Endings are always difficult to write. It’s almost
impossible to include everything you want to have in a story, and the process
of deciding what really needs to be there versus what I want to have in the
story can be enough to make me want to abandon the project altogether. And all
of that comes before the question of how I’m going to organize the story so
that the thing I want to finish with (assuming I even know what that is)
actually comes at the “end” of the story.
As difficult as all those issues are to navigate when you’re
working with a single story, the process becomes even more complicated when
you’re writing a series of linked stories. With the linked stories I’m working
on right now, I have to figure out what I’m going to do with all of those issues
and possibilities for each individual story, and at the same time, keep in mind
how each story fits into the overall narrative I want to tell, which stretches
across all of those stories.
It’s like I have ten sets of Legos. Each one has its own
composite pieces that fit together to construct a pirate ship, castle, or space
station, and each set is internally complete. That is, I don’t have any
leftover pieces when I finish the pirate ship. As I’m building the individual
sets, however, I decide that I want all of them to connect together and form a
much larger set that incorporates all the castles and space stations, and that
also combines a new, unified super-set. And I have to do combine them in a way
that doesn’t make the super-set look like a Frankenstein’s monster of
mismatched pieces.
The way I see it, that is the largest difficulty in
constructing a series of linked stories: Ending each story so that it’s
complete, but also feeds into the other stories around it and allows room for
them to connect and cohere into a larger whole.
One approach that has helped me with the series of linked
stories I’m currently writing is the decision to write all of them in
first-person. That has allowed me to use the limitations and gaps in a given
character’s awareness as sockets into which I can fit the perspective of a
different character, which then helps to clarify the previous story, while at
the same time branching off and becoming a story of it’s own.
For example, the first story in my series, “Thirteen Little
Words,” is narrated by Jenna, a fifteen-year-old girl who lives with her single
mother. Jenna has a collection of books in which she and her father wrote notes
and comments while they read them together. Jenna’s father is now out of the
picture, so she uses the books, such as A Little Princess, as a substitute for him:
Miss Minchin was quite agitated. This was an incident
which suggested strange things to her sordid mind. Could
it be that she had made a mistake, after all, and that the
neglected child had some powerful though eccentric friend
in the background—perhaps some previously unknown
Trace mine, Dad.
relation who had suddenly traced her whereabouts, and I’d take anything
chose to provide for her in this mysterious and fantastic way? from you.
Jenna’s collection has expanded beyond just the books from
her father, however. She also has a collection of fairy tales with a set of
notes in them. She discovers the fairy tales previously belonged to Harold, a
man she meets at the local park. When Jenna offers to give the fairy tales back
to Harold, he refuses, saying, “My days with this book are over.” Harold then
exits the story, while Jenna continues to narrate it.
Harold narrates the next story in the collection, “An Echo
of Better Days,” which explains how and why he wrote those notes in the fairy
tale collection, and also why he chose to give it away. In that story, Harold
also mentions a waiter at the local French restaurant named Charles; the next
story, “Poulet avec Legumes,” is narrated by Charles.
Using these sockets has helped me to think of each story as
a separate entity, with its own plot and narrative arc, while also keeping my
out for the “open spaces” I can use to fit the stories together, building them
up into a creation that maintains the integrity of all the individual pieces,
but also combines them into a new, unified structure.
