A Good Ending
I started writing personal essays more or less accidentally. I had (and still have) what began as a monthly column for the online magazine Author but soon turned, despite my mild objections, into a daily column. I didn’t think I had enough to say about writing and publishing to fill 400 words, five days a week. And I was right! After only a month, I didn’t want to pen another piece about query letters or agents or markets. So, I decided to tell a story.
While I had been telling fictional stories for years, I was not accustomed to personal narrative, at least not on the page. I told stories to my friends and family all the time, but this, I knew, would be different. Fortunately, Author was intended to be an uplifting magazine—we would publish no articles or interviews filled with any gloom and doom about the publishing world or how hard it is to write. Instead, we would always encourage.
That meant my story had to be uplifting, which helped serve as a guide, a definite target for my narrative arrow. However, I didn’t appreciate until I reached the story’s end, specifically the last paragraph and then the very last line, that whether the story left the reader feeling hopeful or indifferent or discouraged would be determined in these final words. What’s more, when I finished it to my satisfaction, and as I pushed myself away from the desk, I noticed how peaceful and soothed I felt. It was an important lesson for a newly-minted essayist: In writing it, I had left myself feeling how I hoped my readers would feel.
I believe I have a career as an essayist because of how I have learned to end my stories. This is where you deliver your gift: the clear, emotional destination toward which your essay is moving. This is where you answer the reader’s question: Why have you told me this story?
It’s Not About You
As someone who has read hundreds of submissions to Author and who regularly teaches the personal essay, I have seen again and again how most pieces, no matter how well told in the beginning and middle, lose focus and power at their conclusion. This is due largely to the nature of the personal essay, which, as Windy Lynn Harris succinctly described in her book Writing and Selling Short Stories and Personal Essays, is “a story with a lesson.” Creative writers love telling stories; many do not feel so comfortable offering lessons.
There are a number of reasons for this. First, however, I should point out that not all personal essays end with any kind of lesson. These types of pieces tend to be more like portraits of life as it has been lived, without any real definitive answers about that life. What is called the “lyrical essay” is one common example of this. Sometimes these essays show us something beautiful, and sometimes something quite grim. Regardless, the author draws no conclusions about what they rendered. Here is life as they’ve seen it; draw whatever conclusions you’d like.
This is a common approach if you’ve primarily written fiction. Most fiction writers train themselves not to preach to their readers, to always show and not to tell, to avoid a soapbox and to let the characters and their actions reveal the story’s meaning. They may even deliberately avoid thinking too much about any kind of message so as to better allow the characters to act naturally and show the author why the story is being told. Most fiction writers discover their story’s full arc through the characters’ actions, which become the vehicles for how those characters change or don’t change, learn or don’t learn.
This is somewhat true in personal narrative as well. At first, I just want to tell the story. I want to paint a vivid setting, capture the surprise of an inciting incident, the pain or confusion or fear of the rising conflict, and then the relief of resolution. Initially, I am just focused on what happened and why it happened.
The difference is that in personal narrative, I already know what my character is going to do. I do not, however, often know why he did what he did, thought what he thought, or said what he said. I discover the answers in the writing. By the way, the answer to why he did and said what he did and said is always because of what he, my character, who is also named Bill Kenower, believed at that time. As my beliefs change, so do my actions.
I don’t know how to write a personal essay without this kind of self-reflection. Not every writer wants to look inward in this particular way. It feels self-indulgent. And it can be. A personal narrative is never about the author but about what life taught the author; when I tell my stories it’s my goal that any reader, regardless of who they might be, will feel ultimately as if the story is about them.
Life the Teacher
And here’s what I know about everyone on earth: they don’t like to suffer. Everyone likes to feel happy and safe and content, and no one likes to be afraid or angry or confused. Sadly, everyone will suffer, and probably frequently. Fortunately, without conflict, without problems and pain, there would be no stories. In fact, I usually choose my stories based on how acute its conflict. In other words, the worse I felt, the better the story.
