Monday, March 22, 2010

A Good Flourish

A lot of people think that starting a story is the hard part.  It's the search for the perfect first sentence.  You just need that awesome character that everyone will identify with, or a plot that will wrench the emotion from the reader.

It's hard, yes.  Its daunting, certainly.  It's down right terrifying.  The search for the beginning of a story, to begin filling that blank page can freeze you in your tracks.  Starting, however, can be as easy as just doing it.  It also has nothing to do with what I want to talk about. 

Have you ever read a novel, or a short story, all the way to the end, only to find that it has no ending?  Or that the ending makes no sense?  It's a problem, bad endings.  I've read books, some by my favorite authors, that have endings that, well, don't.  Or there are ones that end a different story than the one that they started telling.

I've always hated that, and I'm guessing that you probably do too.  What's worse, I have no problem starting a story, but sometimes, when it comes to wrapping a story up, to finishing it, that's when I freeze up.  Beginning, middle and, notebook shoved into a box somewhere.

So, this week my devoted Viissada, five hundred words to an ending.  Yes, I know five hundred is a very short piece of writing, but an ending is as hard on 100,000 words as it is on five hundred.

The Gauntlet is thrown, do you dare pick it up?

- Sam

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