Personal essays
On knowing where to end a story
Suggestions
Last week a friend told me he always reads my newsletter.
“Well,” he said, “that’s not completely true. I read the first sentence and if it captures my attention I keep reading.”
I should probably spend more time writing that first sentence. Clearly today I didn’t.
Every once in a while I get feedback and make changes.
“Your podcast ends too abruptly,” one listener told me. And so I added a little bit at the end where I quickly wrapped up the current episode and previewed the next one. It added about five seconds to each episode, but it did change the feel completely.
I listen to a lot of audio books. One series always says, “The final chapter” after giving the chapter number of the last chapter in the book.
Such a small detail.
But I owe something to the people who stay with me after the beginning and remain through the middle.
Beginnings and endings are hard.
Knowing when to end a story is so important.
In a more formal story, the ending must deliver on the promise that the beginning makes.
Boarding
I’ll give you an example of where this didn’t happen recently.
I changed planes in Frankfurt on my way to Bologna.
The flight would be on a small plane with only two seats on each side of the aisle.
The boarding was really well thought out.
Of course the first group to board would be business class. The next group was anyone with some level of status on the airline. There’s no avoiding that.
In the old days, planes used to board by row number after the “important” people were seated. This way you would fill up the plane from back to front so that people sitting up front wouldn’t delay people further back from taking their seats.
This flight boarded people sitting in window seats in group three and people sitting in the aisles in group four.
Brilliant.
No one sitting in the aisle seat would have to stand up and block the aisle to let the person sitting in the window seat by.
Except.
Except, in Europe you often are boarding a bus to get from the terminal to your plane. So all of the people with status boarded first, then the people in window seats, and then the people in aisle seats.
This, of course, meant that getting off the bus an onto the plane were first the people in aisle seats, then the people in window seats, and then the people with status.
The ending undid all of the promise of the beginning.
Saying Goodbye
I was in Bologna for this year’s Pragma Conference. It has been one of the highlights of my year for many years now. October in Italy. A conference combined with sightseeing and eating.
The first time I went to the conference, it was held in Verona.
They’d invited me the year before but when Kim died I’d cancelled all of my fall conferences.
Luis invited me to NSSpain and Klaus invited me to Pragma the following year. They continued to invite me each year their conference ran after that.
During the closing ceremonies for NSSpain, Luis said that this was the first year he couldn’t say for sure that the conference would be back the following year.
It’s been a tough time for tech conferences. Usually sponsorships help them make up for what conference tickets can’t cover. The sponsors pay for some of the food, the parties, and other things that make the conference special.
Each year the conference party for NSSpain is at a different winery in the Rioja region. In addition to the food and the wine, there is also the cost of hiring buses to take the hundreds of attendees to and from the winery.
We all understood the difficulties and expense of running a conference - but there was hope - right? He didn’t say it was definitely the end. He just said that he wasn’t sure that it wasn’t.
A month later, during the closing ceremonies for Pragma, Klaus announced that this would be the last running of the conference.
No wiggle room. This was the end.
I can’t imagine what a difficult decision this was and I can’t imagine how hard it was for Klaus and the team to keep it to themselves until the conference was coming to an end.
Unlike my audio books, if they had announced this was the last running of the conference at the opening, it would have changed the mood of the event.
This last running was a joy-filled gathering of people learning from each other, catching up with old friends, and making new friends.
So many conversations contained the words “next year.”
This is a conference we love to come back to.
But it has come to an end. In many ways it was a perfect ending.
As Orson Welles famously said, “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”
Instead of continuing to do something that was as good as it had been and as good as it could have been, they have decided to stop while it was still great.
I hope I have the strength and wisdom to do that.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 293. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe