the metaphor that ate my brain

It’s a rare moment that I read my horoscope in the daily paper.  I used to check it out regularly for laughs, but lately not so much.  It would have been better for my peace of mind if I had not glanced at it the other day.  Much better.  

There it was, on page two of the Island Life section, right next to Sylvia (“The woman who somtimes lacks empathy can always dredge up a bit for France”), and Annie’s Mailbox (“Woman finds her job unfulfilling, considers Air National Guard”), and the daily drama of advice for bridge players (“‘East opened,’ Louie said plaintively; ‘why not take the heart finesse?’”), and the latest Sudoku (reminding me once again why I didn’t major in math), and the New York Times Crossword (54 down, three letters, “___ vindice” [Confederacy motto], reminding me once again why I didn’t major in Latin).  

So there it was, my daily horoscope, courtesy of the Honolulu Advertiser:

GEMINI (May 21-June 20) 

Sail the seas of romance, but keep an eye peeled on business from your personal crow’s nest. New relationships may seem uncertain. Hold your course and be patient until storms of controversy pass.

As soon as I read these words I knew I was in trouble. The storms in my brain built quickly. Memories of bouts of seasickness on small boats, each memory colored by the most vivid physical sensations and events, replayed in the home theatre of my mind.  Throw in acrophobia—a condition I attribute to having fallen off the family couch and broken my collarbone when I was six months old, so yeah, right, I just can’t wait to climb up into that crow’s nest during a storm—and I’m in deep trouble with this horoscope.

Let’s break it down, shall we?  Sail the seas of romance, but ... hold on right there!  I’ve heard this siren call before.  I’d be happy to take a cruise on a large luxury liner, where there are no sails, and definitely no crow’s nests.  Romance and violent seasickness do not mix.  But if it is a romantic cruise, and I’m getting away from all the demands of my life on land, why do I have to keep an eye peeled on business?  Right now I’m trying not to think about peeled eyes.  I suspect that’s another metaphor, but I’m trying to drive it from my mind.

If I do decide to follow the advice and peel an eye on business, shouldn’t I keep my feet on the ground, or at least on the deck?  But no, it has to be from your personal crow’s nest.  Dammit, I don’t have a personal crow, and if I did I would leave it alone in its nest.  It’s at this point, I notice, that the metaphor begins to eat my brain.

The next sentence in the horoscope seems innocuous enough.  New relationships may seem uncertain. No metaphors here. And yet, I still feel a gnawing at my brain, and I know why.  New relationships are always uncertain.  So don’t waste my time with such drivel.

With what brain I have left I try to process the final sentence of the horoscope.  Hold your course and be patient until storms of controversy pass.  Storms of controversy?  Storms of controversy?!  It’s not enough that I’ve been assigned to a crow’s nest, but now we have to have storms at sea while I’m in the damn crow’s nest?  The storms are totally redundant.  I can be sick just climbing to the crow’s nest, or even standing on the deck and staring up at it.

Let’s recap what we’ve learned, before my brain is totally eaten away.  Seas of romance ... check. Eye peeled on business ... check.  Personal crow’s nest ... check.  New relationships yada yada yada ... check.  Patient during storms ... check.  As I begin to lose consciousness, I seem to see sailors climbing to the crow’s nest to rescue me.  Will they arrive in time?  

While waiting for them, I realize that the Honolulu Advertiser is still clutched in my hand, and I notice for the first time the name of the person who wrote the horoscope, the person responsible for the dire state of my brain.  Holiday Mathis is her name.  I reach for the computer in my personal crow’s nest (well, it’s my crow’s nest, and I insist on the computer ... and WiFi), and I google Holiday Mathis, and her photo appears, staring back at me intently, perhaps studying the degree of my seasickness and the percentage of my brain that is still intact.

Then I click on the LA Times entry for Holiday Mathis, and I read this disclaimer:  “The astrological forecast should be read for entertainment.”  I want to send a strongly worded reply to the LA Times, to ask them if this is their idea of entertainment.  And I want to write to Holiday Mathis and tell her exactly what she can do with her seas of romance and crow’s nests and storms of controversy.  But I have no energy left, and the sailors have finally reached me in my personal crow’s nest.  “It’s Holiday,” I say weakly, “she made me do it.”  But they don’t understand.  They whisper to each other about my brain.  I close my eyes and wait for the storms of controversy to pass.

picture the ending

Writers spend a lot of time on their opening paragraphs, and rightly so. Then we stand on the corner, displaying our wares under a streetlamp, waiting for a reader (or agent, or editor) to drive by. When they slow down, or stop at a red light, we boldly slink out to the curb, holding the first manuscript page of our novel up to the car window, pointing to that first seductive sentence, the alluring opening paragraph, the irresistible hook that will charm them into opening the passenger door and inviting us in. Hooker and hookee, together at last in a kind of erotic literary eHarmony dream.

