My End is My Beginning

"My end is my beginning." I love T.S. Eliot and I particularly appreciate this sentiment. I've found it to be true in so many different areas of life -- from nature, to relationships, and even to something as benign as changing jobs.

Where I've never seen the principle work (or at least work very well) is in writing. I suppose the cliff-hanger has it's place in literature, but sometimes I feel like I am getting jerked around. One thing I've always tried to do in writing stories is to offer up a clear beginning and ending. It just seems like a common courtesy to the reader.

Nevertheless, there is a rub in it all for me. Writing beginnings is easy. I have hundreds of stories that I started and never finished. I like getting to know my characters as I write and explore the setting of the story as I move through it. Beginnings are easy because beginnings are fun. In writing stories, I would compare it to starting a new relationship with someone. The excitement is always there and the act of discovery doesn't seem to wear thin.

But like all things, newness doesn't last. Familiarity sets in and with it, sometimes, boredom. It's easier to just walk away from the story and start another one. That's what separates those who dabble from those who do. Getting through those middle parts of the story is work. It can be laborious. I've been stonewalled at 50,000 words much more often than I want to admit. And I've walked away during those times for months, even years at a time.

Doers push through and do the hard work. Dabblers start a new story. But the hardest work for the doer comes when it is time to type two simple words: THE END. I have found it so hard to end a story -- by the time I have worked through the characters, lived with them for many months, I just don't want to let them go. Even when I already have scheduled out my plot points and know what is going to happen to them, I just don't want to turn them loose to the devices of literature.

This feeling bothered me so much, that many years ago, it occurred to me that something theological was taking place in my relationship with my characters. I was their 'god' so to speak. I created them, I plotted out their life course, I was responsible for either allowing bad things to happen to them, or intervening in their lives to shield them from harm. That opened up something new in me spiritually, as I contemplated my own existence and relationship with the Divine.

So I started writing a novella, entitled Nova. It was a story about a Native American woman named Nova, and her cross country journey with a group of settlers who she ultimately betrays to her tribe to be murdered. I wrote both the forward and the conclusion in my own voice, as author god of this story world and these characters. I had to ask myself some hard questions about why I was writing a tragedy, when it could have just as easily been a comedy.

I decided that the answer to that question was moot. "Of all the worlds I could have created with these words, this was the world that had to come first." I went on to use a quote from theologian Martin Buber about releasing one's own sense of 'doom.' As I continued comparing reality and fiction, I slowly changed.

I reached the end of a long, personal struggle with the problem of evil in the world. And at the end of that struggle, and that story, there was a new beginning. Then it sort of struck me that this was truly the intersection between literature and reality -- books give us endings, but in each ending, the good ones will always leave us with something new: a thought or maybe an emotion that urges us to another place, or along the path of another journey. And this reality seems no where more evident than in our spirituality and our spiritual stories.

I'll resist the urge to launch into an apologetic defense of that last statement. I'll just say that I believe it to be very true, and walk away with this ending and as I do, I walk into a new beginning.