Endings
11 o'clock, June 28, 2005
Mr. Westerfeld makes an interesting observation:
Yeah, well, the inspiration of a new story is exciting. But if you wind up not finishing ninety percent of what you start, guess what happens. After a few years you’ll have written 100 beginnings, 40 middles, and only 10 endings. Which means you’ll be great at writing beginnings, only so-so at middles, and you’ll suck at endings. Which means you will almost certainly keep faltering between the middle and the end of every story, which means you’ll keep giving up and not finishing . . . Rinse, repeat.
This is a compelling argument. This would explain why my laptop has a Writing folder with over two hundred Word documents in it, some of them almost old enough to drive, not one of which is the completed manuscript of a novel.
Also, I recently read somewhere someone (Update: Justine reminds me that it was Justine) quoting Ted as saying that he started writing his stories by writing the ending. Which, whether or not it’s true, is a good story. (And would go some way toward explaining “Story of Your Life”.)
I’d like to drop everything and take Scott’s advice, but unfortunately I have bills to pay. So instead I give you the following newly-written endings to unfinished but not-yet-forgotten stories.
Disorder under Heaven
ca. 1988
The Englishman arranged everything: passports, plane tickets, police reports. He offered Ethan money, a job, a new suit of clothes. Ethan declined everything except a one-way ticket to Los Angeles. Uncle Goro was waiting at the airport.
Ethan went back to the desert. He kept the two pieces of his heart on a cheap steel chain that he found at a thrift shop in Bakersfield.
He never saw Colleen again.
THE END
Princes of the Sun
ca. 1993
He’d thought of flinging the book from the top of the cliffs into the ocean, or tearing the pages from it and burning them, one by one. But the tide was out, and there wasn’t enough driftwood to make a fire. So in the end he just left the book there, let it fall to the packed sand face-down, with its cover open and its pages crumpled beneath it.
At the top of the cliffs Sand looked back, thinking to see the book lying there on the beach, the water perhaps beginning to lap at it now. But he had climbed too far, and the book was invisible, one more anonymous lump among the piles of drying seaweed.
“So much for you, then,” he told himself; and he turned away and went into the trees.
When he came to the bowshot-wide clear-cut of what had once been the Queen’s Highway and was now no one’s, Sand found a fallen log on the shady side and sat down on it, where he would be in clear sight of the road; and he waited.
As the ghost had said: There would be someone along in a little while.
There always was.
THE END
In the Light of Eternity
ca. 1997
“Goodbye,” said Felix.
In an instant, the bore pinched shut, the ring of light shrinking quickly down through the Planck scale, leaving only a last, short-lived bubble of exotic particles to mark its disappearance into the quantum foam.
The ghosts, through MESSENGER’s eyes, turned their attention outward. The Milky Way was on fire, the stars of Sagittarius dim through a haze of violet and ultraviolet and gamma, where the leading edge of the Arkystasia’s relativistic attack crossed the heliopause. Inward, the sun was visibly fading, its light shifted clear into the red by whatever futile defense the Crusaders were preparing.
Earth was a dimming blue star.
— We saved everything we could, said Felix’s ghost.
— We saved nothing, said Zheng’s.
The ghost of Yibaihua seemed to look from one to the other, and to Santander’s ghost, who was silent. Then it said:
— You saved enough.
Lights began to flare, here and there in the haze, like match-heads in a fire: comets, asteroids, ships, stations, there was no telling. MESSENGER’s senses began to fail, one by one, or to shut themselves down, in a vain attempt at self-preservation.
In darkness, the ghosts drew together, and waited to die.
— Hello, Felix’s ghost said. — Was that supposed to happen?
— I’m not sure, said Zheng’s ghost. — Maybe we missed something.
— We must have, said Felix’s.
— What is it? Yibaihua’s ghost asked.
— I don’t know, said Santander’s. — Let’s go and find out.
THE END
Questions.
Have you known for a long time that the stories would end there? Did you know the endings before you started writing? And if so, do you think of them as finish lines (i.e. built into the story structure and intrinsic to the story you're telling), or as moving targets (i.e. placeholders which are subject to change depending upon what happens on the way)?
I ask because I personally find it very difficult to write once I know the ending. I usually start with little or no idea of what's going to happen at the end. I gradually figure it out as I write, and once all the details are cemented there is an immediate letdown. It's as if once I've told myself the story the impetus to tell it to others is less present. But I may be alone in this.