Don’t waste time on how it starts until you know how it ends,

One, don’t wait for inspiration, just start the damned thing. Two, once you begin, keep on until the end. How do you know how the story should begin until you find out where it’s going?

If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I'm going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God's grace.

Where a story ends is nothing more than a snapshot in time, a brief flash of emotion, a pause. How and if it continues is up to us.

I will tell my story, and my reader shall judge for me. I will tell my story, and so contrive to pass some few hours of a long eternity, become so worrisome to me.

And remember, that it takes as long, to view it or, to listen to it, as it does to do it.

Go to your desk on Monday morning and write about some event that’s still vivid in your memory. It doesn’t have to be long — three pages, five pages — but it should have a beginning and an end. Put that episode in a folder and get on with your life. On Tuesday morning, do the same thing. Tuesday’s episode doesn’t have to be related to Monday’s episode. Take whatever memory comes calling; your subconscious mind, having been put to work, will start delivering your past. Keep this up for two months, or three months, or six months. Don’t be impatient to start writing your “memoir” — the one you had in mind before you began. Then, one day, take all your entries out of their folder and spread them on the floor. (The floor is often a writer’s best friend.) Read them through and see what they tell you and what patterns emerge. They will tell you what your memoir is about — and what it’s not about.

Our story has three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end. And although this is the way all stories unfold, I still can't believe that ours didn't go on forever.

IF YOU WANT A STORYBOOK ENDING, stop — now — and remember them in that tender moment. Be content to know that they embarked on a series of adventures throughout the West and that they stayed together through thick and thin for forty-five years.

But know this as well: If their story ended here, no one would remember them at all.

Where a tale begins and where it ends matters. Who tells the story, and why . . . That makes all the difference.

40 minutes in a city is nothing. But 40 minutes along a rural highway seems like an eternity. So we’re driving along, and I ask my friend if we’re there yet, and he says no, so I say, “Jesus. By the time we get there, the kid won’t even be dead anymore.” There is this pause in the car, and one of the other actors says, “Dude. Did you just quote your own movie?” I answered in the affirmative, and he says, “That was very cool.

But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest — for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both — must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.

Life's like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending.

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.”

[<i>Letter to Harrison Blake</i>; November 16, 1857]

The ending is nearer than you think, and it is already written. All that we have left to choose is the correct moment to begin.