On Getting Out of a Story

Some Useful Quotes

I find teaching how to end stories very tricky.

Possibly the trickiest thing about teaching writing, apart from teaching (trying to teach) how to be funny.

It’s easy enough to talk for a while about kinds of ending, but I absolutely don’t want to recommend this or that one.

Especially not happy or sad, upbeat or downbeat.

If you haven’t written an epiphany ending before, it’s worth trying — just to get a sense if that kind of (for some people) non-ending is for you.

A lot of epiphanies are essentially:

It is August.

My life is going to change. I feel it.

(That’s Raymond Carver in the wonderful and troubling story ‘Fat’.)

(I’ll write a bit about epiphany stories soon.)

Perhaps because it is genuinely difficult to say much that’s useful about story endings, I haven’t found half as many useful quotes on this as on getting in and getting on.

Please help me out with this. Add something useful in the comments. Maybe there’s a slew of good stuff I just haven’t found.

The quotes I do have, well — I feel a bit ashamed at how well known they are.

For example:

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées.

I think this is profoundly true.

The essential epigraph that was with you all along, that germinated the whole book, that had to be cut.

The title, which is really the first thing — often changed in the final few hours.

And here’s another quote from Blaise Pascal, but from many others as well.

I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.

But you shouldn’t find yourself making that excuse about a finished work. Ideally, you wouldn’t ever rush anything.

That’s not the case, though.

For years, I taught alongside the writer Russell Celyn Jones. And I once heard him say —

When’s the book finished? When I need the money.

Russell was, of course, assuming that there was some money.

Robert McKee, in Story, says —

The Climax of the last act should be your greatest imaginative leap. Without it, you have no story. Until you have it, your characters wait like suffering patients praying for a cure.

But that’s just like saying, ‘Amaze me now.’

Or ‘Amaze me in six months’ time.’

McKee does give guidance, and references Chinatown and Casablanca. But one of the reasons I respect him as a screenwriting guru is that he doesn’t pretend great imaginative leaps can come from anything other than great efforts at great imagination.

Our rousing upbeat/downbeat finish today comes from Henry James — his story ‘The Middle Years’.

We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.