In Dreams

“Now here I go again, I see the crystal visions
I keep my visions to myself
It's only me
Who wants to wrap around your dreams and
Have you any dreams you'd like to sell?
Dreams of loneliness...”
~Stevie Nicks (Fleetwood Mac), “Dreams”

“Come on out of your dreams
And wake up from your reverie
Time is here, don’t go to sleep . . .
About a light year from reality”

~Beck, “Dreams”

Dreams can be an excellent source of inspiration when writing.  That’s how Stephenie Meyer received her idea for the Twilight series.  I remember waking from a dream at roughly two a.m. when I was around eighteen or nineteen and immediately going to my computer to begin typing away.  I guess I didn’t save it because I can’t remember what it was about, only that I had to get it down and see if I could go with it.  And even though I lost sleep and never used the idea, it was still time well spent.  I always say, time spent writing is never wasted time.  It keeps you practicing and sometimes we writers need to write a huge amount before we write something we actually want to use or show the world.  And, I always find the more I write, the better the work becomes.

But back to my original thought.  I’ve been thinking a lot about dreams, particularly two I had lately.  The first was rather frightening, one I have had before.  I found myself inexplicably moving through outer space.  Not in a rocket ship or anything of the sort, just moving through the darkness, nothingness—floating amongst massive planets close by and stars in the distance.  But it was frightening because there was nothing stable, nothing to hold onto, no gravity, no life force, and no one else around, just empty vastness all around—and it was immense.

Strange, I know.  Like with a lot of dreams, they seem to make sense until you try to explain them out loud or on paper.

The other dream I had, the same evening, is the first one I had about two people I loved greatly, who passed away within six months of each other: my grandmother and my cousin, Barbara (I will be talking more about Barbara in an upcoming post on characterization).  I was close to both of them and I still haven’t quite gotten over the shock of losing them both within such close proximity.  The experience of losing each was different, too: my grandmother’s was slightly expected, yet Barbara’s was completely unexpected, but they both played a role in my growth as a writer.  It was at my grandmother’s house that I learned my love of writing, and it is in that house that I set part of my new book.  Barbara was my reader.  She read my to-be published book before anyone else had, and told me that I needed to get it published right away.  At least she got to know that it was on its way before she passed on.  I just wish my grandmother had seen it, too.  It still feels a little strange knowing they won’t be able to see my future works.  I guess it hurts the most when I’ve written something I like and I think to myself, Oh, I need to email that to Barbara and then the fresh realization of oh, that’s right, I can’t, sets in yet again.  Not a good feeling.

But what was a good feeling was seeing them both for just a few moments in my dream the other night.  I know it may seem silly, but when I see loved ones who have passed on in my dreams, I like to think it is them visiting me, letting me know they’re okay.  I thought that when I dreamed of my great-grandmother and my grandfather, too.  I’m a believer in God and Heaven, so I know they’re there, and no longer in pain, and that’s about the only thing that gets me through not being able to see them, hug them, talk with them.  I think about things we used to do together, things as simple as going to the dollar store with my grandmother (an old tradition of ours) or even to her doctor’s appointments with her, or seeing that smile of Barbara’s that could light up any room, hearing her infectious laugh, talking with her about books, films, characters and storylines.

I know it may seem like I’ve gotten a little off my topic of writing and dreams.  But also, I think having the ones I had the other night illustrates the bad and the good about them: you live in them for a while, and then you wake up.  Just which is good and which is bad depends, of course, on your dream, and whether or not you let them disappear with the new day, or hold onto them depends on that as well.

As for me, even though I am filled with fresh sadness and longing to see my grandmother and cousin—my friends—again, my dream is still one I’m grateful for and glad I had.  I just hope they visit me again soon.

Into Oblivion

Last Friday, I did something I have not done in a long time: sit back, relax, and watch a movie I’ve never seen with my husband.  Usually, by the time evening rolls around, the kiddos are sleeping, and I’ve finished my evening job as professional domestic engineer (i.e. mommy, laundry maid, kitchen maid, house cleaner, chef), my eyes can do anything but stay open. 

