Anyone
can write an attention-grabbing beginning.
See?
All
it takes is a powerful statement, an intriguing premise, a vivid scene, a
fascinating character, a tantalizing promise of what is to come.
Beginnings are the easiest part of
storytelling—difficult only in the decision of which moment to begin with, finding the ideal door to
enter the story.
Finding the ideal point of entry often
depends on knowing where the story ends. Endings present more of a challenge.
They’re like a delicate recipe where the ingredients must be measured to the
precise ounce to leave just the right taste in the mouth. But it can be a very
rewarding challenge, because everyone knows and appreciates a well-crafted
ending, though favorite flavors may differ.
Then
there’s the middle. People tend to remember beginnings and endings most
clearly, but what comes between is the backbone of the story. If the beginning
is the appetizer, and the ending is dessert, then the middle is the meal.
A strong middle flows naturally from the
beginning, heads inexorably toward the ending, and along the way all the
story’s promises are fulfilled.
As a novelist, I dread the plague of the
“sagging middle”. It began afflicting my current work-in-progress about chapter
six or so. The middle chapters are where I’m in the most danger of losing the
point of it all. Or, I may discover I never knew the point in the first place,
and must laboriously rework the story to find it, as happened in the earlier
drafts. In a dense, multi-layered story like I’m currently writing, with half a
dozen important characters with simultaneous, intertwined plot-lines unfolding
in different locations, it’s easy to get lost. Each chapter has a little
beginning and ending of its own, with a little middle that needs to be kept
lean but filling. It’s easy to scribble the time away perfecting these parts
and forgetting the whole they make.
I
could just keep going on about this. Did I mention middles are hard? The point
is: you’ve
got to know what the point is.
This applies in the out-here world as much
as in the pages of a novel. I’m currently in the middle chapters of my life,
agonizing over the little beginnings that haven’t come yet, mistaking
interludes for postludes, and whining for the endings I think I’d rather have.
When I’m writing in the middle,
sometimes I have to look ahead to the ending, just soaking it in, and reminding
myself that this is what I’m heading toward.
And when I’m lost in a middle chapter
of life, confused and overwhelmed by all the directions I could go, I need to
reach for the Book that starts, “In the beginning, God…” and ends with “Amen.”
The Book reminds me the story I’m in isn’t about me. I’m a simultaneous, intertwined
chapter in the epic of all Creation, and I and everyone who knows and loves the
Storyteller are headed for an utterly delicious ending that never ends.
Like
lines converging on the heart of the horizon, may every descriptive phrase and
line of dialogue converge on the final page, and may my words and actions
converge on the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
