C. to locations around the world with the finale on top of the Great Pyramid of Giza and wrapping up loose ends in Cairo.

Keep reading. “Home” comes in many flavors and working it into your novel will add depth, characters, and plot points.

What to Find at a Home Base

If you write a series, a home base can provide a lot of material for your novels. The home base for my young amateur detective Rae Riley is the alpaca farm where she lives with her dad, grandmother, and three half-brothers. What makes this home base so important to Rae?

Her people. In the prequel short story, “A Rose from the Ashes”, Rae is looking for her father. Her mother has died of cancer, and she has no family. Rae tries to solve who attempted to murder her mother when she was pregnant with Rae in an effort to find her father. She risks everything to find her people, so her family is precious to her.
Safety. Because these are her people, Rae can retreat here when she needs a refuge to think about the case, test theories with her dad and grandma, or just destress.

Because her home base is so important, threatening it gives me a powerful plot point. When the crack marksman Colonel Sebastian Moran shoots through a window of 221 B Baker Street to kill Sherlock Holmes in “The Adventure of the Empty House”, it means something more when he attacks him in his home than if he shot him walking along the Thames.

In the Nero Wolfe mystery series, eccentric detective Nero Wolfe charges exorbitant fees to maintain his luxurious lifestyle in an old brownstone in New York City. One of his hobbies is orchids. He raises ten thousand plants in greenhouses on the top floor of his home. Wolfe rarely leaves his home to solve cases, relying on his assistant to do the leg work, so the brownstone is a crucial setting to the series. When master criminal Arnold Zeck in The Second Confession decides to issue a warning to Wolfe to stop an investigation, he goes for the brownstone. He machine-guns the greenhouses from across the street.

Threatening the home base can inspire plot points like:

Protagonist feels vulnerable.
Protagonists fears for her people.
Protagonist gives in to fear and lets threat control her.
Protagonist becomes more firmly resolved to defy threat.

What if your protagonist has no home?

No problem. A motivation for your protagonist can be either to find a home that he has always longed for and never had. Or he has lost a wonderful home and either wants to find a new one, reclaim the old one, or exact revenge on those who took it. Any of these ideas can power a novel and do so effectively because home means so much to readers. It’s a universal concept that any reader can identify with.

Back to our hero of the thriller. How do you work a home into the novel? Perhaps the first attack by the villain is at his office. His people are attacked. If he’s an agent of the government, then home can be his country and he wants to protect the life he knows.

What are other ways to use creating a home for your protagonist to develop the plot of your novel?

Here are more tips on writing settings in a novel.

March 5, 2026 2

Tag: How to write a book