Explore "The Writing of Fiction" by Edith Wharton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Nietzsche said that it took genius to "make an end"-that is, to give the touch of inevitableness to the conclusion of any work of art. In the art of fiction this is peculiarly true of the novel, that slowly built-up monument in which every stone has its particular weight and thrust to carry and of which the foundations must be laid with a view to the proportions of the highest tower. Of the short story, on the contrary, it might be said that the writer's first care should be to know how to make a beginning.
That an inadequate or unreal ending diminishes the short tale in value as much as the novel need hardly be added, since it is proved with depressing regularity by the machine-made "magazine story" to which one or the other of half a dozen "standardized" endings is automatically adjusted at the four-thousand-five-hundredth word of whatsoever has been narrated. Obviously, as every subject contains its own dimensions, so is its conclusion ab ovo; and the failure to end a tale in accordance with its own deepest sense must deprive it of meaning.