647 - Crafting Your Ending
Scriptnotes Podcast
John August
4.8 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 18 June 2024
⏱️ 72 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this compendium episode, John and Craig fast-forward to the third act to talk about endings. How do they work? What makes them great? And how do you fix them when they’re not working?
They look at how to connect your ending to your characters, crafting a twist that surprises (but doesn’t confuse), the function of the climax, the importance of the denouement, and how to make it all satisfying for your audience.
In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Drew welcome back Megana Rao to ask: do we still need reunions in the age of social media?
Links:
- Episode 44 – Endings for beginners
- Episode 170 – Lotteries, lightning strikes and twist endings
- Episode 366 – Tying Things Up
- Episode 392 – The Final Moment
- Episode 524 – The Home Stretch
- Too Many Cooks
- America’s best decade, according to data by Andrew Van Dam for The Washington Post
- All Fours by Miranda July
- Callipeg
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
- Segments originally produced by Stuart Friedel, Megan McDonnell and Megana Rao. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome my name is John August and you're listening to episode 647 of |
| 0:06.4 | script notes a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to |
| 0:10.0 | screenwriters today I am so lucky to have two Script Notes producers in the |
| 0:14.4 | studio with me. Megan A row welcome back. Thank you I'm excited to be here. |
| 0:18.4 | And Drew of course you're always here. You're stuck with me. We are doing a compendium episode, a sort of best of things, and Drew, as you were putting this together, you realized that this is familiar territory here. |
| 0:30.0 | Yeah, so it's an endings compendium and going through I found out that |
| 0:33.6 | Meagna had already made an endings compendium in episode 524 which was very good |
| 0:37.8 | but I'm gonna try and one-up you. I so welcome that yes and me please.'s yes that's the best way to do it so talk to me about the things you chose for this which megal may have already chosen for her episode too so we're starting out with a clip from episode 44 which is breaking down how an ending works. It's a really |
| 0:54.7 | great primer for sort of what you should be looking for an endings. |
| 0:56.9 | Then we're going to go to episode 170 and talk about twist endings. There was a |
| 1:01.1 | great article that provided a framework for that. |
| 1:03.0 | And then we're going to go to episode 366 to talk about de-normons. |
| 1:07.0 | That little moment after your climax where you wanted to wrap everything up. |
| 1:11.0 | And then we're going to go to episode |
| 1:12.8 | 392 talking about how that last moment or sort of last image develops and how to |
| 1:19.6 | fix an ending that's not working. Yeah, the reason why this is relevant for me this week is I was just doing the Sundance Labs |
| 1:25.4 | and one of the things you do the Sundance Labs traditionally is show a scene from your movies or |
| 1:30.1 | movies you enjoy and the theme for this lab session was endings and so |
| 1:34.1 | Susanna Graham was talking about the ending of Aaron Brockovich and it's not just |
| 1:37.2 | about winning the case it's all the things that happen after that and how you |
| 1:39.5 | tie up all those relationships and the things that actually matter to your audience. |
| 1:43.7 | So endings were on my mind. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John August, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of John August and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.