Ending Pending

I am not going to lie, when I opened the Modern Library Writer's Workshop by Stephen Koch, I jumped right to the end. Not because I thought the rest of the book held no value, but simply because I wanted to see what Koch had to say about endings. I love to write, from the time that I knew how to I was keeping journals, making up (really horrible) song lyrics and jotting down any little thing that crossed my mind that I considered somewhat profound. As I got older my writing progressed, I started writing short one or two page stories, which eventually led me to writing 10 to 12 page "glimpses" (as I like to call them) of what I would hope would someday be a future novel. There was and still is only one significant problem: I have a terrible time writing endings. Sometimes its because I have no idea what I am trying to accomplish when I start writing. Sometimes because I have such a clear cut idea of what I want that I find it really hard to transition from the beginning of the story to what I want the end to entail. I guess it could be said in Koch's terms that I am "lazy." I get frustrated and then I want to move on to something more fresh, more exciting, so the unfinished story gets shoved in another notebook on my bookshelf or another folder on my laptop with the note of 'Ending Pending' in hopes that one day I will miraculously figure out how to accomplish what has become the impossible.
While I just sort of chalked this ending disorder to be my own problem, Koch's views on endings, more specifically, his views on writer's who have difficult times with endings, hit a little close to home. Case and point: "If there is no ending, there is no story." This sentence stirred up some of the anxiety I have about teaching creative writing in the classroom. When it comes to endings I don't want to be one of those 'do as I say, not as I do' educators. I realize that at some point this is going to happen in the classroom. Teachers are not going to be great at everything, nor are they going to know everything. I mean we are humans, but my worry with this, as I am sure, with everyone else who teaches, is that my short comings may negatively influence my students experience with creative writing, or even worse, their learned ability/skills with creative writing. I don't want to be the reason that someone did not understand this, or never really liked that. Is that inevitable when you become a teacher?