But when telling true stories about our lives, we always start with the ending, because we’re not making stuff up. We’re not hoping to invent the perfect combination of action, description, and dialogue. We’re telling the truth, so even if we’re not entirely sure of how to tell our ending — which combination of action, dialogue, and description will best capture that five-second moment — we know what happened. We know the who, what, where, and when, and we probably know the why (though that can sometimes come later). We know what our five-second moment is, and therefore that is where we begin the process of crafting our story. We start at the end.
This is a beautiful thing, because knowing the ending will inform all the choices that we must make as we craft the rest of the story. Everything must serve our five-second moment, so knowing the ending — and starting the process of crafting the story with the ending — is helpful beyond measure. In fact the ending simply involves the choice of words you will use. How will you describe your five-second moment for the greatest emotional effect?
The hard part is finding the beginning, because it involves choosing the right moments from your life, and there is often a multitude of choices.
So how do you choose the right place to start a story? Simple. Ask yourself where your story ends. What is the meaning of your five-second moment? Say it aloud.
In “Charity Thief,” I might say it like this: “I thought I was alone in this world, facing a lifetime of loneliness. Then I met a man who taught me that I knew very little about loneliness and never wanted to know loneliness the way that man knew it on that day and probably many, many days thereafter.”
That’s my five-second moment. That is what I’m trying to say to you as simply as possible. It’s not a good story on its own, but choose better words to describe the moment, prop it up with everything that comes before the moment, and you have yourself a story.
Once you’ve distilled your five-second moment down to its essence, ask yourself: What is the opposite of your five-second moment?
Simply put, the beginning of the story should be the opposite of the end. Find the opposite of your transformation, revelation, or realization, and this is where your story should start. This is what creates an arc in your story. This is how a story shows change over time.
I was once this, but now I am this.
I once thought this, but now I think this.
I once felt this, but now I feel this.
Stories must reflect change of some kind. It need not always be positive change, and the change need not be monumental. In fact, stories about failure, embarrassment, and shame are fantastic. Stories about trying desperately to achieve a goal and failing spectacularly are beloved. Even when progress is made, the best stories often reflect incremental change. Tiny steps forward. Glacial improvement. Audiences would much rather hear about incremental, tenuous growth than about overnight success.
Regardless of whether your change is infinitesimal or profound, positive or negative, your story must reflect change. You must begin and end your story in entirely different states of being.
Change is key.
The story of how you’re an amazing person who did an amazing thing and ended up in an amazing place is not a story. It’s a recipe for a douchebag.
The story of how you’re a pathetic person who did a pathetic thing and remained pathetic is also not a story. It’s a recipe for a sad sack.
You create the arc of a story through the change that your story ultimately describes. Starting in one place and landing in another. Think of it like air travel. An airplane takes off, flies through the sky, and lands in a new place. Your story must do the same. The easiest, most effective way of doing this is by ensuring that the beginning and the ending of your stories are opposites or as close to opposites as possible. This is not the case in every story that I tell, but it’s true for most.
I was once hopeful, but now I am not.
I was once lost, but now I am found.
I was once happy, but now I am sad.
I was once uncertain, but now I know.
I was once angry, but now I am grateful.
I was once afraid, but now I am fearless.
I once believed, but now I don’t.
This change is what makes stories satisfying. It’s how storytellers are able to move an audience emotionally. The same holds true for most movies. Imagine this setup for a romantic comedy:
We open on a young woman working in a cubicle at a large bank. She’s typing away on her computer when the phone rings. It’s her boyfriend. He works in the bank too, one floor above our protagonist.
“Listen,” he says. “Bad news. I’m breaking up with you. I’m moving to Tanzania today. And I’m taking your best friend, Jane, with me. We fell in love while buying you a birthday present last week. Have a great life. Bye.”
Our protagonist hangs up the phone and stares at her computer screen in disbelief. Her eyes well up with tears. Just then her boss appears over the top of the cubicle. “Listen,” she says. “We’re downsizing. Bad loans. I’m sorry. You’re fired.”
In the next scene, we see our protagonist standing on the sidewalk outside the bank, looking lost. She’s holding one of those brown boxes that we see in movies, though never in real life, filled with the trinkets from her desk and the contents of her drawers. She’s holding back tears.
We all know how this movie is going to end. Right?
Think of the opposite of what we just saw.
