The writer has done their job when the reader’s reaction to the ending is “Oh my God,” followed by “Of course.” ~David Leavitt
Story Challenge | Week 12 | Elissa Schappell says the ending bears all the weight of the story ... imbuing the story with meaning and making it unforgettable ... but how exactly do we do that?
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I’ve been dreading writing this post! Today is the twelfth and last Wednesday post of our epic Story Challenge, which started in December. But, as L. Frank Baum said, “Everything has to come to an end, sometime.” So, here I go, writing the last post of Story Challenge, and with special thanks and eternal gratitude to Little Red Riding Hood (more on that shortly).
From that incredible first week of new beginnings, we have taken ourselves through a whole cascade of storytelling craft principles—character, place, image, desire, voice, the narrator’s promise, conflict & stakes, dialogue, and aboutness, all archived in order here. And it has been nothing short of an honor—one full of surprise, delight, and tremendous, light-filled pleasure—to watch so much incredible work unfold over 12 weeks. To bear witness to such stunning creative energy, such inventiveness with language and form.
Yes.
But also, to witness so much effort, so much bumping up against and ultimately breaking through preconceived ideas about what a story is or has to be, and so much wrestling with self-imposed understandings of what our writing is or isn’t, what it can or cannot become. So much renegotiation of permission and possibility, so much re-seeing of the story itself.
Friends, writing is always a metaphor for life.
Where we struggle in the writing, we struggle in the living. Where we can find more ease in the writing, we find more ease in the living. There is no other way, because we are narrative beings. The way we understand stories and the ways we allow ourselves to shape and reshape them is the way we understand life, and the ways we allow ourselves to shape and reshape it.
Which leads me to a few observations.
1. We discover the most power in our stories when we shake off our own seriousness and let ourselves play, let ourselves make something that might be nonsense. Playful is—again and again and again—the portal to the profound.
2. We can, as Glennon Doyle says, do hard things, even when the hard things are posing as silly exercises.
3. There is magic in throwing ourselves into newness, into the unexpected task, into the “who knows what will happen here.”
And now, let’s play with endings!
For the best luck with endings, we will benefit from going back to the beginning (after all, a circular structure is so satisfying!).
I must say, though, that in many ways, the first week of Story Challenge was, for me, the most nerve-wracking, because I wanted it to be good, I wanted you all to love it, but I knew already from your notes and emails and comments that many of you had some anxiety about fiction. Some of you had never attempted it before and wanted to be sure that Story Challenge would be useful to your essays and memoir writing, as well. So I said a lot of reassuring things about how playing with the craft of fiction will always amplify and sharpen our creative nonfiction.
Then … instead of doing something nice and conventional, something that would seem like an easy bridge between the worlds of CNF and fiction, something that might feel sensible to everyone regardless of genre and experience, I busted out of the gate with a curveball, a fairy tale, no less—Little Red Riding Hood—and asked you to write a new beginning, an in media res beginning, to this well-worn children’s story. And I asked you to dive in deep and surprise us, surprise yourself.
My heavens did you show up for that, and then some! I haven’t had so much fun teaching writing in a very long time. I was reading your entries out loud to my family, my friends, anyone who would listen.
Those early LRRH scenes, which many of you continued to pull through the subsequent weeks of the challenge, contained some of the most original, inventive, compelling, hilarious, and strangely evocative work I could ever have hoped for in any challenge. Those scenes were among the most alive and unpredictable storytelling, the truest storytelling, I’ve ever seen in a writing workshop, ever (including during my MFA).
And that feeling—that feeling we had when we created those living scenes, crackling with the spark of truth and possibility—still lives in our bodies. That exhilaration we expressed (that was fun! that surprised me! where did that even come from?! I can’t believe what I came up with!) is a feeling we want to memorize, just like the first time we ever rode a two-wheeler without training wheels: freedom, power, balance, speed, surprise.
We won’t feel that every single time we write (if only), but if we’ve never felt it at all, if we never take off the training wheels of self-limitation, we won’t ever taste the deliciousness of pure creativity.
We won’t even know what we’re missing.
Another thing we gleaned right of the gate, in week one, is that stories are not fixed. We can reimagine the telling of our stories as many times as we want. In many ways, storytelling is the ultimate freedom even while being the ultimate portal to potential truth, as we talked about in last week’s thread.
So, as we enter into the fun and impossible work of writing good endings, we’ll benefit from remembering—from literally “recalling”—that feeling we had in week one (and intermittently throughout, whenever breakthroughs came!) in order to write the kinds of endings that Elissa Schappell describes in her Tin House essay, Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow:
The ending bears all the weight of the story, its task nothing less than imbuing the story with meaning and making it unforgettable. The ending must fulfill the reader’s expectations by answering the questions that have been raised in the reader’s mind (or at least some of them), and it has to make sense, but at the same time, it should be unexpected. I don’t mean I want a surprise—I mean, even if I know how the story will end, I want to be surprised by the way I get there. The writer has done his job, novelist David Leavitt says, when the reader’s reaction to the ending is “Oh my God,” followed by “Of course.”
Let’s do that!
Let’s write some endings that make us say, “Oh my god,” followed by, “Of course.” And if you weren’t here for week one, that’s okay, too, you get the fun of having that same feeling anew, possibly for the first time, as we go back into the bizarre world of LRRH for another round of creative treasure.
“Little Red Riding Hood,” illustrated in a 1927 story anthology
To warm us up for the hard work of real play (remember how that felt in childhood?!), we’ll start with a breakdown of how the ending to LRRH has repeatedly changed over the years, both for inspiration and permission.
I’ll then give you very specific invitations and constrained exercises to write your own endings—with a twist.
It’s going to be wild.
I absolutely cannot wait to read your work in this week’s comments. I’ll be hanging out there and celebrating through my tears that it’s over—but I know I’ll also be laughing and exclaiming with joy as we watch the exercises unlock so many doors.
Let’s go!