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