From First to Last

Con­sid­er the first sen­tence of a sto­ry. Some call it the “open win­dow.” “The door.” “The key.” “The arrow that points the way.” “The hook.” “The open lock.” All use­ful metaphors. All sug­ges­tive of the pow­er and impor­tance of an open­ing line. Every sto­ry has one.

Now con­sid­er the last line of a sto­ry. “The clos­ing of the door.”

“The anchor.” “The last truth.” “The clos­ing of the ring.” “The last breath.” “The final handshake.”

It too has great impor­tance. It is the end of the nar­ra­tive expe­ri­ence, one that brings, lit­er­ar­i­ly, (and hope­ful­ly) closure.

And again, every sto­ry has one.

But what if I told you about anoth­er writer’s say­ing: “You can’t write a good first line until you write a good last line.”

I believe that.

It may seem to be a con­tra­dic­tion, and even an impos­si­bil­i­ty, but actu­al­ly it’s per­fect­ly rea­son­able. That is because no one — no one — sits down and writes a com­plete — and final — draft of a book in one go. The pro­fes­sion­al writer is con­stant­ly rewrit­ing her or his work, so that the whole piece appears to be one cloth, if you will. But that draft is writ­ten from first to last, last to first, bit by bit, even side to side, sec­tion by sec­tion. Its sense of whole­ness comes from the writer being atten­tive to its myr­i­ad parts. Its whole­ness is an illu­sion cre­at­ed by the writer’s craft and skill.

An exam­ple. I am work­ing on a book, and I almost have a first draft, hav­ing already rewrit­ten it count­less times. Last night I was ready for sleep but think­ing about the book. Noth­ing spe­cial there. But that’s when I had a thought: that moment in the sto­ry on page 24 in the man­u­script, the char­ac­ter should say this. 

This morn­ing when I got up, I went to the page and insert­ed that line. 

The read­er will nev­er know (I hope) that line was writ­ten six months after the lines sur­round­ing it. It will seem (I also hope) to be a per­fect­ly log­i­cal thing for that char­ac­ter to say at that moment. That’s not how it was writ­ten. But I hope it will read that way.

I had to dis­cov­er the line.

I hope this sug­gests that one of the great dif­fi­cul­ties in writ­ing some­thing good is that it needs to be log­i­cal: Log­i­cal as in “An under­ly­ing struc­ture or coher­ent pat­tern,” to quote the Oxford Unabridged Dic­tio­nary. It needs to be — for the read­er — a most­ly con­tin­u­ous stream of events, move­ments, actions, dia­logue, etc., that flows from one nar­ra­tive moment to the next. You don’t want the read­er to say, “Wait! How did that hap­pen?” “Well, that came out of nowhere.” “That makes no sense.” “That’s impossible.”

Nev­er for­get that the writer is learn­ing the sto­ry even as it is being writ­ten. The writer is cre­at­ing a log­i­cal pat­tern out of ran­dom thoughts.

Yes, sur­prise is a good thing, but you want the read­er to feel and know — “I didn’t see that com­ing, but I can now under­stand how it did.” Don’t for­get, it’s very com­mon for writ­ers to say, “I didn’t know what I was think­ing until I wrote it.”

As you read a sto­ry and won­der how it will all work out, just know that the writer went through the same experience.

But if the writ­ing is good, you won’t know it.

Trust me, the writer does.