Start from the End
One of the ways I know if I want to read a book – which in the privacy of my head I experience as whether a book “knows who it is” – involves opening a random page, letting my eyes find a random sentence and trust my compulsion (or lack of) to know what I’ve missed.
If this feels like a world I’ve just walked in on, I experience that as wanting to go on reading. Not from where I am. That would be silly. It would be cheating myself. I will want to read from the beginning. Money will then leave me – and something far beyond financial value, worth the value of my own time, will arrive.
Do you do that? If you do (or if you don’t), do you feel it’s any better than going by covers or categories?
I ask because one of the effects of creating my new genre fiction module at Roehampton University is how tempting it is to imagine what the alternative might be like. For example, I imagine a bookshop where every book has been put in a section because not (as things are now) because its horror elements are stronger than its fantasy and sci-fi elements and so it’s officially horror, or its crime elements are louder than its romance elements so it’s declared crime, but instead were classified by the genre that just lost out. This was particularly appealing after I went to the current Fantasy exhibition at the British Library. It follows the genre across books, films, stage, radio and live action role play. Deep within the exhibition two of my favourite ever television series appear, and this Fantasy exhibition had chosen what I’d argue are the most powerfully horrific images available from each to sum them up (Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Gentlemen; Twin Peaks: Josie turning into a wooden drawer knob). I was delighted to see these, and to play in the mini-version of the Black Lodge; I was more delighted with this wordless acknowledgement that genre is a system, not an absolutism. It’s not pretending to be anything else.
Don’t get me wrong: having genres is categorically (pun intended) worth it. To not have a ‘menu’ in books where there is a small enough number of options not to drive you mad or render the amount of choice meaningless would result in the same kind of disaster that we see when Gordon Ramsay visits a failing hotel and finds a menu that gives hundreds of options. Categorisation, and a few implicit difficult decisions, beat infinite lack of clarity or understanding of what your choices even are. Start with the end in mind, give yourself something to divert from or push up against, and you find where your writing wants to call home.
Starting with the end is something I try to recreate in my writing process as well as its content. Not necessarily in plot – though I have started at the literal end with at least one story – but certainly in terms but in approach. What am I in the mood to focus on? What’s the image that’s calling me? Rather than wait for the sentences to prove themselves to me, I transcribe what I hear for the editor (also me) to deal with later. That might not sound like starting at the end but it’s certainly starting with the end in mind – my job is to write, future me’s job is to edit. I need to trust us both.
All this keeps me curious rather than judgmental, exploratory rather than rushed over the journey I’m developing one step at a time. The story and the telling of it is an end in itself. I feel this moment, express this moment, trust and follow it as it links to a future or past scene that I explore in their own time.
Having fun is the best end to start with, because writing becomes harder when you’re not having fun. If you want to have fun, the place to start is where you’re curious about. But so many people only hear the doubts in their head and open conversations with them, rather than focusing on curiosity. The fox in the headlights makes the same decision, and receives an even worse fate than ours (ours being writer’s block).
In the final week of The Creative Writer, last Monday, I set an exercise I love. Write the final page of the thing you’re writing. Yes, the one you don’t know what happens in. Yes, the thing you’re tempted to tell yourself is so far into the future you wouldn’t dream of trying to join that future to the present. This isn’t the true ending – probably – any more than the first paragraph you write turns out to be the first paragraph in the eventual full draft. It never needs to be.
Do you know what I’d never do in a bookshop? Read the final page first. I want to get there, I want to go there to come back, but that’s a personal choice. I’d never read like that. Maybe that’s the same logic with which we avoid finishing that draft. Time is finite, and we never feel it more than when we stop perfectionising/procrastinating (whichever way up the coin falls, it’s the same coin).
But writing isn’t reading. We have more responsibility, more power. Start with the outcome and we’ll be motivated by what we want instead of what we fear. We do want to reach the end, and we will cover all the ground. Just not necessarily in the right order.