Ending
Bruce DeSilva/Special to the Digest
[Note: The following is an edited transcript from a talk at the 2001 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism. It first appeared in the Spring 2002 issue of Nieman Reports.]
The ending is something special. The ending is the last word. It’s the writer’s final chance to nail his or her point home to the memory of the reader. It’s the moment when you give the reader something to take away from the story and think about or when you fail to achieve that.
Every story has to arrive at a destination as well. That’s the whole point of the story, to get to that destination. Yet in all the years I’ve been attending writer’s conferences and speaking at them, I’ve never seen a workshop on endings. I’m not quite sure why that is.
Judging from the way most nonfiction reads, especially in newspapers, this is something we could use some help on, most of us. Most newspaper stories just dribble pitifully to an end. Often they really don’t have endings at all. And newspaper people seem to be the only ones who have this fundamental problem with understanding that endings are important and figuring out how to make them work. Or if they get it, they don’t seem to practice it. And the reason for this is pretty obvious: the inverted pyramid.
The inverted pyramid makes endings impossible. You simply can’t have an ending in an inverted pyramid. You have to order your information most important and most interesting first. The story becomes progressively less interesting and less important as you go along. The theory is that we must do this because people don’t read to the end. Well, of course they don’t! It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. We teach readers not to read to the end of newspaper stories.
