I love a good story. A good story is like a grand adventure. I get lost in the plot, traveling with the characters, getting caught up in the emotional struggles, and making friends with people who don't exist in my daily reality.
I don't love endings. I mean, I might like the way a story ends, but I don't like that the story ends. Endings signal the story is over. Like grieving the death of a dear friend, I must say goodbye to framed moments someone else's imagination let me step into and then promptly invited me to step out of. To say goodbye to good friends after a grand adventure and part ways after spending so much time together leaves me with a feeling of loss and emptiness, a sense of finality. Perhaps the characters will go on to enjoy life, but unless the author writes another story, I will not get to be part of that experience.
Unlike the writing process--always unfinished. Writing seems to go on for infinity. Even when a work is published, I seem to be able to find ways of rethinking my ideas and reconsidering structures and reformulating sentences. Writing is a process of
planning
starting ideas
ending ideas
shifting directions
scrapping a draft
rethinking
revising
getting opinions
throwing out opinions
punctuating
choosing
laboring over a sentence
cutting a sentence after changing it 25 times because it doesn't work--
Oh, and these are just a few things that happen in the process. In these moments of unfinished-ness, I find something of opportunities to pick up where I left off, to experiment with something new, or to look at old ideas in a new way. The process seems to continue long after I've abandoned one project to work on another.
Letting writing rest unfinished has some benefits. In A Moveable Feast, author Ernest Hemingway wrote, "I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it." New inspiration can bring old ideas to life or help writers take a look at an idea with fresh eyes.
The unfinished conversation with my neighbor may never be revisited. This kind of unfinished leaves me without closure, but I can't even remember the significance of yesterday's conversation now. I'm glad we didn't waste any more time talking about nothing, and today we will begin anew, beginning new conversations that will connect a string of unfinisheds.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. 1964. Vintage Classics, 2000.
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