Ending is the Hardest Part

                                      THE END

You begin to write with all the passion of a new idea. The story, whether novel or short story, goes along pretty well, the middle perhaps getting muddled in one or two places, but nothing you can't clean up in the rewrite.

Then comes the point at which you feel you should write The End. Unfortunately, all too often, the ending doesn't quite work. The conclusion you had in mind had more to do with theme or character than actual plot. You think about how other authors bring about that all-important denouement: Shakespeare killed practically everyone, a plot device that worked well for him yet might seem derivative in your work. Or cheap. Too easy. Besides, you might want to write a sequel. Your Hamlet must survive.

You think of books whose endings you didn't like--Charming Billy fizzled, you remember, and you don't care that it did win the National Book Award. Snow Falling on Cedars, another disappointment, had nothing to say that Calvin or the Myers Briggs community hadn't said before.

If you were writing a mystery or detective novel (same thing?), the ending would be easier: they catch the criminal--story over.

But yours isn't a mystery. What to do? Return to the masters and study their works. Tear them down, word by word, section by section. Fitzgerald, Chekov, Hemingway, Faulkner, Poe, Hawthorne--read great short story writers because their works are short, always a plus. You can read the entire work in one sitting, as Poe said you should, and notice what devices they use to move the reader from section to section and to prepare the reader for the ending so that, when it arrives, you feel that the author had no choice but to bring the story to that particular conclusion.

Study, study, study, and study even more. Copy the stories so that you can write all over them, marking every transition, every word that carries the theme, every action that moves the plot along. Faulkner read the same 50 or so books all his life, starting on any page and reading until he decided to move to another well-read book. Though we don't all have to limit ourselves to 50 books in a lifetime, we should return to a handful of authors who move us deeply, mind and heart, and study their work intently and intentionally.

We must all be students, as well as writers or teachers.