I didn’t have a lot of faith in myself to stay awake, but I agreed, anyway, and found myself pulled right into Oblivion, a visually stunning and engrossing film that had potential, but was ultimately lacking.  After it was over, I found myself confused, not by the storyline, but by my feelings.  The film was good in a lot of respects, so why didn’t I fully enjoy it?  After taking the time to think about it over the weekend, I think I know why. 

For the sake of space, I won’t go into too much detail on the plot, but rather the elements I enjoyed and the ones that I feel detracted me from loving the film.  First of all, the imagery is lovely, glorious, refreshing. The home that Jack Harper inhabits with his co-worker/lover, Vika, is a sleek, minimalist house in the sky, covered in windows, and every time they step outside, they are greeted with the exuberant, high-up winds known on top of the world.  Jack also keeps a cabin on the surface as well.  It is so deep within the mountains it is almost built into them, amid lush greenery and overlooking a vast, reflective lake.  He keeps mementos of Earth there—books, records, a clock, sunglasses.  It’s captivating and inviting—almost anyone would want to live there. 

Then there’s the cinematography.  One example is when Jack is on the vast rugged landscape of a desert, watching the landing of a ship and coming face to face with its passenger.  The camera slowly and carefully swings around Jack to reveal that he is looking directly at a clone of himself.  This reveal, and the way the director handles it . . . well, it’s nicely done.     

And finally, there are the small moments between characters a couple of times.  From across a dark table, Jack tells Vika of so-called aliens who very nearly captured him that day.  She has little reaction except to study him as he tells her the story, but makes clear her love for him when she says, in a low voice, “Well, they can’t have you.”  They seem to have a lovely relationship.  The way they look at one another, the way he gently brings her a flower he found on Earth—I believed their relationship.    

Okay, so what kept me from loving the film? I pondered that over the weekend, wondered why I felt just slightly annoyed and let down.  A few elements come to mind.   

The first is that we are given the character of Jack Harper, played by Tom Cruise.  He is still a great actor, but whenever I watch one of his films lately, I always see the person rather than the character—the person he has been over the last ten years, the extremely passionate Scientologist who repeatedly jumped on the couch over his love for Katie Holmes, who got into an argument with Matt Lauer on live television over anti-depressants.  This is probably more my problem than the film’s, but, there it is. 

The second is the introduction of a second female character in the film.  Jack is constantly flashing in his mind to an unknown, unnamed woman.  It’s the same couple of memories over and over until they become almost annoying.  When a ship crash lands on Earth, Jack goes to investigate and low and behold, she is there, in stasis.  He, of course, takes the woman back to his and Vika’s home.  She helps him realize she is his wife.  This awareness brings very real tears to Vika’s eyes, and causes her to go willingly to her death.  What’s more, Jack finds out he is not who he thinks he is at all.  One might think that this is all a lot for Jack to handle.  He has spent a great deal of time with Vika, taken her as his lover, worked with her.  Wouldn’t he be more than a little heartbroken?  But talking to this mystery woman a while longer and spending a night having sex with her seems to cure him of all negative feelings.    

I am just not sure I bought the relationship between Jack and this new woman (Julia).  I suppose if we’d been given more memories between her and Jack—gentle, loving ones—then that would have made her presence more welcome.  As it was, she seemed more of an intrusion in Jack and Vika’s lives.  She spends a lot of time scowling at Vika and strangely laughs when Vika takes Jack’s hand at one point.  Furthermore, when she is brought out of stasis, she obviously recognizes Jack because she says his name but does nothing more—no act of affection, nothing to let viewers know what a large part she played in his life.  I suppose the fact that Vika is a victim just like Jack is, makes me sympathize with her as well.  Like Jack, she is not who she thinks she is, but she loves him, so much that she is willing to die when his feelings almost instantaneously change for her.  This whole idea of a mystery woman visiting the mind of a man who isn’t who he thinks he is was done in Total Recall, but was done better, I think, probably because the “new” woman versus the “mystery” one was more villainous.  But that notwithstanding, I think the idea that Oblivion presents here is a good one, just wasn’t executed well.  If this mystery woman is the one Jack is meant to be with, have viewers want him to be with her. 

