I’ve spent the last week holed up in my office writing my final essay of the semester – another Bakhtinian analysis, this one on the later works of Virginia Woolf. It’s complex, heady stuff, and, frankly, I’d rather be watching Nestor, the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey. With all of the salient points made and the minimum length requirement exceeded, the only obstacle that stands between freedom and me is, as usual, the pesky task of writing the conclusion.
I’m not sure what it is about the expository conclusion, but I’ve always been inexplicably daunted by the task of summing up. Perhaps it’s the perceived (and correct, by the way) notion that the last paragraph will singularly uphold or destroy the merits of the entire essay that has me rattled. Or perhaps the looming deadline has triggered what remains of my creativity to gather its things, turn out the lights, and go home. Then again, it’s hard to write with the Grim Reaper snickering over my shoulder. “Seriously?” he scoffs, crunching an apple and rolling his sockets. “How many times are you going to say that?”
In On Writing Well, William Zinsser cautions writers about the oh-so-important last sentence: “Failure to know where that sentence should occur can wreck an article that until its final stage has been tightly constructed. […] The perfect ending should take your readers slightly by surprise and yet seem exactly right.” He goes on to extol the virtues of striking at the end an echo of a note that was sounded at the beginning, gratifying the reader’s sense of symmetry with its resonance.
Ah, yes. Well. No pressure there.
At this point, I think I’ll follow Zinsser’s final bit of advice and simply look for the nearest exit.
[...] by Bird,” “Write About Now,” “Demons and Darlings,” “The Reality of Rejection,” “In conclusion…,” and “A New Summer of Writing” convey my own struggles with the creative stall and feelings of [...]