Ian McMillan: The last word...

This is the last Saturday column I'll ever write. Goodbye! I'm off to the wastes of an uninhabited island north of the Arctic Circle to raise reindeer and make Yorkshire puddings from whale blubber. Okay, I'm joking. This isn't my last column, but I've been thinking about how you start, continue, and then end a piece of writing and one way to start it is with a bit of a surprise to make the reader sit up and take notice. And that's why I did the '˜last column' thing.
Ian McMillanIan McMillan
Ian McMillan

That’s one way to start but there are lots of others. A lot of writing starts with a name and a description: ‘Ian McMillan’s grey hair looked like a cloudy day over the moors near Penistone.’ That’s quite a nice start because it names the central character and it gives you something about them to be going on with as the writing develops. You could start with something philosophical and thoughtful, like Dickens did in A Tale of Two Cities: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was an age of wisdom, it was an age of foolishness’, so you could put something like ‘It was a moment that hung there like a drop of rain at the end of a branch’ which I’ve just made up and which doesn’t mean anything but it might make a good start.

Once you’ve started the piece of writing and you’re up and running, then you get to the difficult middle, or the squeezed middle, or the flabby middle. This is the most difficult part of any piece of writing, whether it’s a short column like this, or a massive novel. It’s in the middle when the reader could become distracted. Somebody might come to the door, the phone might ring, the soup might boil over. It’s in the middle of a story that the plot needs to be working efficiently and it’s in the middle of a piece of non-fiction that the facts need to be checked and checked. Maybe, somewhere in the middle of a piece, you need to try and jolt the reader again, to surprise them. This is my last column: I’m off to Hollywood to record the voiceover for a Disney version of Kes. No: you can’t do the same surprise twice.

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Then you come to the ending of the piece of writing, and this is probably the hardest bit. Do you slow down the prose, flutter towards the final full stop with a gentle cadence that eases the reader to the final words? Do you tie all the ends up so that every character is married off or dead or run away? Do you leave the ending a little ambiguous so that there’s room for a sequel? Do you do what children often do and put ‘and then we all woke up and it at all been a dream.’? Maybe not: mind you, it almost worked for Bobby Ewing in Dallas.

Endings are so tricky. This is my last column. You’ll never read me again. I’m off to sail single-handedly across the River Dearne in a dugout canoe.

No, that won’t work as an ending. I’ll see you next week!

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