Finding Your Story's True North
Where memory meets meaning on the final page
A master class in finding your memoir's perfect ending, featuring intimate analysis of literary classics and the surprising power of hidden symbols. Plus, discover how your story's beginning holds the compass to its true destination.
Updated 2/25
Welcome into Flight School:
The ending of a story is more than a conclusion - it's the final taste left in the reader's mouth, a chance to accentuate your art while tipping your hat toward the unknown. The best endings leave us with a sense of dissonance, a slight off-note. Done, yet unfinished - just like life itself.
Learning from the Masters
Great endings haunt us across all genres. Think of Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, where the heroine chooses a man who "gets her" while abandoning her dreams - leaving us wondering if she's found freedom or taken the easy way out. Or consider The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, ending with that mysterious hummingbird at the hospital window during a hurricane. These endings give us chills, yet we can't quite explain why.
The Secret Architecture
Here's what I've learned: endings aren't created - they're discovered in our beginnings. Let me show you through my own work in Show Me the Way.
Specifically, I’m looking at this section:
I touch over his face, this perfect heart of a face with eyes as dark as Egyptian Stones. Life and death come through the same door. He puffs his chest, sucks another deep breath, and cries so loud this time everyone in the room laughs at the sound of him. No one has ever looked so beautiful to me. I press my lips against his head and whisper, “Welcome, baby,” except I can’t hear myself over the sound of his powerful cry.
I bolded my key symbols/images. Now, let’s go find them in the opening pages:
She listens to her husband breathing. Pg.3/gr. 3. …Steve, who breathes deep in his chest on his inhales and lets out little puffs on his exhales.
On pg. 5/gr. 27, she describes her mother this way: Her face is shaped like a heart and her eyes are as black as Egyptian stones.
On pg. 14/gr. 140, her mother is so beautiful it hurts. And there is a second reference to the heart shaped face.
This is a 41 page story. I’m done collecting the images that will be used at the end by pg. 14. So, at one level, that’s it. I repeated what I wrote at the beginning and reversed it. Steve’s breathing/the baby breathing. Mother description/baby description.
It’s called book-ending. You take what you have put into place at the beginning and repeat it differently in the end. But it actually the meaning of the symbols that provides the depth and the dissonance.
Breath is the spirit that animates form. Without breath, there is no movement of the lungs which in turn worth the heart. “Do we breathe or are we being breathed?” is the question asked in this terrific book that sits on my shelf, always within reach: The Book of Symbols: Reflections of Archetypal Images.
Breath animates the clay of our being. It is the lusty cry of the newborn, and the essence of the wind, spirit, muse, sound. Our feeling states manifest in changes of breath, from the panicky shortness of breath to the sighs “too deep for words” of intense sorrow.
~ Pg. 16, The Book of Symbols, Taschen
The heart is the equivalent of the sun for a human being. No sun. No life on the planet. No heart. No life in the body.
Egypt is a county with one of the oldest known histories. Its ancient name, Kemet, is so ancient that it was represented by symbols and not letters. From WorldAtlas, this name means, “the black and fertile soils that are lying the Nile flood plains.”
A stone is inert, slow moving energy. The slowest, some say. It’s solid. Dense. But, still it is energy in the process of breaking down and changing shape.
We have all of our symbols, now, and their meanings. Let’s look a bit closer.
When creating my ending back in 2003, the feelings I had for my deceased mother were the same as those I was having for my infant son but a look at the symbols and their meanings explains I was writing about something much deeper which was a hunger for that which I hadn’t yet experienced. A genetic link to another human being. My mother (who had died) wasn’t my biological mother. I was adopted. In this ending, I was also writing about that biological connection denied me. An ancient longing. And that reference to Egyptian stones is the clue (since that is such an ancient culture) that revealed the edge of a shadow pointing to an older and underlying longing.
✍️ Your Turn
Look at the first twenty percent of your work-in-progress. Find three or four symbols that seem to hum with energy. Don't analyze - just collect them. Then check your ending. Have these symbols naturally found their way there? If not, might they belong?
Remember: A great ending should be like the finest dark chocolate - slightly bitter but smooth. Elegant with a twist. And memorable to the point you long for more.
Thanks for being with me,
Jennifer 🐦⬛
