I’ve heard it over and over again, too many times. No doubt, you’ve heard
it too—“start with the end in mind”. Many writers advocate such a plan. I’m not
one of them.
It ruins all the fun. It containerizes me; keeps me in a box. It
prevents the story from taking me somewhere I haven’t gone before. Creativity
is not about knowing the end before you begin. Creativity is about discovery. Writing
fiction is about discovery. It’s about venturing on a new journey. Pulling from
experiences—some new, some old, some imagined—and letting the story take me
where it chooses.
Knowing the end feels mechanical and constrained like I’m going
through the motions. I never want to feel that way. I’ll stop writing when that
happens. Maybe the story doesn’t turn out how I thought it was going to in the
beginning. It takes courage to let a story direct its own path. It can be scary
venturing off the worn one.
There is a place for knowing how things will end. I know a bit about
that. It was an integral part of my engineering world and the reason why it’s a
profession. There’s a responsibility for knowing how the end will turn out. We
want the wheels to stay on our cars and airplanes to stay in the air. We want
those equations filled out with the upmost of correctness. We want the end
result to be the right answer.
But in creating a story, “starting with the end in mind” seems like reading
the end of a book before the start. Spoiler alert, spoiler alert! What’s the
point of the story then? Why write if I know where I’m going to end.
I can’t think of a story I’ve started knowing how it will turn out. Sometimes
the end comes sooner than I anticipate but often it’s the other way around. I
want to follow where the story leads me. It’s part of discovering what’s inside
me—the good, the bad and the ugly—and how the story pulls it out of me. Seeing the
connections that weren’t at first apparent and being fooled by what I thought
were.
My love for the physical aspects of writing likely had a hand in
this as well. I love the feel of holding a pen in my hand and watching the
words and sentences come out on a fresh, blank piece of paper. Writing simply lead
to the story.
That said I usually have some idea of what I want to write about and
at least a character’s name. My characters almost always start as a name.
It’s fun yet intimidating to follow where a story takes me. Life is
like that and that’s what I write about.
It brings to mind a quote
from Frank Herbert, author of the sci-fi magnum opus Dune. “There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop
the story.” Such a realization makes it all but impossible to “start with the
end in mind”.
