The End?!

A ques­tion I am often asked is, “Do you know the end­ings of your books when you begin?”

There is not a sim­ple answer to this ques­tion. Now and again I do know with some clar­i­ty what I expect the end­ing of a book will be. That, how­ev­er, is rare. More often than not, I have a gen­er­al sense as to where I am going. I has­ten to add that writ­ers dif­fer a great deal in this mat­ter. An edi­tor once told me of an impor­tant writer who did not set down a word until she was cer­tain of the book’s last line.

Anoth­er fine writer told me she did not begin writ­ing until she had thought out the whole book. Then again, I have lis­tened to writ­ers who say ”I just begin and see what happens.”

Hey, what­ev­er works …

As for me, I do not do out­lines when I start a book (I did in my ear­ly years) but often these days, when about two thirds of a way through a first draft I tell myself I MUST orga­nize my thoughts and do a rough sketch as to where I am going. I just did that for a cur­rent project.

But, let me empha­size, I would much rather dis­cov­er an end­ing, than plot one. Which is to say I want an end­ing to flow out of the plot as a whole, and noth­ing gives me more plea­sure than to be sur­prised. I think my best writ­ing occurs when the text tells me where to go—as opposed to my forc­ing the text into a box. It is that old John McDon­ald notion, “Bet­ter to be pulled by your text, than to push it.”

It is not usu­al for me to approach the ending—as if approach­ing the edge of a cliff—then back off, and take a run (from the begin­ning) to see what end­ing evolves. Leap of char­ac­ter log­ic, if you will.

That said, if I don’t feel emo­tion with my end­ing, I know I have not got it right.

Then there is my own doc­trine: I can’t write a good open­ing sen­tence until I write a good clos­ing sen­tence. All of which is to say a suc­cess­ful book is one that has uni­ty start to finish.

And that, dear friends, is always hard to do.