#beginnings

I have a writing question.

Have you ever written an epilogue before finishing a work?

I have an epilogue almost completely written and im not even 100% sure how they get there. I know basically how i want the story to end but the details need work.

I am here to tell you that I wrote what will be the epilogue for The Door Into Starlight (when it finally gets completed...) in 1980. I absolutely knew—even at that early stage—what was going to happen, and how it was (and is) all going to end.

And I had no damn idea how my characters and I were going to get there, either. (In fact, some of the most important details have only become plain to me in the last few years.) ...So don't despair.

The development of story is rarely linear, no matter how much we'd like it to be. A whole lot of writers have run up against this simple fact, at one point or another in their careers, and—trying to brute-force the situation into compliance—have wasted vast amounts of time and energy bashing their (figurative) heads against a rock-hard wall of resistance as they've tried to force story to grow in a linear way.

Sometimes, however desperate you are for it to do that, it just will not. (Though sometimes, I think just to throw us off our game[s], sometimes it does.) At such times, the thing to do—because frankly, you don't have much choice—is this:

Write down what you've got and then move on.

...This is something I've become used to over many years. In (pausing to attempt an estimate) maybe thirty out of fifty novels, I've absolutely routinely gotten the beginning first, and then the end... and have wound up spending a while staring at an empty-looking middle. (Though this staring period pretty quickly became a lot shorter for me once the habit of a reliable outlining workflow settled itself in... making it a lot easier to quickly structure and exploit what out-of-order pieces manifested themselves.)

Your own writer-brain's typical story-development pattern will probably take some time to develop and settle. This is fine, so don't sweat it. The beginning of your career will be about building and deepening the neural channels in which story runs as it grows, and all kinds of life- and work-events will affect this gradual development. Everybody's storygrowing patterns differ... so just let yours proceed to ingrain themselves at their own speed.

...Because they're going to anyway. 😏

In the Beginning

Paul Klee (1879-1940)

The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment.

-- Cesare Pavese