O, Mysterious Ending!
A quote about endings from Lydia Davis about the 'trail off' ending
Please feel free to chime in in the comments below!
I enjoy thinking about what makes endings to stories so hard to pin down. After reading hundreds and hundreds of stories for Best Microfiction every year it has become ever more clear to me that if a writer doesn’t pin the ending, the story was not ‘lived up to’.
That is a sad thing indeed. Here we writers of flash fiction are no different than Olympic gymnasts who may do everything right, yet wobble on the landing and IT’S OVER!
I wrote a recent post about endings with a quote from one of my all-time writing heroes, Lorrie Moore.
And though it’s great to study and read about how great writers have found their endings, and we do have a lot to learn from them— it doesn’t necessarily mean their advice will work for us in the same way. Endings, in a nutshell, are mercurial critters to capture.
Some of them are hard hitting. Some of them are soft-hitting. Some of them make us feel the need to reread the entire story so that we will get it. Some of them make us cry, or laugh, or feel gratified in some way.
And others will simply trail off because that is what feels right for a particular story or fragment…
Imagine my great excitement today when I came across this advice re: endings from the inimitable Lydia Davis. How I love the way she compares certain ‘trail off’ story endings to life itself.
“Some endings can trail off but it’s okay. It’s like life, it just trails off sometimes like an interesting incident or someone telling you a story who will just shrug and say, “Well, that’s how it ended.” That’s okay too, in certain stories.” - Lydia Davis, from an interview with Tin House
I love any story with a twist in the tail, and I often write toward unexpected endings. But it’s a fine line between giving a surprise and making the reader feel like they’ve been cheated or excluded.
I liked the Olympic gymnast metaphor! Endings are tough! Sometimes it feels like you are abandoning a story—but not like abandoning a bad habit, more like abandoning a loved one in a time of need. Two great endings that came to mind at once were "Salvador Dali Eyes," by Douglas Campbell, and "Zoo," by Jeff Landon, both of which you have shared on your Substack. And just today I finished reading Ada Limón's "The Carrying," a book of poetry, and endings are one of her strengths. Sometimes I didn't love a poem until I got to the end, at which point I went back and reread it, this time enraptured by its halo.