Taken off a note I wrote on Facebook.
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I'm getting chills just thinking about chapter 12. About writing an ending. About the things I've waited almost four years to record in text, about to be actualised at last.
It's been a long time, a long journey. Nothing amazing on absolute standards, but quite a vast achievement for myself. For one, I've never written anything over the course 3.5 years before. I have a little over a million words of lifetime output; this story makes up a fifth of that.
Why an ending? Endings are magical. Reading an ending is ecstasy--sometimes wholesome, sometimes cathartic, sometimes downright painful. In those few pages, in that culmination at the last paragraph, the entire story must be contained, reiterated more powerfully, closed off satisfyingly--yet never closed. An entire world must be left behind, left to stand on its own--a castle to be collapsed or to last in the grinding of time's wind. The ending isn't the flag at the top; the ending is the gate. The place we will always remember as the departure in itself.
Writing the piece is bliss. But writing an ending is an elevated experience altogether. What can I compare it to? Completing the very last examination of your life. Finishing a marathon. The end of childbirth.
The best endings, I feel, do not end. The story is of movement, of change; the ending suggests that this movement and change is everlasting: things do not stall, the world is dynamic, and change will come again--into light, into dark: there will always be heroes to rise to the challenge. How does a story close without closing? A circle.
This is the magic of endings. Someway or other, when the ending comes, we think of the beginning. We lay the origin and the destination side by side, think of the journey we took to get from there to here. And between those points, the voyage passes, like a howling wind, through castles and seas and in the sails of traversing ships, in still summer forests and cave systems that see no light, and down lost rivers--a minute, a millennium. But still, we're here, again, the same yet different, the world completely transformed, the world identical, the world as peaceful as it was at the start. Everything that happens seems to be for the sake of transition, movement, progression out of the darkness--but ultimately, isn't it all in the name of return to the mean? Aren't we only fighting for peace because we know that peace once existed and peace can return?
It's a strange paradox when you take it into the context of writing. The concept of the story, in itself, is hinged upon the idea of progression and change. But it is a progression and change, back to the stable ideal we once had. The darkness must be vanquished so the light can shine again, just as it did in our golden age. The hope for that return is what drives the story. The characters. The idea and inspiration.
And the ending, the ending must carry this all. The ending is the return, the return to that which looked so impossible, a thing of the distant past--like the portrait of heaven in the eyes of a deluded man. The greater the scale of the work, the grander the conclusion. And a happy ending, however Pyrhhic, must be earned in its full worth. Hearts must be torn. The good must be slain. The shadow must win--if only for an instant, that little instant of tilt. And at the end of it all, a reader will look back at the start, and realise how much has changed--the people, the world. That is what makes a good story. That is what strikes the story deep into the heart.
It is daunting to write an ending, it seems, what with these thousands of details that must be tied neatly and kept in balance for the entire course of the climax, the falling action, the resolution. But there is also a strange thing about writing: only half of it is conscious--the scribbling, or tapping of fingers on the keyboard, the intermittent reaching for your drink or turning to the window when your eyes begin to sting.
Of course, conscious and methodical writing is workable. But when it comes to points in the story like the end, when the reader stops analysing (because what is there to analyse, when the plot has unfolded full, and nothing more can be calculated?) and begins to simply, gently, ragingly, /feel/.
That is when you enter this special, ascended state of mind where you aren't completely processing logically anymore. In it, you don't really note individual words as you lay them down; sometimes you don't even know what you are writing--only that you are /writing/, and writing because these words feel right, because these are the first things that your mind sings from its emotional centre. It is the state of mind where, suddenly, links form between ravens and blood and rejection, and when you think of sorrow, you see crystals of snow on windowpanes.
Now that's established, it's not hard to explain why the thought of writing Chapter 12 thrills me so.
Four years is a long time to spend with a story--writing as you please, and yet all the while dropping points, slipping in scenes, all in the drive towards the ending, where it all cumulates and erupts like a supernova and ruins the world or rebuilds it.
Four years of waiting for this ending to happen. Four years of imagining, reimagining, rehashing, reordering that same scene. Which one would have been the best? I wouldn't know, because only one will be breathed life into. Four years is enough to make the thought of letting go of a story heartwrenching.
A little like raising a child, I'd think. You dedicate years of your life to it, watch it find its own footing in the world, let it fly away.
On to the next, though you never can forget it, for all the tears and time you spent.
Funny looking back, seeing how the course of the years is lain down, tangibly, in the progression of words. The writing in the first chapter was fledgling, childish, almost silly. In the tenth, to be frank, I made myself tear up. Half for the story, half for the happiness of seeing what I could do.
Each chapter was frightening, because each ending seemed, in turn, to be the paramount of the story--only to be succeeded by the next. But now comes the ultimate chapter. And I know this climax has to be--like none of the others. It will, must, dwarf the others. It must tie the story up. Make the entire story worth the reader's time.
That daunts me. I am afraid. I am mortified.
To all who have read from start to end, I thank you sincerely. I write for no payment: your satisfaction /is/ my payment. Your dedication makes me feel worthy of my life and my craft, be the story as good as you say, or just painfully amateur. It's far from perfect; it can still be revised hundreds of times and retain its crude imperfection. But such is the journey embarked on when one writes a novel; you learn to accept that you will never, ever, complete it.
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