# Finish Enough to Learn From Endings

The Inkagai Way: 100 Practices for a Writing Life

By Anna Lishman & Brad Lishman

Practice 5 · Part 1: Practice and attention

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> Finish enough work to learn what endings teach.

Jane Austen wrote an ending for *Persuasion* in July 1816 and then replaced it. Her nephew’s *A Memoir of Jane Austen* says the first version, a reconciliation at Admiral Croft’s lodgings, did not satisfy her: she “thought it tame and flat.” The canceled chapters survive. In the printed book Wentworth’s declaration comes in a letter instead. If the family account is right, she had to finish the draft ending before she could find out what was wrong with it, and what she changed was the event, not the sentences. (Practice 86 reads the canceled chapters more closely.)

A writer who is always beginning never gets to do that. She opens a novel, then a different novel, then an essay, each with a strong first chapter, because openings tend to be where interest is highest and the stakes lowest. Over years that can produce real skill at beginning and little at the later stages. She has never had to make the pieces converge, or discover whether the promise made on page one was kept, or put down a last sentence and be unable to take it back.

Endings probably teach things little else can, because an ending is the first place the whole is visible. The opening made a promise, the middle spent resources, and only at the end can anyone ask whether the books balance. It is there that a writer learns the real subject was something other than the announced one, or the proportions were off, or a character the draft treated as minor carried the book. These are lessons about the beginning, delivered late, to writers who have arrived. They reach planners and discovery writers in different forms. The planner finds at the ending that the plan’s last beat does not do what the outline hoped; the discovery writer finds that the ending the material was heading toward is not the one the story needed.

Charles Darwin’s *On the Origin of Species* calls itself an abstract. In the Introduction to the first edition, Darwin says that his work is now nearly finished but will take two or three more years to complete, that his health is far from strong, and that he has been urged to publish this Abstract; he adds that it must necessarily be imperfect. He also mentions that Alfred Russel Wallace has reached almost the same conclusions and sent a memoir. Whatever the pressures behind that decision, a writer with a larger work still two or three years from done chose to complete a smaller one that could be finished, and the book we read as the *Origin* is that finished small thing.

The maxim asks only for enough finished pieces to have the experience more than once, so that endings stop being mysterious. A finished six-hundred-word piece counts. So does a finished chapter, if it has a boundary. Finishing here means bringing a piece to a decision about its own end, which may be publishing it, filing it, or abandoning it on purpose with a note about why.

Some work cannot be closed on demand, and finishing everything is a vice of its own; a writer who forces dead material to an end out of sunk cost may learn mostly how to waste time. An abandoned piece has been looked at and put down with a stated reason, and it taught something. A drifting piece has simply stopped being opened. When the large work is years from done, Darwin’s way out of the all-or-nothing choice is open to anyone: find the smaller complete thing inside it.

**Practice.** Choose a piece you can finish in one sitting or one week: an essay, a short story, a poem sequence, a long scene given its own last line, five hundred to fifteen hundred words. Before you write, state in one sentence what will count as complete. Finish it before beginning anything else new, including the more exciting idea waiting beside it. When it is done, write one paragraph on what the ending taught you about the opening, and change the opening accordingly. That last step is the exercise, because a piece that is merely stopped has taught you less than one that has been allowed to change its beginning.

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