Fixing the Endling

In gymnastics they call it “sticking the landing.” Meaning: coming up with a solid finale to the piece, a culmination of all the bits and parts of plot, dialogue, and character. Hopefully, leaving the reader with a hmm instead of a huh?. The taste left in the mouth at the end of a great meal, the bit that stays with you.

In my critique group I rely on Tim to help me stick the landings. Like it ends here or here is the last line.

But, sometimes, all he says is it isn’t working or needs more and doesn’t tell me how to do it. When all I want is a story fairy godmother to swope in and fix it.

Mostly, I want to live in denial and think everyone in my critique group is wrong.

It’s hard to buckle down and see exactly how to end it. I mean I can end it, but what is the secret sauce the piece needs to really bring it together in that profound pondering way that feels like magic. I have a couple of examples.

I had a short story about 7,000 words called “Museum of the Mall” (Spring 2019, Colere)—but I probably wrote it a couple years before publication. I just needed to stick the landing. I wanted to end it at the mall with the couple settling down on a store display to make love. Huh? But it felt like a letdown. Yes, it ended, but didn’t exactly resolve the idea of the future of malls, what they’re good for, how highway exits were built around the mall where traffic has slowed to a trickle. Finally, I decided that the piece needed a coda. A quick update paragraph, a line or two to move the couple forward. One day while out riding my bike (as is my wont) I got a brainstorm. Malls, like other structures, are being renovated/repurposed for some other use. What if in this time where regulations on growing cannabis are being eased, the indoor space inside a mall is now used for growing weed. It made sense. Maybe is already happening. Well, that’s how the story ended, under grow lights and soothing musak, within acres of indoor retail space.

I had a story I submitted to the group spring of LAST year that needed to land. I just couldn’t figure it out. I went back and added more, almost a whole other story. But I wasn’t happy with that. How do I end both of the stories together?? Then earlier this week I was sitting in my chair reading poetry and I thought: It needs a haiku or quote or ancient wisdom dropped in. Thinking it, isn’t the same as doing it. I had to figure out if it might work. So I came back to the story I’d titled Newlyweds at the Villa Jovis and studied the various paragraphs and transitions: what was I trying to say?

Isn’t there a famous line that all art is about mortality? Indeed, it was a remembrance piece dedicated to a dear friend who passed. I’d included snippets she’d shared about her life, but she herself had never said: And so this is the important thing or the thing is or here’s what I want you to take away. My piece is fiction and I tried to meld the biographical with the memory and come up with something for the reader. Something true and authentic to the story. Because it is really the story we are subject to as writers/authors. Not the truth. What sounds right. The emotional center.

And, because the story involves Italy and ancient Roman ruins and luck and destiny and living and dying, I came up with Petrarch. Petrarch is known for his sonnets—especially love poems written for a “Laura.” He was prolific and wrote a series of Triumphs based upon the Roman ceremony of triumph, where victorious generals and their armies were led in procession by the captives and spoils they had taken in war. The series focuses upon Love, Chastity, Death, and Fame, who vanquish each other in turn. Further triumphs are awarded to Time and Eternity. Composition of the work started in 1351 and the final chapter was last edited on February 12, 1374, a few months before the author's death. So it makes sense Petrarch was writing with a view towards his own mortality when he penned a line about the “eternal now”, describing a timeless state where change stops, time ends, and past and future vanish into a permanent present.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Now to infuse this deeper thought into the piece and give it that umph it needed. I found a way to update the piece, bringing it forward in time to stick the landing. I am excited about our next meeting to discuss this new ending.

17th century portrait, Anonymous