Lastly, the film is filled with other great actors such as Morgan Freeman and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, but they are underdeveloped and under-used, thus their talent seems to largely go to waste.  Each of them gets only a few scenes and are effective enough in their acting and delivery to make me want to see more of both, and their lives.  I wanted to know them but by the end, just felt that I didn’t.  

With all of that said, I do know that films have a limited amount of story-telling space, and the director, Joseph Kosinski, does just fine with the time he is given (the film did stay with me, after all), but I think most of his strength lies in cinematography and imagery rather than story and character development. 

The Rough Road of Writer's Block

"Everyone wants to tell their story," Ed Masry told Erin Brockovich in the film version of her life.  Sometimes people will open up to tell that story and some stay tightly clamped.  Some will tell parts of the story and some will fabricate other parts.  Everyone's different, as if I even need to say that.  That's the way it is with fictional characters, sometimes.  Sometimes they will start to tell me their stories with ease and then stop.  And then I'm stuck, feeling glued to a space and I can't move forward.  I don't know if I would characterize it as writer's block, entirely, because I still think about the characters and their stories all the time, even after I'm finished writing their story.  I've heard some writers say they don't believe in writer's block.  I can't say whether I do or not, but there is something I heard once that made me reconsider my thoughts on it.  Bono, the lead singer for U2, was in grade school and studying a particular author who, his teacher told them, went for years without writing anything because he was suffering writer's block.  It was like his mind would not put forth any idea to write about.  Bono spoke up and said he didn't mean to be disrespectful, but why didn't that writer just write about that until he did find an idea?  

Hmm, good idea.   

Anyway, I think I mentioned that this latest story I've been working on had me stuck recently. I love my characters and can't bear the thought of shelving their story because I feel stuck.  The thing is, I know how I want their story to end, but for a while, I didn't know exactly how to get there.  It was beginning to get frustrating, a feeling akin, I guess, to standing over a pot of water, waiting for it to boil, or waiting for a flower or fruit on a tree to bloom.  It seems like it's never going to happen.  I felt that way about my story.  The path of how to get to that ending wasn't clear and felt like it was like it was never going to be.  I understand Stephen King felt the same way when writing The Stand.  Then one day when he was out for a walk, a single idea arrived in his mind.  He compares it to a gift, and said when he incorporated that simple, single idea, he finished up the work in just a few weeks.  I can't say when my idea came to me, exactly, though I wish I could.  All I know is, I'd been trying to make an idea work and it just wasn't happening.  And although I do applaud myself for pushing myself to keep going and trying, my writing wasn't good and the characters almost seemed forced in their actions--which they were, since I was trying to force the plot in one direction.  But then, I got the idea to modify it just slightly.  And that's when the pot started boiling, the flower decided to bloom and like the imagery those two things conjure, it was bursting and lovely.  My characters are talking again and I'm grateful because I have missed them.  And a part of me does feel like maybe if I hadn't made myself keep going and stay with them even when they weren't talking, I wouldn't be working again.    

I'm reminded of something our pastor said in church this past Sunday, and didn't even realize it until now how that applies to this story.  He mentioned that the roads we encounter and take are sometimes easy and sometimes they're quite rough.  He told a story of a young man on a bus in Jamaica, and how it seemed like the driver was downright trying to hit every pothole on the road and at one time, the bus jolted so violently that everyone bounced out of their seat and the woman sitting next to this man ended up in his lap.  She laughed it off and told him that it was a rough road, but not to worry, they'd all be home soon.

So whether it's the writing road or the road of life, it is, indeed, rough sometimes.  But stay with it, because it'll be lovely once you get to where you're going.  I looked up rough roads as I was finishing up this post to find a picture to illustrate and this one below stood out the most.  The road looks rough and intimidating.  But . . . doesn't the scenery you'll pass look awfully beautiful, too? 

