September 2006: Begin with the End (cont.)

I grow impatient with stories that tell me too much about what kind of ending to expect on the first page. (If a story starts off with a kid who is afraid of an old woman everyone knows to be a witch, don’t you just know that it is going to end with the discovery that the old woman is really nice?) But what the best endings accomplish is an emotional pay off, a kind of, “Oh!” of surprise, followed by a sigh of satisfaction . . . “Of course!” And when you, as the writer, know what will bring that sigh of satisfaction, you will have your ending.

You may not know everything that is going to happen along the way. In fact, you probably won’t. Most of us start off with much that remains to be discovered. That is part of the fun of writing a story, making discoveries along the way. But if you know your ending, you will have your story under control from the first line.

Let me give you an example of the way knowing the ending before I began to write shaped one of my novels. Runt is the story of a wolf pup. Runt’s problem is that he realizes he is a disappointment to his father. He is too small, much smaller than his brothers and sisters, which is how he earned the name Runt. This is what I knew before I began writing, that Runt’s story would be his struggle for his father’s approval.

<<back more>>