I have to think about endings as a storyteller. Where is the plot going? I wonder. Where will the characters be when the story is over?
People who know me best know I struggle with writing happy endings. Either my characters refuse to accept one, or I can’t find a realistic way to contrive one. Would it really happen this way? I want a happy ending in my own life. But I already know life doesn’t always go the way I want. Is the light at the end of the tunnel just a train?
Tolkien called it the eucatastrophe—a sudden, favorable turn of events at the end of a story.
Author Helena Sorensen says it is the idea that it could all be better than we hoped, and even better than that.
Jerry Jenkins, a New York Times bestselling author, says he will always let good win at the end of his stories because his worldview is one of hope. The bad guys always lose.
I know there is hope. That even if the happy ending I want is never realized here, there is a better ending yet to come. “This story begins and ends in joy,” Tolkien wrote. I firmly hold on to that truth.
But this doesn’t mean I’ll get there without scars. I’m already collecting them. Here, on the back of my hand, is the time I crashed my bike into a bridge while trying to impress my best friend, whom I later had to let go of. Here is where I am marred by grief and unwanted loss. Here are the things I will always carry. I know you have those things, too.
Jerry Jenkins talks about how his protagonists still struggle after the climax. How the story doesn’t always wrap up perfectly for them. That even though good wins—and it does—the character is not always perfectly okay when you leave them on the last page.
Frederick Buechner, a writer and poet, wrote, “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.”
This is part of the reason I write. A creative I heard from recently put it this way: to use imagination to process the things we can’t always understand. Anger, fear, loss, grief, hope, love, grace, faith. “Imagination stretches us into what we long for,” Helena Sorensen says. It also lets us grieve and speak honestly about what we will never have.
But there is more. If there is going to be a eucatastrophe, maybe not in my lifetime, but surely already written and planned—and I place my hope in this—then my writing cannot just be for processing. I spent too many years treating it as just that, and it didn’t do anyone any good.
To paraphrase William Wordsworth, the duty of the artist is to look deeper, to “see into the life of things.” We are broken. Everywhere I look, reality is distorted. We are deceived into thinking we are not deceived. This unsettles me. I wonder if all hope is lost, if I will be too late.
But “the world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it” (Tolkien, On Fairie Stories). We can steal past watchful dragons, as C.S. Lewis wrote—through art. Through beautiful things that have truth at their core. Things that “see and say in ways that allow you to look at the misery and the majesty” (sculptor Ross Wilson). Things that reveal what actually is.
I long to do that. To talk about the pain here but to talk about hope, too. To write the truth.
It scares me sometimes. Art asks questions we aren’t ready for, questions we maybe don’t think are important to ask. But I don’t want to write words that don’t ask questions, that don’t examine and illuminate.
I don’t always feel qualified. Some of my scars feel too deep. As Madeleine L’Engle writes, “In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory.” One of my favorite writers, King David, a man who knew what it was to be broken, still wrote, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.”
There is a light, and no, it’s not a train. I long to be faithful, to point toward that light, even if my arm is weak and my fingers barely reach above my head. The eucatastrophe, though maybe not experienced now, is coming.
This is why I write.
This is very thoughtful and thought-provoking McKenna. Keep at it! xoxoxo
I like the way you articulated this struggle, and especially that word 'eucatastrophe', looks like I need to read more Tolkien. Keep writing, it's good.