My Favorite Writing Exercise

Every year I lop off the ending of two published stories and ask my students to write their own endings. What I mean by their own endings is that they have to write them, but in deeper ways, of course, these can't be their own endings. The endings have to be true to what has come earlier in the stories in terms of narrative, voice, details, etc. So what my students are really doing is writing what they think should be the story's real ending. It's an act of ventriloquism, in other words. Then, once they've written their own endings, we read the actual endings and see which they prefer.

Although you could do this exercise with just about any story, I always choose "In the Land of Men" by Antonya Nelson and "What Feels Like the World" by Richard Bausch. I choose these two stories because, for similar reasons, they are especially hard to end. They both involve a seemingly stark choice. In the Nelson story, a woman who has been raped is picked up from work by her three brothers, who have captured the rapist and locked him in the trunk of their car. They have a gun, and they essentially force the sister to decide whether to kill the rapist. The Bausch story, though the situation is a lot quieter, also involves an either/or choice. Told from the perspective of a grandfather, "What Feels Like the World" is about his 10-year-old granddaughter, Brenda, who is physically cloddish and socially maladroit and who, along with the rest of her fifth-grade class, is to particpate in a gymnasticts performance at the PTA assembly that evening. All the children have to jump over the exercise horse: will Brenda get over the horse or will she not?

John Irving once said that he puts bears in his stories so readers will pay attention. The same might be said of Nelson, who, instead of bears, has placed a rapist and a gun. Even Bausch, who, in employing an exercise horse at a PTA meeting, is using much tamer stuff than either bears or rapists, is nonetheless trying to draw the reader in with a basic tension that will run through the story: will Brenda make it over the horse or not? For all the differences between the two stories, both writers are faced with a stark choice: either A or B. And because the choice is so stark, both A and B feel unsatisfying. Either choice says too much, and therefore too little.

It's for this reason that my students bridle at this exercise. It's not fair, they say. We didn't write these stories; Bausch and Nelson did; they should have to figure out their own endings. And, indeed, they should. But what my students fail to recognize is that this is the problem every writer faces. It's almost always the case that what gives the story its initial impetus and drive is also what poses its biggest challenge. Yes, Bausch and Nelson made their own beds, but all writers, I remind my students, are perpetually making their own beds.

My undergraduates, especially, are drawn to creative writing because of the freedom it ostensibly allows: you can do anything. But the truth is, you can do anything, as long as it works. Put another way, you can do anything for the first word of your story or novel, and after that the possibilities rapidly narrow. The second word is beholden to the first word, and the third word is beholden to the first two words, and so on. My students feel that it's unfair for me to ask them to write the ending for a story whose beginning and middle they're not responsible for, but are we ever consciously responsible for what we have just written? We think we're doing one thing, and it turns out we've done something else entirely. To quote David Byrne, "Good god, how did I get here?" And so, I would maintain that the exercise isn't nearly as artificial as it seems. My bet is that Bausch and Nelson found themselves in the same predicament as my students. They had written themselves into a corner, and now they had to get out as convincingly and gracefully as possible.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said that as soon as he has the first paragraph for a piece of fiction, everything else follows. At first blush, Marquez seems to be saying that beginnings are excruciatingly difficult but that once you get the beginning right, everything else is easy. But I don't think that's what he means. The way I understand him is that the first paragraph determines (read: constricts) everything else that follows. I see that in MATRIMONY. You can read the first paragraph of my novel and see in utero everything to come. But that doesn't mean I knew it at the time. I couldn't possibly have. The book took me ten years to write and I threw out more than three thousand pages. There were so many wrong turns along the way. But what I was engaged in--what every writer engages in, and what every writer struggles against--is a winnowing of possibilities. In that sense, fiction is like life. We choose one path over another, and the possibilities of what can happen next get narrower. The fiction writer's struggle, then, is to take these constrictions and turn them into opportunities. That, I think, is what Marquez is saying. At the very least, it's what I'm saying. And it's why I give my students that exercise

Comments

[Michael Hayward]

As I read through your avalanche of recent postings to TEV, I can better understand how you came to throw out more that three thousand pages while writing "Matrimony"!

[KKB]

Ooooo! I'm just now reading through your blogs and I'm totally loving them!

(And I plan to steal your write-the-ending exercise - - something I did myself as a kid when I was so enraged with the end in Of Mice and Men.)

In The Believer, issue 44, there's a piece by Zadie Smith on writing novels that I bet you'd like . . . a lot to do with this concept of the beginning's architecture.

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