I'm Done

Endings are hard. They seem easy when you crap out ten pages about the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, moreso when Professor Historicalbore wanted twenty. So, you keep adding here and there, paragraph on similarities between Roman conflicts and East/West rap conflicts, paragraphs on what it means to you to be Roman, whatever. In the mix, you forget about the conclusion, or even worse, you add pages to the conclusory statement, and just struggle forward, belaboring the same concepts and ideas you just talked about last paragraph, which summarized the same concepts and ideas you discussed over eighteen pages, which in turn plagiarized different sources in the name of research. And this was a structured work.

Endings scare me. I’ve always thought of stories as long snippets from a larger context, and not the Twilight Zone episode when the child zapped his town into Limbo. You should know something about what you’ve written, beyond the boundaries delineated by your paper/computer. Think of sculptors carving out hair on statues that stand flush against a wall. Who would see the hair? They do. You’ve got to anchor your story to something, though it float freely upon the sea of ideas when someone else reads it. Then, you have to cut it out of your larger latticework, set it free to work on its own. Your ending is like saying goodbye to your baby, but it also gives your work independence, self-sufficiency. Its hard to say goodbye, but you eventually have to.

(I wanted to work in an umbilical cord metaphor here, so I googled “umbilical cord clip.” I clicked on the first link, which dealt with reworking baby dolls to appear newborn. I screamed.)

At what point should you, do you end a story? There are so many ideas to transcribe, and you’ve invested so much time, and now you want to get out? Somedays, I want to live with my little bastards. Disconnect from the real world, plug into the fake, walk among my creations. Somewhat related, climax and anti-climax. Once you achieve the high point, you should end soon, unless you want people bored for two hundred more pages. How can you ramp down everything within a short amount of text?

Sometimes, the problem might be that you don’t know where you’re going. Nothing wrong with that. It might have started with an image, maybe a cat falling from a building, not landing on its back. Then, you see in your mind a brick tied to its back, and a child laughing from the fourteenth floor. Then, the brick isn’t just a brick, but a PDA, and the owner is looking for it. Then the garbageman enters, and after a few days of research, takes the cracked device to his poor but talented hacker friend, and you rush off from there. How did you get to that from a cat falling? Who knows.

One way to end, just go home. Finish where you began. Show how your protagonists react to changes in the beginning, or how they’ve changed, and those reactions to the beginning. You might try ending everything on mundane notes, showing that there’s nothing particularly special in each ending. Give the action, and move on. You might try constant cliffhangers, keep the audience engrossed, waiting to see what will happen next, and see what happens if you end on the biggest cliffhanger of them all. (and drive them nuts). Start with the ending and work backwards, like mystery writers, so that you can leave all the clues and there are fewer untouched plot threads. Sometimes, you just have to put the pen down, say, that’s it, deadlines are tomorrow, I can’t do anymore, it ends here. Just like college papers.

Damnable resolution, damnable human desire for resolution. I say we need more beginnings. From now on, instead of wrapping up stories, just use them as opportunities for new beginnings, plain and simple. Nothing will ever end, everything continues forever. Let us all defy the natural order of things.