But—and I apologize if you wanted me to pursue this dream further—what about the final paragraph of the novel? How about that moment on page 324 when you’re exhausted from months of writing, and the plot’s resolved, and the characters have done about all the damage you can handle, and it’s time to end the damn thing? Do you have the creative energy and vision left to write a strong ending? After all the blood, sweat, and tears, maybe you owe it to yourself, and to your story, to write a great ending.

Let’s look at a few famous endings in fiction and see what we can learn. You’ll have your own favorite endings, the ones that have influenced your own writing, whether consciously or not, but these are some of mine.

At the end of Gone With the Wind, after a thousand pages of life with Scarlett and Rhett and friends, after all the triumphs and defeats, all the living and suffering and dying, what image does Margaret Mitchell leave us with? It’s Scarlett O’Hara alone, because Rhett Butler has just walked away from her life again, rejecting her at the end of a long dialogue scene in which the two revisit their past and current feelings. After Rhett disappears up the stairs, and out of her life again, Scarlett is left alone, and in these final moments of chapter 63, and the novel, we are inside the heroine’s mind. Here are the last two paragraphs.

With the spirit of her people who would not know defeat, even when it stared them in the face, she raised her chin. She could get Rhett back. She knew she could. There had never been a man she couldn't get, once she set her mind upon him.

"I'll think of it all tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then. Tomorrow, I'll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day."

Romantic enough for you? Hopeful enough? Well, that’s our Scarlett. She’s going home, the place that, as Dorothy Gale reminds us in The Wizard of Oz, there’s no place like. Not a bad ending. Not a bad first novel for Margaret Mitchell. Sold a few copies. We’re left with the image of a strong heroine, going home to Tara for comfort and strength, to rise again, to win back her man.

Picture that ending. It has a sharp image, tightly focused on the central character, and it evokes strong emotions, for Scarlett, for Margaret Mitchell (imagine her writing that ending), and for the reader. The emotional ending is not gratuitous. Scarlett, and her creator, and the reader have gone through an amazing long journey to reach that ending; they deserve it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, at the end of The Great Gatsby, leaves us with the narrator, outsider Nick Carraway, about to go home again, to return to his roots in the Midwest. But first Nick revisits another home, Gatsby’s Long Island mansion. The house is quiet now. Its wild parties have receded into the past, along with its owner. In the final paragraphs Nick imagines the “old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world.” Then, in the novel’s closing paragraphs, he imagines his friend Gatsby’s own discovery:

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

A great lyrical ending, with a strong image tightly focused on the central character, and evoking strong emotions in the novel’s final moments.

E. B. White’s classic Charlotte’s Web, which opens with Fern saving the runt pig Wilbur from the ax, ends with a hymn to friendship. Wilbur tells Charlotte’s children about their mother, and White writes simply and beautifully of the passing of the seasons, and generations, on the farm. Wilbur’s farm. Home. This last image, of Wilbur happy and surrounded by friends, and remembering Charlotte, brings the book to a perfect end. The final paragraph is a lesson for writers in the elements of style, in the power of a few words:

Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.

What about endings for short stories? I believe the same principles apply as for novels. Two of my favorite short stories are from Dubliners. Both end with what James Joyce called an epiphany, a moment of revelation and insight, “a sudden spiritual manifestation.” In Joyce’s “Araby,” the young narrator with a deep crush on Mangan’s sister makes a difficult journey to buy a promised gift for her at the Araby bazaar. The boy fails in his romantic quest, however, arriving as the bazaar is closing and without enough money for something nice. At the end of the story we see him in the darkness of the closing bazaar, as Joyce delivers the epiphany in one concluding sentence: “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” Again, a sharp image of the central character, evoking strong emotion.

