Back in 2007, in what was only my seventh blog posting, I wrote about finding the ending of a story. What got me thinking about it was an article in Writer's Digest. In the article, the author suggested looking to the beginning of the work to help find the ending and for providing closure.
I didn't have a hard time with endings then nor do I now. It's probably because I have been a journalist for some long and have written the endings to far more articles than I can count.
But I have been thinking more about endings to fiction stories recently, thanks to a posting on Piedmont Writer, one of the blogs I regularly follow. In it, Anne includes a snippet from writer Graham Greene:
A story has no beginning or end;
arbitrarily one chooses that moment of
experience from which to look back
or from which to look ahead.
That basically is my view and has been for years.
In any writing, the author starts the story where he or she thinks it's interesting and ends it just before it gets interesting again. But, like history, stories have a fluid continuity. Something happened before the telling and something happens after the telling.
I am often reminded of that when I see a movie. Often times I wonder, what would happen if the film were five minutes longer? It's not that I am unsatisfied with the ending. It's just that I know the people and events depicted in the story will continue. Thus, I daydream about what happens next.
In my fiction, I am told my endings often come too quickly, rushing up suddenly on the reader like a fast-moving freight train rounding a bend -- unstoppable and inevitable. I am working on slowing down the train. But that is more a matter of timing the ending than of not knowing what the ending is.
Only time will tell whether, in my works, I have chosen the best arbitrary moment to end things. And in the story of my life, I also hope that's how people will view me.
Thanks for reading. Keep writing and I will see you again later this week when I discuss my goals for 2011.
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