Sometimes It's the Little Things

“Monday morning, you sure look fine.” ~ Fleetwood Mac, from the song "Monday Morning."

It didn’t seem that way when I first got up.  It felt like I had slept all of sixty minutes when my alarm went off and even after I pulled myself out of bed after twenty minutes of hitting snooze my eyelids still felt glued shut.  I stumbled into the kitchen where I started my coffee and began fixing Connor his customary grits and milk.  He, as always, was in a great mood, even at six in the morning.  And so, as I stood there fixing up our morning routines, I heard him say, “Wow!  Look at the stars!”

I squinted even more that I already had been in the too-bright kitchen light and came around the counter to where he was standing, just on the edge of the dining room and saw what he was in awe of.  Sure enough, a single star still sparkled in the dim royal blue of the dawn sky.  I knelt beside him, my hand on his little shoulder and just before I could say how beautiful it was, he said, “It’s pretty!  I like the stars!” 

I agreed and told him I did, too, to which he automatically started singing, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” 

What a beautiful start it was to an otherwise mundane Monday.  These little moments have continued each morning since.  It has become a little tradition for Connor and me.  We both immediately go to the dining room, look out the far window and find what we have started referring to as our star.  I think it might be the Evening Star.  I’m not sure, but it doesn’t really matter.  It’s like it’s our moment, his and mine, there, waiting for us to share each morning to start our day in a quiet, lovely way.  Sometimes it’s the little moments that can turn a whole day around, even before it begins.  And even if the rest of the day doesn’t go so well, we still have that one moment to look back, to remember, and to smile to when we do.

That’s true with stories sometimes.  I remember once Jennifer Lopez talking about the film Gigli.  She conceded it wasn’t a good film, was honest about it, but also said that even through that, there were still some good moments.  I agree there were a couple, though they couldn’t save the film entirely.  I happened to consider that, though, as I re-watched a little-known Patrick Swayze film he did with his wife about fifteen years ago.  It was called One Last Dance.  Overall, the film was pretty good, just not great.  But there were moments that stand out still in my mind, like when Patrick Swayze and his wife’s characters (Travis and Chrissa, respectively) are standing on a city street watching a violinist play and they quietly smile at one another, or the look another character gets as he listens to Chrissa tell the story of how she discovered her love of dance, or when Travis talks to a little girl about the wonderful imaginary things you can do and be as a dancer.  I smile when I think about these moments and how, even though they didn’t quite add up to make a great film, they’re still something special, something worth revisiting, just like the little star in my and Connor’s mornings.  

Quiet Curse

I’m a naturally quiet person.  I observe and listen more than I speak.  I’m shy.  I enjoy time alone, and when I know I am going to a party or something with a lot of people, even if I know them, I get tense.  My heart starts racing, my stomach starts somersaulting, and I’m exhausted before I even get there.  I’ll spend much of the evening listening, trying to think of something interesting to add amidst the chatter, and when I finally work up the nerve to do so, I’ll get the inevitable blank stares, overly polite laughter or looks of, “Oh, Tanya, I’d completely forgotten you were there.”

I’ve had family members, friends, people I barely know tell me things like, “Wow, do you ever talk?”  “You’re so quiet.  I don’t think you’ve spoken at all.”  I’ve had professors threaten to fail me if I didn’t start speaking up and contributing to class discussions.  On the playground in school, I hung around the big group of girls my age, but was always just on the outside, never really speaking up and honestly, never really interested.  In case you can’t tell, I’ve never been the most popular person.  People don’t naturally gravitate toward me.  I don’t make friends that easily.  I’m not bubbly or overly excited and it’s because of my quietness and my shyness.  It’s sometimes to the point that I give off an impression of snootiness.  A girl I became friends with in college told me that her first impression of me was that I was aloof, and then she got to know me.  And as I look at the synonyms for that—remote, reserved, standoffish—I can’t help but agree.  My timidity, my inability to find what I want to say the exact instant I want to say it, make me that way.

