Ted Dekker did something to me at the end of Black that I had never experienced before.

He let his main character make the unthinkable choice. Thomas Hunter encountered the black water and he went in. And that was the end of the book. Not a resolution. Not a safe landing. The character I had followed through the entire story made a decision I could not believe and then the pages ran out.

I sat there for a moment after that last page.

Then I went and got the next book.

That is the power of a cliffhanger done correctly. Not a cheap trick. Not a fake-out. A real consequence at the end of a real story that makes the next book not optional. Dekker did not just make me want to read Red. He made me feel like I had to. Like something was unresolved in my own chest that only the next volume could settle.

And then he did it again. At the end of Red. And again at the end of White. Every book ended with that same combination of resolution and unresolved tension. He answered enough to satisfy but left enough open to pull you forward.

By the end of the series he had built an entire world that could generate additional stories indefinitely. He had not just written four books. He had built architecture. A foundation that other stories could be built on.

I understood something about writing in that moment that I could not have learned any other way. A great ending is not a conclusion. It is an invitation. It is the writer looking at the reader and saying — there is more. Come find it.

I have been trying to write endings like that ever since.

Stephon Rudd