More often, the beginning prefigures the end - symbolically maybe, a broken dish fore-shadowing the infidelity revealed in the punch-line. And I am sitting at my mother's place at the mah jong table, on the East, where things begin.I am to replace my mother, whose seat at the mah jong table has been empty since she died two months ago. My father has asked me to be the fourth corner of the Joy Luck Club.Here's the start and end of "The Joy Luck Club" by Amy Tan Sometimes the ending refers back to the beginning even more explicitly. Mrs Wilson winked at her daughter and said: "So he's not such a bad catch after all!" I always write my last lines, my last paragraph, my last page first, and then I go back and work towards it" Katherine Anne Porter (in Writers at Work: "The Paris Review Interviews", p.151)Īs an example of how closely the ending and beginning can be tied together, here's the end of the story from "Yours" Even authors who don't exclusively use twist-endings may be very end-oriented in their writing procedures - " If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. The importance of the ending can be so strong that it affects the shape of the whole story. numerically dominant in the whole of any writer's work until O.Henry, the effect of the surprise endings on short-story structure and on the popularity of the form extended beyond the actual number of examples". William Goldman wrote that " The key to all story endings is to give the audience what it wants, but not the way it expects".Īfter Poe, surprize endings became popular and influential - " Though surprise endings as not. Over 15% end with a sentence of 5 words or less.Īristotle thought that endings should be " inevitable and unexpected". Here are the statistics for endings: 31% speech, 10% ironic (in novels the percentage is lower), 8% main character dies, 7% a symbolic final event (a door closing, a journey ends, etc), 5% a question, 4% "author comment", 1% wedding (in novels the percentage is far higher). They are also apparently harder to write well". Brewer (where I also got the statistics from) " Endings are even more various and harder to classify. "Then I woke up and realised it was all a dream."Īccording to "The Narrative Modes" by D.S. A draft of Nineteen Eighty Four began with "It was a cold, blowy day in early April, and innumerable clocks were striking thirteen" which isn't as crisp an attention-grabber as it could be. It's worth getting the first sentence word perfect. An aphorism - "All happy families are alike each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." ("Anna Karenina", Leo Tolstoy).A Question - "Was was it, Tiffany Aching wondered, that people liked noise so much?" ("I shall wear midnight", Terry Pratchett).Visceral - mentioning a strong smell, taste, etc.Attention-grabbing - "The strangest thing about my wife's return from the dead was how other people reacted" ("The Beginner's Goodbye", Anne Tyler).In "More five-minute writing", Margret Geraghty lists a few common types of starts info-dumps), 10% "speech", 5% "author comment". A survey came up with these statistics for how stories begin: 40% "narrative", 30% "description" (e.g. Initial info-dumps aren't necessarily bad - beginnings like "Gregory Samsa woke from uneasy dreams one morning to find himself changed into a giant bug" quickly give the reader the required context - but newer stories tend to spread out the scene-setting, sometimes starting in the middle of the action - medias in res. There was a Sabbath lull in the air which, in a settlement unused to Sabbath influences, looked ominous. Two or three men, conversingĮarnestly together, ceased as he approached, and exchanged significant glances. John Oakhurst, gambler, stepped into the main street of Poker Flat on the morning of the twenty-third of November, 1850, he was conscious of a change in its moral atmosphere since the preceding night. In the olden days, first paragraphs were info-dumps. For now here's a clue - it's from "Yours", a Women's magazine).īeginnings often set the scene in some way. "You're not going out with him and that's the end of it!" Jenny's father Sometimes they even suggest what the end's going to be. The opening of a short story is more important than a novel's - it's a bigger proportion of the whole, and because a story's supposed to have a tight structure, the beginning's a strong indicator of the whole story's genre, mood and tone.
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