Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.

[truepenny]

Let's talk about endings.

Which I hate.

I hate them, of course, because I'm bad at them. Because of all the things in the world I don't know about writing (and don't ask for a list, or we'll be here a week past the heat-death of the universe), the thing I most don't know is how to end a story.

Sometimes the last line of a story gives itself to me, and I recognize that as a great and precious gift. Sometimes I know how a story has to end: what image, what emotion. Mostly, though, I just keep writing, one line after another. Is this the last line? No? How about this? On at least one occasion, matociquala has had to take me by the hand and lead me back several pages to where the ending actually was.

Part of the problem is that, for me, nothing highlights the artificiality of story-telling like an ending. Beginning a story is also artificial, but there's a sense (again, for me) in which it's like being at a party and turning your attention from one conversation to another. Not starting a story, but joining a story. That's what it feels like.

But endings are different. Readers have expectations about endings. Sure, you can contravene them, if you know what you're doing and your reason is good enough, but in general that's not necessarily a good idea. And the story itself works to set up expectations about how it's going to end. That's the nature of story-telling. As an audience, we want closure. And as a writer, I'm totally on board with that idea. My problem is that I have no real idea of how to do it.

It's the part of writing that feels most artificial, most artificed, to me. Possibly because it has to do with structure, and structure is my weakest point, at least as far as my conscious mind is concerned. I do believe that a lot of creativity takes place in the unconscious and subconscious--the underconscious, if you will--the parts of the brain that don't get to call themselves I, the parts that don't get direct access to language. But those parts can be relied on to do what they feel they need to do, not to meet deadlines or finish stories properly or get the damn words written today. Obligations belong to the conscious mind, and the conscious mind (or, at least, my conscious mind) wants to know what it's doing. It wants to analyze and understand. Mechanics are its security blanket. And the mechanics of structure are one of my blind spots.

And the question of where exactly to end a story is a structural question.

The worst English paper I ever wrote--the only English paper I ever got a C on--was a paper I wrote as a high school junior on the structure of Emerson's "American Scholar." I hated that essay, and that sense of inchoate frustration--like being a blind man asked to describe an elephant--is the same feeling I get when--as I am right now--I'm trying to end a story and don't know how to do it. You can begin every story you write in medias res, if you've a mind to, but there's a very limited number of stories you can end that way, and it's a parlor trick when you do.

For a while, I was writing stories and sending them to matociquala for feedback, and she was telling me, "This isn't a story, it's the first chapter of a novel." And it wasn't--I knew it wasn't--but, you see, I wasn't getting enough closure. I wasn't meeting enough reader expectations about what the end of a story looks like. My stories habitually take long walks off short piers.

I don't have any answers; this post is mostly just me fulminating out loud because I want to finish this short story today, but I can't figure out how to tie it off.

Here, gracelessly, endeth the blog entry.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This is one of the reasons I write out of sequence: when I get something that looks like it might be the ending, I'm so terrified that I'll never get another that I write it down immediately.

So far I have never written the last page of a book last because of this, but I live in fear.

[pameladean]

I have very similar problems, and it is so very frustrating.

I tend to grab, as a drowning person with something that might be a floating cushion, at some thematic element and finish that off, hoping fervently that the actual structure will warp around this as if the theme were a very powerful gravitational object.

That is enough analogies.

P.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

But you wrote the Best End Ever! (Whim. Right up there with "Silent, upon a peak, in Darien".)

[pameladean]

First instinctive reaction: Yeah, I know, but I couldn't tell you how I did it; it certainly was not through consideration of structure.

Second response: Um, wow. Thank you.

Part of one really does know when it's good, doesn't it? Other parts become flabbergasted, but then they get to be pleased.

P.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

If you'd like a fresh perspective on it, I'd be happy to read it.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you, but I think I'm just going to have to thrash through it on my own.

[quietselkie.livejournal.com]

It's pretty rare that I find a book that has managed to "stick the landing" as it were. Those books you close and find them truly ended and not just stopped. No magic bullet here; I've only written one story that I thought had the proper ending.

Interesting and provoking post. Thank you.

[lizziebelle.livejournal.com]

I often have the same problem. Well, OK, I always have the same problem! I have several stories that are waiting for that inspiration on how to end them hits. I can usually get past the 'what comes next' problem by just writing, but that doesn't work for 'what comes last.'

[complicittheory.livejournal.com]

structure? what's that? I save that for papers and acad stuff. Though I can't write fiction wiht sny sense of control, I feel that I am as you put it joining a story when I start writing, and when it is over I'm leaving. As in life, I don't invent my friends and what we do together. I meet them, get to know them, share experiences and sometimes literally just get on separate trains at the station. Perhaps to meet again. I wonder if we don't try to conclude too much when we try to end a story. The story never ends, just my part in it, or knowledge of it. Or the last bus is leaving in 10 minutes. Or we got into a tif over something, and it is 'over'. For now. I could never end anything in life, completely. There's always the pregnant potential for the story to return, to be finished then. For now, I'm just done.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Oh now, I know how to do that.

It is artificial, the whole thing is artificial, and the whole thing is tell as well, but that's another thing.

You start by singing of the wrath of Achilles, and when you get to the end of the wrath of Achilles, you stop, even though you didn't get to the Trojan horse and the destruction of Troy yet. In other words, what Pamela said very diffidently, theme.

