In Praise of Stories With Ending That Don't Suck

07/11/2006 6:00 AM – 6:26 AM

Ain’t nothing at all, just one long mistake. If you put too much weight on it, the truck won’t move at all. Just unstrap the load and step on the gas, let it all fall off the back. Clarity. Brevity. No purple prose. Nope, no purple prose. It’s just a story, no matter what kind of words you use. King and Marquez are both just spinning tales on the back porch.

Too literary, much too literary. See things as they are, not what they’re like. Step on the gas, I said. Don’t matter a thing. The odd thing is that the silence that I’m talking about is spoken by two apparently different sources. The one is the Word that God speaks, the other is that thing which the reader does as he reads. You find yourself praying when you don’t realize it, and that’s pretty much the way it should be. The paths through the books on the tiers are brown and yellow – the color of old pages. Picking up the train of thought at the station, we sit down and wonder about “it all.” Leave the imagery to the crazy singers you listen too, you’re writing down a story. But there is a train in there.

Don’t worry about it, follow delight, it’ll lead you wrong, but anything will if you follow it too closely. At least with delight you’ll have a fun time getting to the place where the story ends. You start with that first thing that you wrote as fast as you could. You let it sit. Reread it. Reread it again, making an outline. Study the outline, fixing the structure where necessary. Study the outline again. Sit down and write – from memory – a synopsis of the story. Now you know how it goes. Writing is rewriting. It’s all just a theory, but a theory will give you permission to move, besides, this way, you’ll never have to throw a story away again. Partly cloudy today. Maybe I’ll actually walk to work today. That would be nice. Onnahanna means family. This is my family. It is small and broken, but still good. Yeah. Still good. God, I love that movie. Stupid cartoons that make you cry. Crying must be paid for with laughter and an ending that doesn’t suck. A sucky ending is generally one of two things – an unpaidfor happy ending or a depressing unhappy ending. This is why “The Bicycle Thief” sucks. All that work. All that beautiful imagery. And he gets hit by a fucking bus. Assholes. No, he didn’t have to discover pirate treasure and live happily ever after. Actually, that would have been funny. Moody emo kids deserve to get kicked in the balls. Look around you! All this sparkly, shiny life around you and you spend your time singing about how bad you screwed up with the one and only girl you could ever love. Bullshit. As your life will demonstrate. A bus hit him. What crap. When I tell that story, he’s going to find pirate treasure. Yar and by the balls, me lads (and lasses, though then there’s a problem with balls, hmmm… fuckit, by the balls and be damned). Yar and by the balls for me. That’s a story to tell yourself on the back porch.