Perilous Adventures
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We Need To Talk

by n a bourke

 

The end of a story is a sad moment, both for the writer and for the reader. This is, perhaps, the last time you’ll
be together. You want to say just the right thing, leave everything on the perfect note: funny, sad, poignant,
longing for more, but ready to go. Ready to move on (hopefully to your next story). Unlike in life you, the
writer, have all the time in the world to work out just the right way to say goodbye.

Writers spend a lot of time, it seems, thinking about beginnings. There are more articles about beginning your novel, short story or article than there are creative works. Writing about endings, however, is much rarer. Perhaps because an ending is only ‘good’ – only powerful, moving, or fitting – when seen in the context of the whole. In isolation, endings can seem cryptic
or trite – and yet, as a reader, I know that endings loom large.

As I close my latest reading adventure, smooth my hand over the cover and remember, it is that last scene that lingers – looming as large in my memory as the foreshortened foot in a photograph. Like beginnings, they are disproportionately significant to the reader, and so bear a great deal of the weight of a story. A good ending, like a good beginning, can make a story.

I have three favourite quotes about endings, each of which I think about often when I’m trying to get the end of a story or article just right.

All endings contain their own beginnings, and the beginnings of a thousand others.

The first is from my PhD supervisor, the author and academic Nigel Krauth, who taught me that all great endings seem like the
beginning of another story (just as all great beginnings seem like they come at the end of another story we will never know). This isn’t an altogether original idea: it’s one that I’ve seen or heard expressed a number of times by a number of writers and other artists. It is, as they say, a kind of ahistorical meme about narrative. It reflects the idea that endings and beginnings
are really just moments of monumental change for the characters, or sometimes for the world they live in. Deaths and births and marriages are only the most obvious and visible shifts. Becoming a vampire, solving the crime, losing The One Ring, meeting the woman of your dreams, blowing up the planet are all dramatic moments of change – they are all endings that embody new beginnings.

This is perhaps best reflected in the following quote – the ending of Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment:

But that is the beginning of a new story--the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.

Surprising, and yet inevitable

The second quote comes from the great contemporary American novelist, John Updike, (though I’ve heard it quoted as though original by David Mamet, Ramona Koval, Jane Yolen, and a host of others. Another ambient meme of narrative). Updike says that a good ending should be both surprising and inevitable. This is a simple, but wondrous formula for endings – it contains
within it the idea that an ending should satisfy a reader’s desire to have at least some of the anxieties or conflicts of the
novel resolved, without knowing from the outset what those resolutions might be. These resolutions need not be absolute,
however. It’s clear, for example, that (almost) every crime novel ends with the solving of the crime, and that (almost)
every romance novel with the clinch and kiss that suggest an ongoing romantic entanglement – perhaps even marriage.
The delicate thing is the taint of surprise that is so necessary: not that the crime is solved, but how it was solved, or who it
was that did the crime, or perhaps even how the crime itself was executed. Not that Elizabeth and Mr Darcy finally end
up together, but that Ms Austen convinces us along the way that it is impossible – that two such creatures could not possibly
resolve their differences of time, temperament and class. And yet, they do.

A garden never knows when it is over.

The third quote is my favourite. And it is my favourite because it is ambiguous enough to allow for a multitude of readings, and
yet it is succinct and self-contained. Enigmatic and open and complete. Just like a good ending. I don’t know who said it. It
was in a gardening book I was reading; I wrote down the quote and have never managed to find it again. If you happen
to know where it’s from, or who wrote it, I’d be delighted to hear from you.

A garden, like a writer, or a character, or a story, never knows when the story is over. They write and live and breathe and carry on. A character in a well-crafted, (well-begun), well-ended story, does not stop at the last full stop. Their life seems
to go on, spilling into the white space at the end of the page. You glimpse them in the distance, have some sense of the
vague shape of their destination, but it is as unknown to you as your own. Gardens and stories are weedy and incomplete,
disobedient and surprising, they are so much more than they seem. They exceed the space that they are allowed. They exceed our paltry human efforts to trim and hedge and espalier and fence. They are ragged, unwieldy. They are spaces within which we dream, but they are not there for us to dream in. They are spaces in which we stop and breathe, but they are not made for our breathing. They are places in which growth and change seem not just possible, but inevitable. In which there is no death that is not the beginning of some other form of life.

One last note on endings. It is only to the reader that they seem inevitable. For the writer, they are always , I think, temporary. Leonardo da Vinci once wrote, ‘Art is never finished, only abandoned’. A novel, a short story, or an article, is never a complete object for the person who wrote it. For a reader, it may seem that every sentence is just where it should and must be. That the movement of a comma would make the whole edifice tremble on its footings. And yet, for a writer, the work is never done. Reading my published works (only when I cannot avoid it) I am always editing as I move from sentence to sentence. Even reading aloud for an audience I become conscious of other possibilities, and edit while I read.

One of the hardest things is to know when to stop editing, when to let it go. Deadlines help. Ruthless partners, agents, publishers. A competition. A birthday. I know of no other way than to say to yourself that this, while it is not perfect, is the work as it is today. It is the best you can make it with the skills you have. There is no perfect moment to end the process, and only you can know when it must be abandoned.

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issue 08:09 | archive by category | archive by author