Homecomings. Game-changers. Portals. Disasters. New Beginnings. Rebirths. Doors. These are just a few of the wildly divergent words I’ve found in craft essays about conclusions––the sheer diversity of terms indicating the lack of consensus on how to imagine narrative closure. Endings seem to need to be everything all at once: We are told readers should gasp, Oh my God, then sigh, Yes, of course. Yet too much satisfaction can signal ideological laziness or political evasion, avoiding life’s loose ends, unsettled feelings, and never-ending struggles. We’re also told endings retroactively imbue stories with meaning, adjusting our focus on all that came before. An ending, then, is never just an ending: it is a philosophy of life, a way of seeing, pulling us both backward and forward in time. How do we balance these complexities?
In this 8-week workshop, we will demystify endings in novels, memoirs, essays, short stories, TV, and film––with the aim of not only creating our own conclusions but also understanding the shape of our stories way before we reach the last page. We will discuss the ethics and politics of resolution while examining how successful endings balance interior and exterior struggles alongside theme and meaning, all of which are set up at the beginning and woven through the middle. We will also track how conclusions are set up through earlier images, gestures, questions, scenes, and more––and practice strategies of expansion, reversal, return, speculation, and closure. In addition to craft lectures, generative exercises, and brainstorming sessions, students can submit 1000-word endings (or outlines of endings) to be workshopped in class.
