This is my penultimate post in Connie Green’s 30 day challenge (I’ll end with 31 posts.  I’ve always been an overachiever.  Okay, a teacher’s pet.  You can say it.)  Because of this, and because I’ve already covered Beginnings and Middles, today I’ll talk about endings, and use Mr. Shakespeare’s title without compunction or permission.

What is an ending?  That is where the ultimate consequence or result of what is set in motion in the middle is realized.  (The ultimate consequence can be implied rather than explicitly described.)  Again, simple.

Endings, however, in life and in stories, can be varied and can be confusing.  They can be unsatisfying and they can be thought provoking.  They can be trite, they can be abrupt, they can be sentimental.  Some are happy, some tragic, some, contrived.  Like in life, some are perfect, some are messy.  Some stories, The Lady or the Tiger by Frank R. Stockton is a prime example, end by very consciously not ending.  Don’t be fooled.  Even that influential story has an ending, it is just rather enigmatic.

Endings can also be circular, where they lead back to the beginning.  They can be the beginning, as in Pinter’s play Betrayal or Christopher Nolan’s movie Memento.  In both these examples, the beginning explains everything.

Often, stories will end at a new beginning.  The hero will come home, look around at his life, then look out his door at the new possibilities and adventures awaiting him.  (Hollywood loves this kind of ending, because it leaves the possibility of a lucrative sequel wide open.)

Many writers, notably O Henry and Guy de Maupassant, end their stories with a completely unexpected twist.  This is a very satisfying, but not easy, technique.  A twist that makes no sense is worse than a cliche ending.  A twist has to make sense, given everything that has lead up to it.  If you can master that, however, you will be a master story teller.

Some writers, especially beginning writers, will often be tempted to resolve every issue in the story, and resolve them completely.  The cliche way to say this is “tie everything up with a neat bow”.  This is unnecessary.  It is also rarely satisfying to the reader.  Resolve your main conflicts if you must, but you can resolve them with a question rather than with an answer.  This can leave the reader thinking.

Just because the ultimate consequence of what is set in motion are realized, it doesn’t at all mean that it is all necessarily resolved.

I’ll end this essay about ending with a quote from novelist Jerry Pournelle.  “And meanwhile, the storytellers like me and Anderson, Silverberg… we tell stories. People like them. They want to know how it comes out, they want to know what the ending is.”

If your reader wants to know how things come out, in the end that’s a good story.

~Geoff Hoff
Co-author of the how-to guide On Writing a Short Story.

P.S. Listen to the replay of our tele-seminar on the process of writing – go to http://CreativeWritingStrategyTips.com/

A few days ago I posted about beginnings of stories, which can actually happen in the beginning, the middle or the end of the written work.  Now let’s look at the middle.

Often, I’ve heard that the basic reason that much writing doesn’t quite work is “the muddle in the middle.”  I think this can be true.  A writer will have a great idea for a story, will know where it starts and know where it ends.  He will write a great beginning, and a good or great ending.  But then he must get from one to the other and is often confused as to how to do that.

First, remember that confusion is a very high and powerful state to be in.  Don’t fight it, celebrate it.

Then, there are things you can do to help you on your way.

What is the middle?  What is set in motion in the beginning progresses and develops, often in unexpected ways.  Again, pretty basic and simple.

The middle is also most of your story, not just the middle third of it.  This intimidates some writers.  Don’t let it intimidate you.  You’re the one in charge of the beast and your story will thank you if you take the reins firmly.  To stretch a metaphor a little.  Which can be fun.

So what do you do?  First, step away from the computer and do some imagining work.  You’ll need to know your characters.  You’ll need to know your settings.  Imagine them well before you start to write.  Give them quirks, if you want.  The characters, I mean, not the settings.  Although giving the settings quirks might be fun, too.

Once you’ve imagined them, write down what you imagined.  This is for you, just notes, not part of the story itself, although much of it may end up in the story.

Once you’ve done this, if the getting from A to Z still doesn’t become clear, throw some circumstances at your characters (or settings.  Or both) to see how they would react to them.  Again, this is just for yourself, but again, a lot of it could influence your story in very interesting ways.

The main piece of advice I have, however, once you feel you know your people and where and when they are sufficiently, is to imagine the unfolding of the events of the story.  Live through it in the senses of your mind.  Feel the events, smell them, hear them, see them, taste them.  Do this before you are actually writing it all down.  If something occurs to you in this imagining, make a note of it, but keep imagining.

Then just tell the tale you’ve imagined.  This will be the basis of the story, and, since you’ve come to it organically and have personally experienced it yourself, anything that is missing will become obvious.  The muddle will melt and the middle will move meaningfully forward.  To use too many alliterations.  Which can also be fun.

~Geoff Hoff
Co-author the how-to guide On Writing a Short Story.

P.S. Listen to the replay of our tele-seminar on the process of writing – go to http://CreativeWritingStrategyTips.com/

It’s a new year, and as such, I thought I’d talk a little about beginnings.  The western notion of story structure (no, it’s not Universal, I’ll talk about that in another post) dictates a beginning, a middle and an end.  It dictates setups and payoffs.  It dictates some sort of change to happen to a circumstance or a character.

In the beginning, something happens that sets something else in motion.  Pretty simple.

In linear story structure (1~2~3) the beginning happens where you would expect it, at the beginning, but there are many other ways of doing it.  There is a device called framing, where you “frame” your story with the last scene.  (3~1~2~3.) Usually, with this device, the last scene is broken in two and the story starts with the first half and ends with the second half of that scene.  Sometimes the last scene is repeated, but on the second reading, we know much more, so it seems new, the meanings of the moments seem different. The beginning happens second in this technique.

Sometime, you might tweak this even further and start at the middle, then go back to the beginning and tell the story through to the end.  (2~1~2~3.) This can be a very exciting way to tell a story when handled well.  It creates an immediate intrigue, then goes back to explain what lead up to it, how it happened, then resolves it.

One of my favorite non traditional story telling techniques is the non-linear structure, where things happen completely out of sequence and the reader isn’t sure of anything until the final moments of the story.  (3~2~6~1~4.  Or something.) In these, the beginning can be in the middle or, as with the movie “Memento“, at the very end, or anywhere in between.  This is a difficult device to use well, but when it is mastered, it can be thrilling to read because every moment keeps you guessing.  A very formidable but gloriously satisfying (and marvelously surreal) novel that uses this technique is Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren.  That one not only starts somewhere in the middle, it starts mid-sentence!

Even within these non linear or non traditional ways to tell a story, however, the piece itself has a beginning.  It needs that moment or event that makes the reader want to know what’s next.  No matter where in your story you start, starting on something that creates tension or surprise or confusion or recognition or  something is very highly recommended.  At least in the Western notion of story structure.

Happy beginnings!  The rest of the story is wide open!

~Geoff Hoff
Co-author of the how-to guide On Writing a Short Story.