I've been wrong about a lot of things, but I don't think I've ever been wrong about where the end was, not with a novel. Sometimes I have thought "Oh, I shall have to go back and put x (generally 'what happened to x') in somewhere earlier, because this is the end and it didn't go here", but normally the end itself is inherent in my beginning, and I get to it with a satisfying snap.

It's middles I hate.

Have you read Four Quartets? They have a lot to say about structure and beginnings and ends and how you wrap things, both directly and by demonstration.

[rosefox]

Beginning a story is also artificial, but there's a sense (again, for me) in which it's like being at a party and turning your attention from one conversation to another. Not starting a story, but joining a story.

I understand this perfectly, because I learned how to end stories at the same time that I learned how to leave parties. I love to leave when the music is still playing and people are still laughing, letting the door swing shut behind me and muffle the sounds into silence as I walk off down the street. The party doesn't end, but my experience of it does. I always prefer this to having the party end around me; it drags on and wears me down. Thus with stories: I don't try to make the characters' lives stop, but I choose a graceful moment, after I've had enough of watching them and before they've had too much of being watched, to make my exit and leave them to do their own thing in privacy.

With stories as with parties, leaving this way lets me secretly believe that somehow, in the cool dark distance behind me, they go on forever.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

It's the "graceful" part I have trouble with.

In this as in so many other aspects of my life. :)

[rosefox]

I found that the secret was caring much more about whether I wanted to leave than about whether other people wanted me to stay. My introversion serves me well here. *) I like being around people--fictional as well as non--but after a while I get a definite sense of That's Enough, I'm Going To Go Hide Now.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

That's an extremely helpful comment, thank you.
I too share truepenny's frustration with endings--BTW, such a lovely post, it made perfect sense out of how I've been feeling about a couple of different stories that I pick at now and then when I'm frustrated with the main book project in hand. Which isnt' a nice way to treat a perfectly innocent story, but there it is.

The idea of "leaving the party", that's an awfully nice guideline.
Gracefully, ah well... *cough, cough!*
I think maybe my standards are too high. I always want to wave and depart on the crest of a great joke that leaves everybody laughing, a huge dramatic bang of an event that concludes it in a way that will be passed along for years, or done to a wry observation that just finishes the evening for everybody.
I hadn't thought of it before, but it might be kinder to do it quietly.
A gentle warning to the host, and a quick smile for a few people, and a quiet departure without banging the front door might be much better, from the POV of leaving readers with the feeling that it goes on after we've departed.

[rosefox]

Yes, exactly. I think it's kinder to the characters that way, too.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_swallow/]

> With stories as with parties, leaving this way lets me secretly believe that somehow, in the cool dark distance behind me, they go on forever.

(What a lovely turn of phrase!)

[rosefox]

Thank you. *)

[joecrow.livejournal.com]

Apropos of nothing whatsoever, I adore your icon.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

So glad to know that real writers also have problems with endings. Sometimes I think I should try to write soap operas, so there'd never be any endings, just more and more story, on and on, into oblivion.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Short stories, I usually know how they're going to end, and roughly where. Perhaps this is an artifact of writing too much erotica, which has a certain range of acceptable endings; I know ahead of time what the shape will be. It's the last line I search for and occasionally arrive at in a flash of laughing inspiration--will it be abrupt and ironic? Melancholy? Hopeful? If I can't get that last line, and have to cobble something together, I often remain unsatisfied with the story itself.

[almeda.livejournal.com]

Odd that you mention erotica. Most of the stories I've written that are even vaguely any good (or even vaguely finished, cough) are erotica, and I always know where they stop, because I had a chunk of story just a certain size, and when I get to the end of a scene or something, I just end it there with a little bow.

This means, however, that my instincts are ALL WRONG for longer forms, to the point where I can't even start them, because I don't know how to grasp the shape. I know what *happened*, I have no idea how to *tell* it (for example, the most novel-shaped story idea I have fairly-fully-formed at the moment, involves a [vampire] character born in the mid-1800s, has a mildly adventurous life that could be a short story up until a Mysteeeerious Stranger shows up and offers her a deal. He takes her off to his mansion outside San Francisco, tutors her in myriad disciplines, and eventually makes her a vampire too (second short story/section). Then he gets his sorry ass killed, and she drives herself into depression-induced hibernation, waking up in the 1980s/90s/something modern, starting a new chapter of her life. She tries to settle in and make a life, but gets freaked out that someone might be seeing through her cover story, moves to a new city, a little wiser in Modern Ways, and starts again (which is where the novel opens ... I think). Then there's the bit where I don't yet know exactly what happens to her, but the rest ends up told in flashbacks (because it'd be more interesting that way, I somehow think, than if I just started at the beginning, went right through to the Modern World, and stopped). And she finally finds peace with herself and her mentor's death and Everything. Which is The End. I think.

[heathwitch.livejournal.com]

I know where you are coming from... I think I would have rewritten the ending for Solace a million times over or more, had I not had to submit it to the university... :-\

Good luck! And if you need to talk anytime, I'm on AIM as heathwitch.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

And I'm no help on endings. Because I just know them. Once I get to a certain part of the story, say, just about as it hits the downhill run, there they are, ready to be written.

Getting the pieces to match up, though, that's a nightmare.

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

Huh. I often know the ending well before I know the middle.