Endings

How to end your piece. Where does the story end? It might end when the votes are counted and someone has won, if you’re writing about the 2020 presidential election. But is the right place, if one candidate is still protesting the outcome more than a month later?  Whose version do you accept? Or do you blandly report each side’s opinion. And there are still two elections go in Atlanta. Do you include those?

Consider writing fiction. For example the story of A Few Good Men, the Tom Cruise, Demi Moore-Jack Nicholson legal thriller. The movie ends when the trial does. There’s more because the Jack Nicholson character is being charged and escorted out of the courtroom. And the Tom Cruise character has a new future ahead of him because he’s finally overcome his demons caused by his father’s huge legal reputation. Where does that story end for the two Marines who had been in trial? They wound up with dishonorable discharges, an existential conflict for the African-American. He’s going to have to deal with that when he goes home.

You have to stop at some point if you’re writing your autobiography for your grandchildren. But your story going to go on.

David McCollough’s 1776 tells the history of our country in 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence. I was quite frustrated because I wanted it to go on, yet it ended in 1776. His purpose was to stay in that year, but so what? I wanted more. The story of our country is still going on. I

Your readers will want enough pay-off to justify the time they spent reading your writing, however you choose to end it, The McCollough book didn’t have enough for me, though I enjoyed the experience of reading it. Do the best you can for your readers, whatever you are writing and for whomever you are writing it.

NEXT TIME: The problem of the middle.