Justin Elesterio: "To Vina Jie-Min Prasad: PLEASE READ (I'm Sorry for Going Off-Topic)"

To Vina Jie-Min Prasad: PLEASE READ (I’m Sorry for Going Off-Topic)

By Justin Elesterio

There are three authors to respond to, and I chose you specifically for one thing: your beginnings. I know Ms. Townsend might shun me for shying away from the original question, but I’d like to express praise for good beginnings rather than good endings. Trust me; I will connect it back to the question.  

For those who haven’t read Vina Jie-Min’s stories, I’d like you guys to read the very first scene of Prasad’s Pistol Grip, one of her most recent published works (read the whole thing; it’s a really good story ). Read it here.

A guy is killed with a shotgun up the butt by a super-soldier. With a beginning like that, who would stop reading? For the casual reader, our endurance to read stories is very weak. We sift through the beginning chapters, taking in a tiny taste of the bigger picture, and quickly decide whether or not it’s worth our time to finish. The majority of us, to say the least, are lazy. Besides assigned readings, it has been a long time since I’ve read the ending of a story for leisure. 

However, if the audience is so enrapt with the opening, by the time the beginning ends, they’ll realize that they have gone through a good portion of the story, and find that it’s worth to see it to its conclusion. So, answering Prasad’s question in the general sense, I think endings that worked are determined by quality of the rest of the story. 

Endings work best when they are consistent to the rest of the story’s theme, feel, and emotion. Different stories beg a different ending:  I am fine with the predictable happy fairy-tale ending.  I don’t care if the story ends mundanely, nor if it ends halfway through a sentence. Twist ending, somber ending, leave-the-reader-hanging-for-a-sequel ending, they’re all enjoyable. I don’t think there can be a perfect or ideal conclusion to a story, but there can be memorable ones, and those are the ones authors should aim to achieve.

Knowing this, here are endings from various works of fiction that I think were well done, and very memorable: 

The Name of This Book is Secret by Pseudonymous Bosch: It’s one of my all-time favorite books. It’s eccentric. The 3^rd person narrator interacts with the reader, telling us to stop reading before it is too late, or that try as much as we can, there are secrets hidden in the text readers will never find out. The book ends mysteriously, with no resolve. Most of the text at the end is crossed or blacked out, leaving readers in the dark to how the story ends. The title, the beginning, and the ending are filled with playful messages meant directly toward the reader. What better way to end this story than to leave it out of the reach of the reader?

Her by Spike Jonze & Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri by Martin McDonagh: The endings of these stories are curt. Both are in the middle of a bittersweet moment, and still in the process of resolving things, when the movie ends. We are left only hints about the future of the characters. However, I enjoy these endings because I have closure in the fact that our characters have developed greatly under heartbreaks and drama demonstrated throughout the movie. By abruptly severing attachments audiences might have for the characters, these endings convey the same bitter, sentimental tone that resonates throughout their respective stories.

To Prasad, I think good endings are just natural extensions to a good story, and my picks for good endings tend to be the ones that make me want to read or watch more (as most other readers would agree). Addictive stories with an ever-evading closure hanging in front of readers like a piñata is my personal favorite way to conclude a story, because while you can’t have an ending without a beginning, you can have a beginning without an ending (although an infinitely long story is something no author has attempted to write, there are really good recursive, looped stories).

When it comes to any work of fiction, endings that do it right just have one simple duty: to pair well with the rest of the story.

As Pseudonymous Bosch writes in The Name of This Book is Secret, “only bad books have good endings. If a book is any good, its ending is always bad - because you don't want the book to end.”