Last Thoughts on Structure

82} PAVED WITH INEVITABILITY:
THE ROAD TO THE END

Every great story is a life-support system for its ending. Every scene and chapter and section is there to set up The End, to provide whatever is needed in order for the final words to send a shiver up readers’ spines. You might say that every word of a story is setting up the ending, and therefore that, even as we begin our stories, we are already in the process of ending them.

I have tried this test with some of my favorite novels and stories: I imagine that each line of the story is the last line, and I ask myself, as the last line, would it resonate, would it send a little shiver up (or down) my spine?

With great works, the answer is very often, “yes.”

We speak of great endings as “feeling” inevitable—with “yes, of course” following immediately on the heels of “Oh, my God!” But in a great piece of writing every paragraph, every sentence, even every word carries this quality of inevitability, which may help explain why in great literary works every line might function as a last line.

Those who live life most fully are said to live every day as if it were their last. The same philosophy applies to writing. When down to your last draft, try to write each sentence as if it were your last, to treat each word as if it were the final word, a last breath of life.

22 Shelley Jackson’s novel Half Life tells the story of Siamese twins from a single point of view—that of Nora Olney who, after fifteen years of conjoinment, seeks to rid herself of Blanche, her comatose twin. Proof that to every principle or rule in this book, there are exceptions.

23 “R.O.T.” Asked, “What does the ‘O’ stand for?” Grant replies, “Nothing.”

24 From “One Man’s Way,” a radio lecture broadcast on The Listener, July 23, 1959.

25 One noteworthy exception: Hans Fallada’s The Drinker, an autobiographical novel documenting the alcohol-induced psychic collapse of a respectable businessman, was written in two weeks in a German lunatic asylum in 1944. Far from seeming like a rush job, the result is a stylistically flawless prose narrative.

26 The reviews, of course, glow, but they’re reviewing the novelist and not the novel. Novelists like Cormac McCarthy and Michael Ondaatje, having written hugely successful works, enter the realm of the Sacred & Profound, and everything they write afterward—no matter how mediocre or trite—is pronounced wonderful by other novelists, who don’t wish to offend the gods. This is why, just as baseball needs dedicated umpires, literature needs dedicated critics.

27 Dos Passos called his “The Camera Eye.” He uses it in his U.S.A. trilogy.

28 One could argue that there’s little difference between an omniscient narrator and an invisible peripheral one—that is, a peripheral narrator who plays no role in the story being told. The difference, if any, is that we wisely refuse to acknowledge the latter’s existence.

29 Gabriel García Márquez’s life-spanning opening to One Hundred Years of Solitude.

30 In Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Book II of Douglas Adams’s five-book Hitchhiker’s Trilogy, he gives us this version of that beginning: “In the beginning, the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry, and has been widely regarded as a bad idea.”

31 Henri-Louis Bergson, French philosopher, 1859–1941.

32 From London Fields.

33 It helps to give your scene a name. Sometimes, as an exercise, I have my students go through their works-in-progress and label the “types” of scenes that they’re writing: love scene, dinner scene, classroom scene, argument scene, waiting scene, sex scene, and so on.

34 “ Science must exhaust all possibilities; art presents only so much as to allow the imagination to divine the essence.”—Schopenhauer.

35 See the discussion of Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” in Meditation # 23.