Beginning and Ending

Beginnings, for me, are usually the result of an obsession that finally gives way to a sentence. Most often, it's a scene I can't get out of my mind--a moment that was either transformative or characterizing of something/someone important to me. I'll play this scene again and again, and then I'll find myself telling a friend about it. (Oral communication is really the key to any of my written work; I almost always have to work out some complication in speech before understanding why I feel urged to the page.) The storytelling turns into a search for insight. If there's enough energy, I'll work on the issue for a long time, much to the chagrin of my company, perhaps, until I stumble upon the line or question that demands the memory be turned into art.

I suppose, then, that beginnings are the catharsis part of art-making for me. How cliche.

I tend to write slow. While some of my peers can dash off an essay or story or poem per week, it often takes me months to complete a single piece of prose. Every day, I start at the beginning and revise until I come to the white space that still needs filling, and then I slowly fill it, sentence by sentence, day by day. It's sadly not uncommon for me to spend an entire day working only to end up with one meager paragraph. It's also not uncommon for me to delete that paragraph once I overcome whatever roadblocks the piece presents. Very rarely does an essay or story come with the grace and inevitability of a waterfall, just flowing out onto the page of its own momentum. Though some writing sessions seem propelled by something other than me, the cynic inside remains convinced that some days are just good, and others, well, not so good. The acceptance of this has been hard. But I no longer worry that a bad writing day is a signal of the end of my career.

Endings are another matter. The beginning of a piece always carries with it the implication of the end, and so I cannot begin without looking ahead to the resolution. It's the only part of prose-writing I attempt to plan, even though my "planning" looks an awful lot like insomnia. While my beginnings are born of urgency and possibility, rather than careful assessment of an issue, my endings try to be more calculated. This does not generally work. Even when I'm so clever as to come up with the scene that will refract the opening just so, this cleverness hardly ever results from my nights toiling over how to exit the story in which I've come so far.

Stephen Dunn once said of sleep: "how hard I'd try when I couldn't,/how it would come/if only I could find a way/to enter and drift without concern/for what it is." I find endings to work similarly. The best ones are usually surprising. Their finality comes in the sentence I never expected to write, the sentence that overturns the insight that brought me to write in the first place, the sentence that does something wonderful and frustrating at the same time: makes me rethink my beginning.