When is a Story Finished?
I'm always interested in the question: How do you know when a story is finished? My answer is that I usually know when a story is finished on a very visceral kinesthetic level--like seeing a toy train stop on the tracks because it's reached its destination. But people know in different ways. How do you know? Have you resolved the narrative? Has a character gone through an arc? Or, if you write flash fiction, does the language itself tell you "there is no more left?"
The question "is a story finished?" usually applies to the end of a story or novel. And in that sense, for me (and I hear a lot of writers say this) when a story is finished, there's a sense of having no more business with it. Recently, though, I began to think about the things that my characters did *during* the story---the lives they led, without regard to the plot, lives that perhaps were hinted at but not explicitly stated. Perhaps because my novel involved a panoply of characters I became aware that--in some strange and surreal sense---I could imagine them still going about their business, cuaght in various segments of time in the underground mine where they were held hostage. It became clear to me that they wrote each other letters--letters having nothing to do with the plot. And I began to write them.
You can see them at athttp://www.facebook.com/pages/Heideggers-Glasses-Notes-from-the-Compound-of-Scribes/117690484948850?ref=t
I never have forced myself to write them. But now and then a letter occurs to me. Or perhaps I even think they allow me to to show it to a limited part of the world. In that sense, for this novel, the story is never finished. But it's what goes on in the middle of the story for me that contains teeming details.
What is it like for you?
About Thaisa
Enchantment is Thaisa Frank’s third collection of short fiction, (her sixth book) and includes two semi-autobiographical novellas as well as thirty-three stories. Her most recent novel, Heidegger’s Glasses, takes place in the mythical haven of an underground...
Connections
Causes Thaisa Frank Supports
Kiva Doctors without Borders Care2
Love this question!
Such an intriguing and mysterious topic, Thaisa.
For myself, it's one of the many curiosities of the writing process, and the answer always changes. Sometimes I feel I'm writing toward the ending, knowing it exists very specifically and can be aimed at, like a bright beacon out ahead of me. Other times I feel it keeps dancing out of reach. And every once in a while, it seems to be a random moment that catches me by surprise.
Narrative resolution isn't always so much the point as much as a completion of an image, with something that is like a visual resolving into focus. Because I'm fascinated by what might be called "emotional imagery," the visceral/kinesthetic conclusion (as you say) is where I listen for clarity.
I love the idea that characters can keep muttering secrets to one another long after the writer has turned her attention elsewhere.
characters' letters
How amazingly wonderful, Thaisa, that you characters still live on, and write letters!! Well, wonderful for you as a writer, and for your characters as a mode of communication, and yet of course their situation may continue to be difficult --- I can't wait to read your book!!
I too know more through sound and feel, when I've come to an ending. I like Elizabeth's sense of sometimes being surprised, when the ending has arrived. This happened to me with my Lydia Cassatt novel -- I'd thought it would be much longer, in fact, and I'd thought the second half would be from another point of view, but once I realized what the ending was, my plans flew out the window.
I can trip myself up, sometimes, if I am too attached to the way I'd like a work of fiction to end. Right now I'm revising a novel, changing the story, so that it doesn't have to have the more artificial ending I'd thought I wanted.
the story's ending/the writer's ending/the characters' endings
This is a fascinating question, Thaisa. Thanks for asking -- it seems as if the ending of the story may come long before the writer is finished with the work as a whole...if we revise and revise, the ending may be in place, but we still have plenty of work to do. For The True Sources of the Nile, I wrote dozens of endings before I found the one that felt accurate. For my new book, I found the ending (apart from editing) long before I had versions of the beginning or middle that worked.
And then even when the story is done and the author is done, the characters may go on and show up elsewhere -- I love it that yours are writing letters. Sometimes I think I may have more stories about a given set of characters, or another book. It's a pleasure to read books that develop in series, trilogies or less formal forms. Multiple stories about the same characters or about their descendents or relatives. A.S. Byatt, Andrea Barrett, Joseph Roth, Doris Lessing. Perhaps some of your characters are suggesting they're not done with you?
really interesting
distinction between the ending and "finishing." I sometimes know the ending and work backwards, but knowing the ending isn' the same as the story being finished. I've wondered, too, whether my characters aren't finished with me. I can't imagine writing another novel about WW II; but maybe they will make me (characters can be very strict!). Or maybe they will show up somewhere else.
I love the way you describe your new book. I do think that if you have the end of a book, the whole book is there--just like Michelangelo seeing the statue when he looked at the unsculpted stone. I can't wait to read this new book.