Storystorm

Here's a fact: I can't write an ending to save my life. No matter the format—blog post, short story, essay, or critical paper—I will spend way too much time on the last few lines of a piece only to inevitably hate it. It's always a beat too short or too grandiose or too sudden. The only somewhat decent ending that I've ever written came accidentally: I could only turn in nine pages to a workshop and had forty, so I cut it off at a somewhat acceptable point and called it a day. And wouldn't you know, the people loved it: the dual meaning, the quietness, the sparkly bit of imagery that really got at the heart of the characters.Figures.I know this about endings: they should reveal something about the characters in question, they should show some bit of change, some movement toward a deeper truth that we sensed but could not name throughout the story. They should be epiphanic. They should be, as Joyce originally deemed, a “little error and gesture—mere straw in the wind—by which [your character] betray[s] the very thing [she] is most careful to conceal."No big deal. Sounds easy, right? Now try to do it. Try to write an ending that has the right rhythm and isn't too pat and isn't too easy and isn't too overt but that still somehow reveals the deepest truth of a character.If by “mere straw in the wind” Joyce meant that the epiphanies our characters should reach are evasive and enigmatic then, yeah, I can get behind that.In reading Elissa Schappell's most recent collection of short stories, Blueprints for Building Better Girls, I was awed by her clear talent for a knock-you-down-flat, grab-your-heart-good, holy-god-that-hurts ending. In “Are You Comfortable?”, a story about a young girl who is home from school after a car accident, we watch as the layers of this archetypally female character peel away with every turn of the page. The girl who you know by the second page did not really have a car accident, the girl who is not really home with mononucleosis, who you assume to be depressed or maybe suicidal in some vague way, is cracked open on the final page to reveal the real reason behind her current circumstances. Which is all to say, Schappell can write the hell out of an ending. The girl you thought you were reading about, the girl you thought was similar to someone you knew in college, the girl whose story seemed like something you had read before, turns out to be devastatingly, imperfectly, and unpredictably herself.What Schappell's stories do so well, on a political level, is to enlighten us to the fact that we are all far more fragile and idiosyncratic than the labels we use to define each other. But what they do for those of us who write is illustrate the way in which the surface of our characters needs to crack by the end of our stories. The honest, oftentimes devastating truth that they hold inside should reveal itself however subtly to our readers.The other night I was walking my dog as the sun was setting, thinking about the way we see things differently at the end of the day, the red light of the lowered sun illuminating the undersides of leaves, outlining the silhouette of a tree. We give a different type of attention to the end of things: relationships, journeys, stories, and our days. We stop walking, we put away our phones, we take in how different everything looks in the final light, the day we rushed through seeming suddenly different, something at which to be wondered. “That was what mattered most,” one of Schappell's characters in a later story states, "The end." And it is. The end can reveal the emotional weight of what we experienced. It can reveal the truth. It can compel us to look back on what has come before with new eyes, and, perhaps most importantly, it can reveal the necessity for the story in the first place—the spiritual manifestation of a character's truth, the unveiling of their previously concealed and newly changed selves.Yeah. No pressure. “Are You Comfortable?” is the third story in Elissa Schappell's collection, Blueprints for Building Better Girls.