I remember something I once heard my aunt say about me to someone who said I was the quietest person they’d ever met: that I will contribute if I am interested in what you are saying.  I get that from my dad, I think.  He can talk on and on about subjects that interest him, but he does tend be quieter on ones that don’t.  The thing is, he doesn’t seem to mind if others talk about things he’s not interested in.  He goes about his own work and that’s that.

I, on the other hand, tend to feel left out, excluded, sad, when I’m not included in a conversation. And let me tell you, it doesn’t take much to make me feel that way.  One look, one lack of acknowledgment, one odd tone toward me and all of a sudden, all of these aforementioned emotions are running rampant in my mind.  I’m overanalyzing, thinking, questioning, “Okay, what did I do or not do? What did I say or not say?”

When it could be nothing at all.  But the thing is, why?  If I am not really all that interested in the first place, why does it bother me when they don’t include me or acknowledge me?

I suppose it partly comes from my grandpa.  I remember him asking my mom once if a co-worker of hers was in a bad mood or if he (my grandpa) had done anything to insult her co-worker because he’d snapped or something.  This is just one example.  I have quite a few of my own that remind me of my grandpa, like when I attended bridal and baby showers I was invited to, and sent emails and Facebook posts and then when I invited these people to my own baby showers, they didn’t show.  And there was barely a response to my posts and emails.  Hmm, okay feelings a little hurt.

I remember once a Creative Writing professor, one of my all-time favorites, telling us students that writers are usually very sensitive people and to remember that when critiquing one another’s works.  Sensitivity can be a good thing to have as a writer.  It means I’m more keen and aware, but it also means I feel like a turtle without a shell sometimes, like when I got my feelings hurt.

I’ve taken the long way around and written a lot, but I guess one thing I am trying to say is this is another reason I call myself a writer, why I gravitated toward it and why my love for doing it has not waned in twenty-six years.  Writers listen to and observe society, and they reflect it in their work.  I love writing about the things I’ve seen and done and experienced.  It’s therapeutic.  What’s more, I love taking my time and thinking about what I have to say before I say it (or write it).  I know some people who don’t enjoy or prefer writing for this very reason because it does require a lot of work and time and thought.  But that’s a beauty in writing to me.  Sometimes it does take me a while to realize exactly what it is I want or need to say.  If I put something down, I can always take my time.  And if I read over something I’ve written and decide, “Oh, that’s not what I meant or wanted to say,” I can change it until it is.  This is not always an option when speaking.  When it’s done, it’s done.  There is no delete button, no revision there, and oftentimes if you try to go back and revise or clarify or change what you’ve said to the person you’ve said it to, it only makes it worse (ever see the episode of Frasier in which he and Lilith are trying to get their son into a prestigious prep school and keep saying the wrong things to the headmaster? Illustrates the point well). 

So this quietness, this sensitivity and shyness, I can critique these aspects in myself all I want and accept them all I want, but the thing is, I hope I learn to embrace and cherish them one day, because they’re part of the reason I discovered the writer in myself, and why I’ve kept writing all these years. 

In the meantime, I think I’ll just keep in mind something Ernest Hemingway, one of the best and most well-known American writers once said: “A writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.”

I hope I remember that the next time someone comments on how quiet I am.  Even if I don’t say it.  J

Home and Away

I saw online recently where my great-grandmother’s home is up for sale.  It was built in 1900, and so the place holds a lot of memories for not only me, but my mom, my grandfather, and countless cousins, aunts, uncles, etc.  I haven’t been there in a few years, but somehow, just knowing that soon, I will not be able to feel the creak of the wood beneath my feet as I walk around the wraparound porch, go into warmly-lit rooms with twelve-foot ceilings, sit in the bay window seat, and feel my great-grandmother’s presence all around as I move from places still called parlors and salons, saddens me.  She passed away there, just as she was born there, in the very same room.

