Today’s WordPress question asks:
If you could rewrite any book’s ending, which one would you choose?
I promise I’ll answer the question eventually. But first, I’d like to have a brief word with whoever is writing these prompts.
Actually, “writing” may be too generous a word.
On June 25—just 32 days ago—WordPress asked:
If you could change the ending of any book, which one would it be?
Today, it wants to know:
If you could rewrite any book’s ending, which one would you choose?
Well played.
They changed “change” to “rewrite,” moved a few words around and sent the question back into the world as though it had undergone a complete renovation. This is not a new question. This is the old question disguised in Groucho Marx glasses and hoping I don’t recognize it.
Somewhere in the WordPress Daily Prompt offices, a writer apparently opened the file marked Questions We’ve Already Asked, copied one, ran it through a thesaurus and declared the day’s work complete. If you’re fans of Friends, at least it wasn’t written by Baby Kangaroo Tribbiani.
“Shouldn’t we check when we last used this one?”
“Nah. It’s been 32 days. Nobody will remember.”
I remember.
Thursday, June 25, was the day Daryl and I drove to Atlanta to see Lizzi, Sully and Aurelia. It was the beginning of our vacation. I can tell you where I was going, what I was doing and why that particular day mattered.
But WordPress apparently cannot remember what question it asked us one month ago.
I appreciate the Daily Prompts. I really do. They regularly give me something to think about, and they’ve led me into stories I probably wouldn’t have told otherwise. But the whole point of a writing prompt is to prompt writing. It isn’t particularly helpful when the food for thought has been reheated before the leftovers have even gone bad.
Still, I promised I would answer today’s entirely new, completely original and absolutely-not-recycled question.
So here is the heart of my answer from June 25—word for word.
I don’t know that I have a specific book ending I would change. I’m not exactly the Dewey Decimal System of literary conclusions. I’ve read plenty of books where I loved the journey more than the destination, but I’m not sure I’d have the nerve to walk up to a great author and say, “Here, let me fix that for you.”
But I do think about endings.
One of my favorite authors is Stephen King, and even King has been criticized for his endings. I’ve heard people say he doesn’t always end his books so much as he just stops writing. I don’t know if that’s fair. When a writer creates worlds that big, characters that alive, and nightmares that linger for decades, maybe no ending can carry the full weight of everything that came before it.
Still, there’s something oddly encouraging about that to me.
Stephen King is on my Mount Rushmore of living American authors. I’m not pretending to be anywhere near his level. But if even Stephen King can have an area where readers sometimes say, “That wasn’t his strongest finish,” then maybe being imperfect doesn’t mean a writer has no business trying. Maybe it just means the work is hard.
And endings are hard.
For any writer, I think the opening and the closing are the hardest parts. That’s true whether you’re writing a short story, an essay, a reflection or a novel. The beginning has to invite the reader in. The ending has to make the journey feel worth it. Everything in the middle may not be easy, exactly, but compared to getting in and getting out, it sometimes feels that way.
With my own book, I had the opening line years before I ever wrote the story. It just came to me, and I mentally filed it away under, “Don’t you dare forget this line, because this is the perfect opener.”
Then, as I was writing the final chapter, the closing came to me in much the same way. My characters were in the right place. Certain pieces were already there, waiting to be used. Suddenly, I could see precisely how it needed to end.
I was almost terrified as I wrote it.
Not because the ending was bad, but because it felt important. It felt like one of those moments when the story was either going to land or it wasn’t. But somehow, the ending presented itself to me. I don’t want to give it away, because I still hope people will get to read it one day, but I will say this: when I finished it, I felt like the plane had landed.
That blew me away.
I won’t claim the book is perfect. I won’t claim it belongs on a shelf beside the masters. But I do believe the ending is satisfying. At least it is to me. It feels earned. It feels true to the characters. It feels like the story found the place where it was always supposed to arrive.
Maybe that’s why this question is hard for me. I don’t immediately think of another author’s ending I’d change. I think about endings themselves—how hard they are, how much they matter, and how encouraging it is to know that even writers as great as Stephen King have struggled with them.
If someone like him can wrestle with endings and still become one of the most beloved storytellers of our time, then maybe there’s hope for the rest of us.
Maybe there’s even hope for me.
There. Question answered.
Again.
Perhaps 32 days from now, WordPress can ask which literary conclusion I would alter.
I’ll start preparing my response.
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