As the year closes, I’ve been thinking about endings as anticipatory structures—the places toward which we work, often without realizing it. The end of a year is supposed to feel resolved, but it usually doesn’t; we’re always in the middle of something. Which may be why many writers feel so at home in endings: they offer a vantage point, however fleeting.
There are writers who live for beginnings and writers who live for endings. I don’t mean this in the tidy personality-typing way that social media loves. I mean that some of us feel most engaged—most drawn, almost bodily—toward certain parts of the creative process. Some writers I know thrill at the blank page and its glut of possibility; they love the feeling of conjuring a book’s opening, when everything is still possible. Others—myself among them—are most invigorated when the shape of the thing has finally begun to reveal itself, when we can sense the gravitational pull of the last page and orchestrate (or discover?) the movement that will bring it to fruition. For me, it’s an almost architectural feeling: a kind of internal click, when I know with utter clarity what the ending is.
I’ve always liked ending things (I even take pleasure when my kids’ lunch prep lets me use the last bit in a jar of peanut butter or a bag of oats—there is so much strange satisfaction in completion). Writing poetry, for me, the ending tends to arrive early on, long before I’ve understood the middle. Which is to say: I allow the poem to unfold messily, to surprise me, to make discoveries. My early drafts often contain a lot of throat-clearing or wind-up, baggy middles, all of which I later have to cut. But then, somewhere in the composition, a line appears, snapping into place. It’s the first thing to be done, that ending.
(I do have to watch out for this, though: sometimes the “snap” becomes a tic. In my first book of poems, I realized during copyedits that many of the poems ended with an imperative. I had to rework some of them.)
In prose, I often realize the ending while I’m doing something meditative, or in transit—but still lost in the weeds of a middle chapter. Usually I’m feeling a bit of despair about the book, when I take a trip or go for a run, and the ending announces itself, like a beacon to write toward.
I wrote the ending of The Long Goodbye on a run, still in the middle of drafting the book. I wrote the ending of The Invisible Kingdom in a café in Fort Greene I loved, at a time when I felt mired in the book’s middle and suspected I’d never find my way out. And the new book: I wrote its ending on a plane from England thirteen months ago; the beginning revealed itself soon after; the middle is where I’ve been working ever since. This is my pattern. I think of it as a small gift from my creative daemon—a reminder to persist through the challenging middle, which always makes me want to give up.
If I’ve learned anything, it’s this: don’t be afraid to skip ahead or to work in your own idiosyncratic way. Don’t be afraid to turn toward the parts of a book you’re drawn to, even if they arrive “out of order.” Narrative rarely arrives chronologically, and neither does insight.
This, too, is a way of thinking about endings as a writer’s form of hope. An ending is a place the self is trying to reach before it knows how. And sometimes we go beyond the ending, trying to lard in a little too much, anxious about what the reader will “get.” I sent poems to The New Yorker a while back and, in a moment of anxiety, added two lines to one poem’s ending. The editor took the poem but said, “I think it ends earlier, here.” The funny thing was that he wanted it to end one line after my original ending—and one line before the revised one. (He was completely right.) The revision helped, but I overdid it by half a turn.
I find I always return, at year’s end, to certain endings in literature—those that gather the whole arc of a piece and turn it, with quick torque, into something more capacious, unexpected, unforgettable. Think of Joan Didion’s endings in The White Album or “Goodbye to All That”: the clipped, almost anti-epiphanic gesture; the way she unsettles rather than resolves. Or James Baldwin, and the endings of Notes of a Native Son or “Stranger in the Village,” where moral seriousness and emotional restraint are held simultaneously.
Perhaps thinking about what your ending might do for the book—rather than what it literally will be—will give you something to write toward. Below, I look more closely at two endings and how they work, to see how they might help us write our own. Plus, as ever, a prompt!
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