February 26, 2019

Conclusions aren’t endings

Whenever I write a story, I ask myself, does this story have a conclusion? And when I say conclusion, I don’t mean an ending. There’s a difference.

Author of Invisible Ink, Brian McDonald, describes a story as “A telling or re-telling of events leading to a conclusion.” On the surface, that sounds pretty simple. But what Brian means by ‘conclusion’ isn’t ‘the end or finish of an event, process, or text’. Conclusion, in Brian’s definition of storytelling, refers to the alternate meaning of conclusion, “a judgement or decision reached by reasoning.”

So when I ask myself, does this story have a conclusion, what I’m asking is, have I encouraged the reader to decide something? Have I helped them make a decision? Have I told or retold events whereby the reader has experienced an epiphany and received the true message of what I was trying to say?

When I think of conclusion like this, endings become less important, and it keeps me focused on what I was trying to say in the first place. It’s a handy tool to use when you’re deep in a project, and you risk losing the forest for the trees.

For more about this, listen to this episode of the Paper Wings Podcast.

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