In “The Dead,” Joyce is at his best, writing a longer story with a deeper epiphany. It begins simply with Gabriel Conroy, the central character, attending a Christmas party thrown by his aunts, and ends dramatically with a scene between Gabriel and his wife, Gretta. After the party they ride out a snowstorm in a hotel room, where Gretta tells Gabriel that the song that moved her at the party was the song that a young man she once loved greatly used to sing, a man who died for love of her. Gretta lies crying on the bed, and finally falls asleep while Gabriel gazes out at the snow and experiences his spiritual moment of insight.

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

So there we have it. Five endings, all with powerful images and emotions and focused on the central characters who have been at the heart of the story. Notice that these are examples of denouement—that often quiet, reflective period following the climax of the plot. The story has reached afterglow, the golden hour, the last light of day between sunset and evening.

When I’m writing a short story or novel, and have resolved the conflict, I find myself naturally writing by that last light of day, adding a short scene or paragraph that inevitably is influenced and inspired by dozens of favorite endings. As the cowboy rides off into the sunset, his battles won, what is he thinking? Perhaps he stops and looks back at the town and gives a final wave. Or maybe, just maybe, he turns and rides back into town and, without stopping, sweeps the blonde saloon girl off her feet, just when she feared she would never see him again. Now there’s an image I like.

it's where you finish

“It’s an amazing story. They talk about it all the time. The players keep saying, ‘It’s not where you start, but where you finish.' "
... Brandi Chastain, Beijing 2008

Immediately after the emotional ending of the Olympic women’s soccer gold medal match in Beijing, as the cameras showed the faces of the American players, TV commentator Brandi Chastain gave us one of the many lessons that we can take away from an exhilarating two hours of sport and human drama.

The USA women had just stuck together as a team to edge out favored Brazil for the gold, 1-0. Carli Lloyd’s shot in overtime had eluded the Brazilian goalkeeper’s fingers by inches. Then, in the closing minutes, the Americans had withstood furious attacks on their goal.

After the final whistle Hope Solo (the best name for a goalie ever) walked triumphantly across the field. Solo’s own story is, in itself, one of redemption and validation. In the World Cup last year, although she had performed admirably, Solo was benched by the American coach (soon to be replaced himself) in an unpopular move before a loss to Brazil that knocked her team out of the Cup.

Now, a year later, as we watched Hope Solo and the rest of the victorious American women, Chastain spoke of the team’s mantra, “It’s not where you start, but where you finish.”

In Beijing the American women did not start well. Missing their injured star and top player, Abby Wambach, they opened against Norway and promptly surrendered two goals in the first four minutes. They lost that first game 2-0, but during the following two weeks they dug in and advanced to the gold medal game, where in spite of the incredible skills and flare of the Brazilian players, in spite of a crowd that largely cheered on the favored Brazil, they proved that soccer is a team sport. All the lessons you’ve ever been taught about teamwork and sticking together in tough times were there on that Olympic soccer field.

Then we were treated to the medal ceremony, and for once the network showed the full ceremony, with all the flowers and music and smiles and tears and medals. Were there ever medals. Bronze medals for the young German team, which seemed quite proud of its achievement. Silver medals for the talented Brazilians, the crushing weight of another bitter defeat showing in their faces.

And finally gold medals for the Americans, who had earned their medals and celebration with 120 minutes of gritty team effort against all odds, rewarded for all their hard work in the months and years leading up to the Olympics, and rewarded for their belief in themselves. They had finished incredibly well, on top of the soccer world.

There’s a lesson in there for all of us, in our lives and in our careers. If you’re a writer you might want to put the American team’s mantra on your desk, where you can see it every day: “It’s not where you start, but where you finish.”

So many difficult beginnings in a writer’s life. So many obstacles to overcome. A new story that does not start well. Struggling through a muddled middle, searching for that happy ending. Then a first draft completed, but needing so much revision. Writing is rewriting. You do your best. Then somehow you do better. And after all that there may be no gold medal waiting for you. Where’s the reward?

Take a day away from the keyboard, away from the writing. Take a long walk and think about why you write, why you began writing and continue. Then return and write again. Write from the heart. Tell your story. It’s where you finish that matters.

Then take that mantra and apply it to your characters. If they don’t start well, if the odds are against them, so much the better. We love to root for the underdog. Let them dig down and find their way. Let them find redemption and finish well.

Remember Hope Solo’s story. Remember the American women in Beijing, members of a team that worked together and celebrated together, young athletes who deserved each petal on the roses they held at the end, and each medal they wore proudly around their necks.