On Endings...

Happy or sad?

Q.

Regarding your most recent  letter and answer on likable characters… funny that I've been thinking a bit about likability recently. Not about the characters but a story itself. I have one story I've written where this comes to mind. I'm actually proud of the story but ... well, the ending is definite in a way I don't usually write. It's also, for lack of a better word, kind of uplifting. By that I mean, it's not a downer. I keep thinking it's wrong or maybe unhip in a way. Like serious writers don't write happy ending stories. So I want to change it. And I think that this relatively happy, non-cool ending to a serious story about love and loss and loneliness makes the story less interesting and, yes, less important.

I don’t know if it’s the right ending, really. I keep thinking I can just cut it off a sentence before and the story will be fine, perhaps not as complete. But what is complete? It’s not like a Lego construction set where when you run out of pieces, you’re done. I feel like cutting it and leaving the story more ambiguous might be the better ending. I’m a ruthless editor of my own work but here is a case where I feel paralyzed. To make things more fraught, I intend the story as my writing sample when I begin applying for MFA Fellowships at the end of the year. You’ve written stories that have good outcome endings (“Victory Lap”) so I see it’s done but reading the published stories of the moment, many do not.  Does my ending work? Sure.  But I wonder if I’m saying too much anoppd it’s tied me in knots.  

So I ask you, George, how do I know?

A.

Another amazing question, and thanks for it.

First, let me say that I am very familiar with this conundrum. 

I wonder what happens if we do a bit of axis-shifting.  Rather than “uplifting” vs. “downer,” what if we say “truthful” vs. “forced?”

Imagine that your story has three main parts and then the ending.  What we might want to ask is: “Which ending is most truthful, given those first three parts?”  That is: which ending has the story, so far, earned? 

We can sometimes feel when a story is forcing an “uplifting” ending (or, for that matter, a “downer” ending) just by the way it has to contort itself to get out of the grasp of what it has already declared in its non-ending sections.  It’s kind of like in a conversation, when a friend has just listed the nine things that are going badly, and then she feels compelled to end with “But it’s all good!”  (That’s the “false uplift” ending.) Or, conversely, when another friend has just listed all the many good things happening in his life and ends with, “It’s hard, though.” (That’s the “false downer” ending.)

“At last! I’ve reached the final paragraph of my story! This should be easy…”

In some cases, if we look closely, we’ll find that our ending is defying the story’s established physical or emotional reality.  (A guy who is not a fast runner miraculously wins the Olympics, just because he needs to or the story will be too sad; an abusive mother suddenly “has a realization” unprompted by what the story has made happen to her and is suddenly a great mother, because the writer loves her mother and all mothers and doesn’t want to be a bummer.  And so on.)  

This is not to say that an ending can’t defy its pre-ending reality – many great stories do just this, and I’d cite Tolstoy’s “Master and Man” as one such example.  (We might also cite our current story, “The Gilded Six-Bits” as another.)  Although, in those examples, it feels that the story is not contorting itself, but is, rather, finding something within itself that argues for, or justifies, the “uplifting” ending.  In “Master and Man,” as I discuss in my Russian book, the qualities that allow the more positive ending were there in the character all along, but on the back-burner, and the situation brought these qualities forward.  In “The Gilded Six-Bits,” the story’s movement toward a more positive ending is, actually, the heart of the story, embodied in the question of whether the couple can recover from the shock of the infidelity.

But in neither of these does the sudden lunge toward hope at the end feel forced.

In the story you mentioned, “Victory Lap,” the “data” of the story indicated that the abduction should be successful.  (The abductor had done this before, was armed, the girl was young and small and home alone and opened the door to him).  But I didn’t like this ending.  I was rooting against it.  Partly because it was abhorrent and sad but also because it felt familiar and easy and expected.  So, I said to the story, “Look, if there’s any way you can change this outcome, I’d really appreciate it.”  And it said back, “Well, make it viable.”  So – and none of this happened as linearly as I’m making it sound – I tried a bunch of salvation methods that didn’t work, and then “noticed” a geode I’d put there earlier, innocently, and revised and revised until the method of bringing about the preferred, “happier” ending seemed viable.

The point is: this was now a “truthful” (plausible) ending.  I hadn’t broken any rules, physical or psychological, to get that guy hit in the head.  And it meant something now too; it felt like an answer to the question, “When things go right, how do they?” Or “What resources do we have to bring to bear in the face of evil?”

Also, in truth, it was not a purely “happy” ending: the attack had happened; both kids had seen and done things that would take years to process.  In a sense, that was the whole point of the ending, to indicate that a purely “happy ending,” in this life is rare, and we should be wildly grateful for endings, or moments, that are in the least bit laced through with happiness, virtue, kindness, triumph, etc.

So, dear questioner: what does your story declare in its pre-ending sections?  What seems most likely to happen?  What is the meaning of things happening that way?  If you reverse polarities on the ending, what is the meaning of that?  Which ending is more interesting?  More higher-order, most unusual? To me, having the girl saved at the end of Victory Lap sort of encompassed, or implied, the other, sadder, ending - and then went beyond it. In a sense, because the reader had already imagined (and dreaded) that ending, it was as if I already “had” that ending, and could go beyond it, to the next level of difficulty, as it were, which had the effect of producing, also, an extra dollop of meaning…

Your story is in dialogue with other stories that your reader will feel to be “about” the same thing – how can your story distinguish itself?  When I was writing it, I felt “Victory Lap” to be in conversation with O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” In both of those, the bad guys win, so, my feeling was, my story could serve as a confirmation of the truths of those stories, or could go out and try to confirm something else. And why not, since those stories had already done so perfectly what they were brought into the world to do?

Finally, let me say that I’m at a point in life where I’m finding I really value a story that authentically praises the good – I feel this to be, somehow, a higher-order artistic accomplishment.  The French writer de Montherlant claimed that “happiness writes in white ink on a white page” (which is often misquoted as “happiness writes white.”)  Although, come to think of it, I also (still) value a story that authentically nails the bad, shows us how things go wrong – a story that scolds, renounces, speaks truth to power.

But this is where that axis-shifting above comes in handy.  Why is “A Good Man is Hard to Find” wonderful?  Because it’s truthful.  Truthful, though sad.  Truthful because sad.  True to itself.  True to what is has already stated to be the case.  It’s consistent with itself, it doesn’t insult by asking us to accept a distorted logic. It tells us some things that are laceratingly accurate about human nature, among them the bit about, “She’d have been a good woman if there had been someone there to shoot her every day of her life.”  And what’s more uplifting than that?  Being told precise truths about the way things are, by a valued friend, who has skillfully brought us to that point by carefully tending every line of her story, so that we’ll believe it? 

So maybe the uplift comes from the feeling of watching the writer work things through, displaying certain admirable qualities (intensity, honestly, creative joy) as she does so.

I’d imagine it could be uplifting to watch a person energetically building a beautiful coffin. And depressing to watch someone sloppily and carelessly make the worst birthday cake ever. :)