Endings are Beginnings (and Vice Versa)

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

Every beginning is the end of something, and every ending is the start of something new. It follows that every beginning holds the seeds of its own eventual end. Those new shoots in the vegetable garden are the end of the seeds I planted two weeks ago, and eventually those plants will make new seeds.

Stories are, ultimately, about change. The standard advice about beginnings recognizes this. If you can open a story either “just before, just at, or just after” the Inciting Incident, things must have been different Before. Something has changed; something has come to an end.  Whatever Before was like, things aren’t going to be like that any more, at least for a while.

If, previous to the Inciting Incident, everyone was in a steady state of being happy or miserable, what ended was an uninteresting steady state, and there’s not much in the way of story involved. Happy people happily being happy are not story material; neither are miserable people unhappily being miserable.

Beginnings, however, imply a change—something disrupts the status quo. The happy people get bored, or face a new problem from outside (natural disasters, an invading army, an unexpected lawsuit…even something “good,” like getting a promotion, means that relationships and routines will have to change and happy people will have to cope with new situations). The miserable people—or at least one of them—become dissatisfied enough with the status quo to snap and leave, or try to change things.

The exact same things apply to endings: something changes. The only difference is that the readers have gotten to see the full story of what led to the change—they watched the war, the political struggle for the crown, the desperate attempt to recover the stolen plans in time, the developing romance. As a result, the reader has opinions about whether the right side won/lost the war, whether the new king deserves the crown, whether it’s good that the stolen plans have been recovered or destroyed, whether the couple belong together or not.

To put it a bit differently, stories have two spots where things change in a major way. One is the start of the story; the other is the end. At the start of the story, the change is from whatever the situation was before to the characters dealing with the central story-problem; at the end, the change is from dealing with the story problem to dealing with whatever comes next. In some stories, the ending change is from the difficulties of the story back to the status quo that was disrupted at the beginning of the story. In many others, the ending goes from the dealing-with-this-problem status quo of the story to something new. Either way, it’s a change from the situation during the story.

How the endpoint change is framed defines whether the story is a happy or unhappy ending. If the characters (and, most commonly, the reader) get the change they’ve been striving for (whether that’s putting everything back the way it was, or moving everything on to a completely different status), then the story is usually considered to have a happy ending. If the characters are unable to change things in the way they want (or, sometimes, can’t prevent the antagonists from implementing a change they don’t want), then the story has an unhappy ending.

For a writer, looking at the pre-story situation that ended with the Inciting Incident of the story can help a lot with figuring out where the current story needs to start. This may have a lot to do with why some writers have to write their way into their stories, then come back when the book is complete and delete the first two-to-four chapters. Looking ahead to where the story goes next (i.e., after the ending changes things) can help writers solve similar problems, like where this story needs to stop, and what the characters need to do to get to that point.

Most of the time, the problems and/or situations that characters face before the beginning of the story and after the end of the story are not just different from the central story-problem, they are different kinds of problems. The detective in a mystery series may go from one murder investigation to another, but even in that sort of story there are usually relationship arcs or internal politics among recurring characters that present the protagonist with new problems. In most other stories, the whole point is that the end of this story is the start of a very different one.

The action story that ends with overthrowing the corrupt government begins a new story about the difficulties inherent in coming up with a successful alternative that people will accept. The problems of building a successful marriage are vastly different from those of succeeding in a courtship. Getting a big promotion is, in real life, often described as “getting on the bottom rung of a whole new ladder.” Which means that the logical prequel or sequel may not interest readers who were mainly interested in the action story or the getting-together romance.

The through line of most stories is solving a central story problem, which may or may not be clearly articulated and all of one piece. However, the central story problem is always a particular type of problem, ranging from the obvious win-the-war, survive-the-disaster, save-the-universe problems of action-adventure stories to the midlife-crisis, coming-of-age, starting/finishing-a-relationship problems at the center of emotional drama. Identifying where the type of problem switches can help pinpoint not only where the beginning or ending of a story needs to be, but also what it needs to be. Getting crowned king is not a satisfying ending for a monster-slaying hero who has spent the whole story slowly realizing that he has always wanted to live a quiet life as a small-town accountant.