The End Lies in the Beginning

There are certain writing topics I return to in this space many times.  I return to them partly because I believe they are important and talking about them can be helpful to all of us who write.  But I return to them, also, because I keep rediscovering them for myself, year after year after year.The end lies in the beginning is one of those topics that I have had reason to rediscover recently.When I am preparing to write a story, any story, I know several things before I begin to write.  Who my main character is and what he or she struggles with.  (I prefer the word struggle to conflict, because struggle is active.  I have read too many manuscripts from developing writers where the main character sits around looking at/thinking about a conflict page after page.  I want that character to stand up and struggle.)Who the secondary characters will be and what relationship they have with that character’s struggle.  Do they help or are they part of the problem?  That is character and plot in one package, even though much of it isn’t worked out yet.Finally, I know what a resolution is going to feel like.Usually I know the climactic moment that will bring the story to that resolution, too, but it is the feeling of the resolution that draws me forward when I sit down to write.  I want to get there so I can feel it, too.  And it is, not incidentally, the feeling accompanying that resolution that embodies my story’s meaning.There is no one perfect way to create any story.  There is only the way that works for each of us individually.  I know writers who sit down and write, page after page after page, seeking their story.  And these are accomplished writers for whom the story eventually appears.  I am too much of a linear thinker to work that way.  For me, it would be like setting off on a trip without first deciding whether my destination is New York or California. I’d feel I was wasting a lot of miles/pages.Even with my very intentional destination, though, I can sometimes get to the end and find it doesn’t snap into place.  Those final moments don’t move me and thus will not move my readers.When that happens I don’t return to the chapter just before the end one to see what went wrong.  Always, I go back to Chapter 1.  Somehow I didn’t lay out this moment properly. And there I will find what’s missing, the piece that will allow the final chapter to fulfill its promise.As I write this, I am concluding my work on a young novella called Sunshine.  (Concluding, that is, until it’s in an editor’s hands whose insights I’ll be grateful for.)   As usual, I had the ending in mind the whole time I was writing.  In fact, for the last several weeks I’ve been hurrying to get there, because it was going to feel so good to write it.  (Another of my linear traits, I never write scenes out of order.  If I wrote my ending before I got there, I’d have too little reason to finish the story.)  But when I arrived at that final scene . . . well, it didn’t quite click.So . . . I flew back to Chapter 1, and there I found something missing, something I could imbed to carry forward to the final chapter.You are my Sunshine,my only Sunshine.You make me happy . . .Writing fiction is an organic process, one—whatever our method—that is spun out of our very bones.  Still, there are tricks of the trade useful to know, and that’s one of them.The end lies in the beginning.