The sense of endings

Endings. All stories need them - the unequivocal full stop, the enigmatic dash, a playful row of dots - before the next story begins. 

In life, endings are hard. I suppose I’ve been a full stop kind of person in the past. I haven’t hung around. No looking back. No taking forward. Failed romantic links have been cut swiftly and clinically with a very sharp knife. None of that ‘trying to be friends’ nonsense. When it’s over, it’s over. I ain’t waiting for a fat lady to sing.

Former work colleagues – unless they’ve become friends – drop off my radar, and I’m not one to pop back to an old workplace. Once I’ve left, I’ve shed that particular version of myself, like a snake sloughing off its skin. Why would I go back?

Being good at full stops is great for an improvisation story. Nail the scene with a killer line and move on. Nobody’s worrying about ‘what happened next’; they’re too busy thinking ‘what’s happening now?’

Fiction, especially short fiction, is different. That final punctuation mark should give only the sense of an ending. The story doesn’t finish after the last word; not if it’s doing its job. So, writing short stories has been bringing out the dashes and the dots in me. Where in life I’ve gone for the quick kill, in fiction I’m learning to leave something still alive for the reader. I'm getting to try out a new type of ending -