We used to spend every Christmas Eve there, having dinner in the cavernous, red-carpeted dining room before going to the front den to open gifts.  It was a splendid tradition, one we would always dress up for.

I can carry these memories, of course.  I know I can, always.  But it doesn’t change the sadness of not being able to feel it, go to it, be there, ever again.  I’m no stranger to losing a place.  The house my mom and I lived in the first fourteen years of my life in burned down about ten years ago.  And my grandmother had to sell her house several years ago.  I felt this same loss, then, because I’d spent practically as much time at my grandmother’s as I did at home.  Those were the places I’d started out in life, the places where I began to discover who I was, where I learned of my love of writing and horses, where I made my first friends, where a lot of my family still lives.  But, for some reason, at the time, the loss of these places didn’t hit me quite as hard as the selling of my great-grandmother’s now, probably because I was younger and didn’t realize the enormity of place and home just yet, or maybe it was because I still had somewhere to go when I visited my hometown. 

Now, when someone else moves their family and furniture and memories into the home that has only ever belonged to our family, I won’t have it.  That will be it.  I've known people who think it silly for me to feel this way, who've rolled their eyes when I've tried to tell them the story.  But that's okay.  Not everyone can understand leaving your home or hometown and missing it.  Not everyone knows the feeling of sometimes wanting to move back there so badly it’s becomes hard to focus or even breathe.  I feel this sometimes.  I want to drive down the same, familiar streets and see the old houses, visit the little shops that line the charming town square, see some of the same faces I grew up with on a regular basis, return to the place I know. 

But then I wonder what I might miss here: my kids’ school, our church, my few but close friends here, our little house where we brought our kids home from the hospital, certain aspects of my job, being close to a larger city when I want to go, even driving along the same routes and seeing the same landmarks I’ve become familiar with in the past twenty years.

So, what do I do now with all of these feelings?  Something I’ve done is to preserve the description and therefore, the memory of my great-grandmother’s home in my book that will soon be released, and then my grandmother’s in the one I’m currently writing.  As a matter of fact, I have based my last three books in my hometown.  I have re-named it, to give myself a little creative freedom, but it’s like it’s my way of going back there even when I can’t, physically.  It has become part of my stories, integral, even, to feeling and understanding them.  And it feels good setting my stories there.  I feel like I’m back there in my mind and maybe giving my readers a feel for all the good things about that place. 

I feel like certain writers out there have a lot of power in that way.  Placing a reader in the setting can be so important to the rest of the story, even when readers don’t realize.  I love seeing the little houses and shops in Debbie Macomber’s Cedar Cove.  I saw and felt the sand and sea spray and the shops and title home in Andre Dubus III’s House of Sand and Fog.  I can’t imagine the story without imagining these things.  And then there’s Janet Fitch’s White Oleander.  Take a look at this passage in which Astrid, the fourteen-year-old protagonist observes her new foster home:

“The air in Van Nuys was thicker than in Sunland-Tujunga.  It was a kingdom of strip malls and boulevards a quarter-mile across, neighborhoods of ground-hugging tracts dwarfed by full-growth peppers and sweet gums fifty feet high.  It looked hopeful, until I saw a house down the street, and prayed, please Jesus, don’t let it be the turquoise one with the yard paved in blacktop behind the chained-link fence.

The social worker parked in front of it.  I stared.  It was the color of a tropical lagoon on a postcard thirty years out of date, a Gauguin syphilitic nightmare.  It was the gap in the chain of deciduous trees that cradled every other house on the block, defiantly ugly in its nakedness.

The bubble-glass door was also turquoise, and the foster mother was a wide, hard-faced blond woman who held a dumb-founded toddler on her hip.  A little boy stuck his tongue out at me from behind his mother.”

It doesn’t seem like the happiest or nicest of places and that’s the point.  The things she carefully chooses to describe with equally careful word choice all work together to project this image of a hopeless, depressing environment in which Astrid is about to enter and try to make home.  In essence, we get the full sense of place here. 

