Novelist and writing professor Charles Baxter was reading a Best American Short Stories volume when he realized something: Every story seemed to end the same way:

I kept coming upon final pages in which there was a moment when a character stopped and looked off into the distance, and then a sentence the equivalent of ‘Suddenly she realized…’ appeared…

For Baxter, this seems like cheating:

If you’re trying to write a story with a beginning, middle, and end but haven’t found a way of tying it up dramatically, an epiphany will do the job. But it often ends up feeling like a shortcut, and besides … I’ve had so god-damned few epiphanies in my life that I’m suspicious of them…

Beware of the easy conclusion.