What Endings Really Do
A writer and editor's guide to shaping the last lines of your work — from Rilke to The Great Gatsby.
Hello dear subscribers, and happy (very belated) New Year. I’m sorry to have been quiet here: it was not for lack of wanting to post. But I’m glad to be back.
I was quiet because I was dealing with some health issues. Late last fall, I was diagnosed with a resurgence of babesia — one of the tick-borne infections I wrote about in The Invisible Kingdom — and in December I enrolled in a clinical trial for a new drug that aims to treat chronic babesiosis.
I’m so glad to be getting help and good care. But the first weeks of the trial were pretty tough: a cycle of appointments, herxes, recalibrations, and the temporal distortion that illness brings. Add to that the holidays, the parade of viruses the kids have ferried home, the massive snowstorm, and the ongoing, disorienting turmoil of the country — I wonder how you all are doing. Like so many of us, I find the abandonment of even the semblance of democratic principles and the murder of civilians in the streets just awful. Today and tomorrow there are a number of protests against ICE funding, in case you haven’t seen.
In brighter, and locally personal, news, a new poem of mine, “Changing Table,” appeared recently in The New Yorker, one of the first poems I’ve sent out in quite a while as I’ve been quietly finishing a manuscript. I hope you enjoy it. Another poem from the manuscript will be out in The New Yorker soon, and a long one is appearing in Poetry later this year I believe.
Tomorrow, too, I’ll be visiting the Conscious Writers Collaborative to talk about how to shape a nonfiction book — which feels, fittingly, like a conversation about beginnings and endings disguised as one about structure! If you’re a reader and you’re coming, do say hi.
Today, I want to return to a subject that obsesses me as both a writer and an editor: endings. In my Advanced Poetry class, my number one note to students is: “You’ve written past your ending!” I know I wrote about them recently, but here I want to talk more about what they are — and what kind of temporal and emotional work they do in a piece of writing, which is crucial to understand in order to be able to write better ones.
What is an ending? It’s a way of rereading the past and the future
On one of its broadest levels, art is a special way of making sense of our lives, and in particular of this strange fact: we are born in the middle, and we die in the middle. All kinds of experiences get cut off in the middle. Illness, love, political change, grief — it’s rare that in the moment these experiences come to us with clear narrative edges. They begin before we understand them and end, if they end at all, in ways that resist the tidy arc of resolution. Much of what we live never “finishes.” It simply changes state. And sometimes we never have that final conversation with an ex or a parent that we thought we would someday have.
Frank Kermode, in The Sense of an Ending, argues that the endings we create in art are not mere stopping points. They are temporal fictions that allow us to experience our lives as if they had shape. They are retrospective — they cast meaning backward over the middle — and they are prospective — they imply a future the reader must imagine beyond the final line.
As Kermode writes, we need these “fictions” of beginning and end not because they are literally true, but because they make it possible to live in time at all without losing one’s mind. They create what he calls a consonance between origin, middle, and imagined completion. They humanize what would otherwise be the intolerable fact of temporal chaos. In doing so, they make art into art, as distinct from chaotic narratives of witness.
Of course, while an appetite for art may be universal across time, but the specific conventions of literature change over the decades, and so does how we think about our endings. In our postmodern, “end-of-times” era, endings feel especially charged and hard to deliver: How do you “resolve” what often feels unresolved, or, indeed, unresolvable? To end something in a way that gives it too much shape or tidiness can feel as false and disappointing to readers as not giving any shape at all to a text.
Leo Bersani, glossing Kermode in his New York Times review of The Sense of an Ending, puts it in a way I admire: modern literature finds a new way to think about crisis. The end becomes not imminent — a clear arrival — but immanent: felt as pressure within the present. We live in what feels like perpetual crisis, yet “crisis,” Kermode reminds us, is not inherent in a moment; it is a way of thinking about a moment. That distinction feels newly urgent to me this year.
Genre as shape rather than a set of rules
One of the most freeing ideas I offer my students is this: genre is less a set of rules to follow than a kind of shape that suits a kind of experience or story.
A sonnet, a novel, a memoir — each is a historically evolved way of imposing pattern (a kind of shape) on experience. What matters is not obedience to convention but the patterning itself. And no pattern exists without pressure against it, without constraint. Tradition gives us a recognizable shape, and history selects for some of the most exciting shapes.
Making a pattern out of experience is its own pleasure; further playing with the pattern or intervening in the tradition that pattern belongs to can be even more pleasurable. For example, read Harryette Mullen’s “Wipe That Simile Off Your Aphasia” or Jericho Brown’s “The Tradition.” In each, variation registers as meaningful.
Originality, in other words, doesn’t come from escaping form. It comes from working within a pattern deeply enough that your deviations carry force.
What an ending actually does
So what is thew news you can use, as a writer? Here are some closer looks at what an ending does.