I know you may be reticent to return, as it were, to the scene of the crime. However, I have known plenty of pain in my life, and personal narrative has taught me, like no other practice, that I always suffered not because of what happened but because of what I believed about what was happening. I suffered because I believed I wasn’t good enough, I was unlucky, I needed to be someone I wasn’t, or the world was unkind. The event, the particular thing that happened to me, ends immediately, but my beliefs endure until I change them. I will continue to suffer until I believe differently.
Suffering is a great and clarifying teacher. Nothing teaches me that I must think well of myself like thinking I’m no good; nothing teaches me the value of peace like being at war; nothing teaches me self-acceptance like trying to make myself be someone I’m not. I may have to suffer a long time to learn, but eventually I do. We all do.
However, to write a good ending, I must first understand the story’s problem. That’s where the gold is because that’s where I was learning, where life itself was teaching me. I suffered because I believed something that wasn’t true, and life did all it could to help correct this. If I were writing a piece about quitting smoking, I would devote a fair amount of space to showing why smoking seemed like a good idea at one time, how I felt it solved the ongoing threat of boredom. I would write this portion almost as if I were trying to convince the reader that everyone should smoke. Ideally, I would also write it without any judgment on myself for the choices I made at the time. But I would also describe how my mouth tasted like an ashtray, and how I didn’t like how my body felt, and how I still worried about being bored. Problem, problem, problem.
Two Kinds of Endings
The ending is always the opposite of the problem. Mechanically, the opposite of smoking is simply not smoking. This is useful to remember if I want to end the story with action. That is, the very last thing I describe would be the character throwing away a pack of cigarettes or crushing a half-smoked butt under his shoe. Obviously, it would have to be described in such a way that the reader believed my character would never smoke again, that he no longer needs cigarettes to relieve boredom.
Sometimes, however, the action ends before the story does. In this case, the last paragraph is devoted to a view of life after the problem has been resolved. If my character has smoked his last cigarette, I might have him look out at the world and see it as interesting. This is a more poetic ending. My goal here is to paint a portrait that captures the relief that comes when we have let the problem go.
Regardless of what kind of ending I choose, my description of the problem can come in very handy. If I wanted to end the story with my character crushing out his last cigarette, I would attempt to echo how I described this action in the middle, how he felt bad about himself or was already looking forward to the next one. I would try to keep how I describe the action at the end as close to how I described it in the middle with just enough of a tweak to show that something had changed.
If I wanted a poetic ending, I might have the character look at the exact same scene— same living room or street or park—that he had once seen as boring, as bereft of interest and value, what he had needed a cigarette to save himself from. I would describe the scene once again mirroring as closely as possible how I described it before but with enough changed that it was clear he was seeing it differently.
You’re Not Perfect
Some writers still feel resistant to ending with these kinds of lessons because they are acutely aware that they’re still learning, that they’re far from perfect. Perhaps in the above example I lapsed and started smoking a few years after the finishing the piece, or I simply still craved a cigarette from time to time. Perfection is not the point. Learning is.
For instance, I wrote a book called Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt. It’s a book about how debilitating it is to compare ourselves to other people, specifically other writers. Does this mean that since I published it, I have never compared myself to anyone? If only that were so. However, I don’t do it very often, nor for very long. Once I recognized how useless comparison was, I began practicing not comparing. The more I practice, the better I get at it. However, I can’t practice something until I realize it can be practiced, that there is a choice I can make.
This is what we’re really “teaching” at the end of our pieces—that we have choices. That we are free. If you don’t know you have a choice to open your cage, if you believe it is locked, then you will believe you are imprisoned. You don’t have to be perfect to teach this. You don’t have to be a guru high on a hill. You just have to be someone who has recognized a choice, who has made that choice, and has experienced the value of the difference between one thing and another because they have suffered and learned.
Finally, remember that the best endings leave the reader feeling better than how they felt when they started reading. This should be true for you the writer as well. Ideally, you will feel in yourself that same relief you felt when you crushed out the cigarette, or quit the job, or saw that everyone had what it took. If you can feel that relief again, then likely your readers will as well.
That feeling is everything. We tend to forget most of what we read, even of those stories we love. What we remember, however, what compels us to recommend a book or essay, is how it left us feeling. That lives in us long after we’ve come to the end, teaching us again and again, no matter how hard things may get, the value of life as we lead it.
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