Dear Readers,
Hopefully most of you, like me, grew up in an age where fairy tales were well and alive. When A was for Apple and not for Activist, which is incidentally what they’re calling children’s books these days.
I haven’t read it of course, since I am not a ‘woke baby,’ which is by the way another children’s book title and no I am not making this up! Because as I was saying, I grew up with fairy tales. The stories where good always vanquished evil and everyone lived happily ever after. No matter which enchanted forest, magical kingdom or innocent princess and wicked witch duo, you could count on everything working out in the end.
But more than the rose-tinted worldview, my problem is with the emphasis on grand endings. The idea that stories must culminate in some crescendo of wisdom, or convey a certain set of scruples, a deeper meaning about the world and how we should live in it.
The monumental expectations riding on story endings of course extends beyond the fairy tale genre. Fables, whether the Aesop variety, or Panchatantra, the Sanskrit equivalent, date back centuries and yet find resonance in today’s storytelling culture.
As an education counselor, I write some version of this sentence to multiple students a day while working on essay writing: The conclusion is always the hardest part. But it will become clearer as you actually start to write the rest of your essay! Don’t worry too much about it right now. Just write!
But as a writer, I can’t say I’m wholly convinced about my own advice. Because I worry about conclusions. I worry that they won’t be compelling; that my growth arc won’t be grand enough, my life lessons not profound enough. And ultimately I worry whether that story is even worth telling.
As little as I believe in writer’s block, despite my three-year interlude from writing, I am willing to consider that a similar condition exists exclusively for writing conclusions. For alliteration’s sake, I’ll call it the conclusion clog and it’s something I often suffer from, having spent days obsessing over how to end a piece of writing, letting many-a-draft gather dust in my Google Drive.
A lot of this, I’d like to think, stems from our obsession with endings. Not just the ‘happily ever afters’ or the moral takeaways, but endings in general. What else would explain the absurd sums of money we’re willing to fork out for fortune tellers? Or why I spent last week binge-reading The Testaments to find out what finally happens to Gilead?
I’ll admit that there’s something satisfying about endings. Yet as a writer, they can be equally intimidating because of the pressure to cultivate this sense of completeness or somehow foresee the end of something you’re still living.
As for the grand finale of this newsletter, I’ll leave you with a thought inspired by Tony Stark’s famous Endgame line, but with a spin and say that maybe “part of the end is the journey.”
Happy reading, reflecting and bearing with my musings.
Yours half-baked,
Saanya