I guess that’s what I hope to give my readers and myself as I use my homes and hometown to tell my stories.  Because if we get that sense of place and it lives on in our minds, it’s never really lost, even if someone else buys it and makes their home there.    

Famous Last Words

“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 — to-morrow 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.”--The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald


“A taxi came up the street, the waiter hanging out at the side. I tipped him and told the driver where to drive, and got in beside Brett. The driver started up the street. I settled back. Brett moved close to me. We sat close against each other. I put my arm around her and she rested against me comfortably. It was very hot and bright, and the houses looked sharply white. We turned out onto the Gran Via.
‘Oh, Jake,’ Brett said, ‘We could have had such a damned good time together.’
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’” --The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
“With the spirit of her people who would not know defeat, even when it stared them in the fact, 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 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.’” --Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell


“The old woman stood on the side of the road and waved back until the car was out of sight.” –Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, Fannie Flagg

Where does a story stop, and when?  Is it when the characters stop telling their story to the writer? If that's the case, I'm in a lot of trouble because I'm fifty pages into my new book and my characters have been ignoring me for a little while, now.

But that notwithstanding, I finished up a great book recently and a television series I'd followed just had its finale, and as these things happened, something occurred to me: whenever a novel, a movie, a television series ends, we have only just read or seen a snippet, a small piece, of that person's life.  Now it could be a defining moment, what made them who they are, or whatever, but what happened before and what happens after are left up to readers and viewers to determine.

Now, whenever I start writing a story, I sometimes know where that story is in that character's life, the one that needs or wants to be told.  Ending it can be tough, though.  Not only is it my last chance with my readers (if they've decided to make it that far), but even after I stop writing the story, I still think about my characters and see the rest of their lives unfolding (occupational hazard, I guess--the characters always live in the mind of the one who creates them).
The ones I listed above are some of my favorite endings to books, for various reasons.
Fitzgerald, for instance, uses the lyrical and romantic writing style he is known for to encompass Nick's thoughts on the sadness of the events that took place throughout the novel and in doing so, closes the story in the only way he can.  The result is, I think, one of the most beautifully-written pieces of prose in literature.

Hemingway, though of the same generation as Fitzgerald and one of his friends, presents his ending a little differently, a little more succinctly.  He ends his story by focusing on Jake and Brett, two people who were once together.   They are not now, but still love one another.  Readers of even this small passage can see that in Hemingway's descriptions of their body language and words.  There is nothing keeping them apart other than themselves.  Hemingway was known for his stoic male characters and Jake is no exception.  His simple yet thoughtful response to Brett on what they could have had and been illustrates that and what's more, enables the reader to ponder even more on that statement.  This is one of the great things, I think, about Hemingway's writing style.  Even though the entire story is not just about Jake and Brett's relationship, I do like the fact that it ends with them, and their love.

Like Hemingway, Margaret Mitchell chose to end Gone with the Wind with a quote from its main character.  I quoted the first lines of this novel on my post on opening lines and just as important to understanding and knowing Scarlett O’Hara are these last lines.  It seems ambiguous at first glance and leaves readers with a common question: “What happens after that?”  I actually like endings like that.  Sometimes it’s best to leave it up to the reader to use his or her imagination, to think and analyze.  But, my thoughts on Scarlett and whether or not she ends up with Rhett are this: she puts off bad news and knowledge for the next day, instead determined to focus ahead on how to get what she wants.  There is little, if anything, this woman can’t get when she puts her mind to it.  So, though the ending may seem ambiguous at first glance, Scarlett’s history suggests that yes, she could very well get Rhett back.

The ending to Flagg's novel may seem simplistic as Hemingway's.  However, when I first thought of writing about last lines, this is one of the first that came to mind.  I know it doesn’t seem like much, but it always makes me think of many of the sweet, kind people in the south, and particularly my grandpa, who would wave in the distance at no one in particular as he walked down the back steps of his house.  I once asked him why he did that and since he was one of the first to read and encourage my writing, I suppose it's only right to end today's post with his response, his words: “Well, in case there’s anybody there that I just don't see.”