Our protagonist is going to have a new boyfriend at the end of the movie, and he’s not going to be a banker. He’s going to be the opposite of a banker:
A kindergarten teacher
A sculptor
A mechanic
An artisanal-pickle pickler
Our protagonist is also going to have a new job, and it’s not going to be in a bank. She’s not going to move from Morgan Stanley to Merrill Lynch. She’s going to begin working at the opposite of a bank.
She’s going to open a cupcake shop.
She’s going to write an advice column.
She’s going to cultivate and sell bonsai trees.
She’s going to teach yoga to cats.
She’s also going to find a new best friend, and her new friend won’t be anything like Jane, her former best friend.
It’ll be the old Jewish man she meets on a park bench who teaches her about managing the harsh realities of the world.
The eight-year-old boy she’s babysitting who teaches her to enjoy the little things in life.
The gay man who teaches her to finally live her authentic life.
If you know anything about storytelling, you can’t watch this opening scene and not know how this movie is going to end. Unless we’re in the midst of an indie or art-house film, this story can only end one way. This doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy the movie. The path from beginning to end will hopefully make you laugh. Surprise you. Touch your heart. But the end should be clear. You might not know the specific details, but you should know the gist of things — the general direction.
Simply ask yourself what the opposite of the first fifteen minutes of a movie is, and you will almost always have your ending.
Remember the beginning of Jurassic Park? Alan Grant terrifies a small, round boy with a gruesome description of his death at the hands of a pack of velociraptors. The dialogue between Grant and his love interest, Ellie Sattler, then goes like this:
ELLIE
Hey, Alan, if you wanted to scare the kid, you could’ve pulled a gun on him, you know.
GRANT
Yeah, I know. Kids. You wanna have one of those?
ELLIE
I don’t want that kid. A breed of child, Dr. Grant, could be intriguing! I mean, what’s so wrong with kids?
GRANT
Ah, Ellie, look. They’re noisy, they’re messy, they’re expensive.
ELLIE
Cheap, cheap.
GRANT
They smell.
ELLIE
GRANT
Some of them smell.
If you don’t think Grant is going to fall in love with children by the end of the movie, you’re not paying attention.
This is how movies work. Good ones, at least. Even the bad ones can be fairly predictable in this way.
My friend Bengi asked me to go to the most recent film in the Jurassic Park franchise, Jurassic World.
“I’ll go,” I said. “But listen. There are going to be two kids in the movie, and neither one will be eaten. There will be a male and female lead. They won’t be romantically linked at the beginning, but they’ll clearly be in love by the end of the movie. They also won’t be eaten. The owner of whatever company owns the dinosaurs this time around is going to die. His or her assistant will die too. The guy who plans bad things for the dinosaurs — the corporate spy, military man, mad scientist — will also die. The man who carries a gun the most will die. And in the end, one dinosaur will kill the other dinosaur and save the day.”
As we leave the theater later that afternoon, Bengi turns to me and asks, “Did you see that movie before today?”
I hadn’t, but this is how Jurassic Park movies work. Even the bad ones, which don’t involve Steven Spielberg. And if you watched the first fifteen minutes of the film with a storyteller’s eye, you would have known how the movie was going to end too.
At one point during the film, the two aforementioned children — brothers — are trapped in a large glass ball as the big, bad dinosaur tries to bite down on it and break it open. The glass is cracking. The boys are screaming. I stopped watching the scene for a moment to look around the darkened theater. People were gripping their armrests in fear. Jaws were locked. Nerves were frayed. Even Bengi was leaning forward. He was tense. Frightened.
In that moment, I wanted to stand up and say, “We’re watching a Jurassic Park movie, people! Do you really think those kids are going to get eaten?”
But this is the magic of storytelling. Even when the ending is all but certain, a good storyteller can grab the audience by the throat and make them temporarily forget that they know damn well how this movie will end.
So the beginning is important. Finding that five-second moment in your life is critical, of course, but in terms of actually crafting your story, where you start your story is the most important decision you will make. The right beginning creates a satisfying narrative arc that will cause people to connect to and remember your story. It will provide a clear, coherent path to the end. It will serve as an enormous arrow that will point both you and the audience in the right direction.
Sometimes the place to begin is convenient and easy to find. Sometimes not.
In “Charity Thief,” for example, my story ends with the realization that I know nothing about loneliness. Once I found that five-second moment, I asked myself, what is the opposite of knowing nothing about loneliness?
The opposite of knowing nothing about loneliness is the belief that you know something about loneliness. That you understand loneliness in some fundamental way. In the case of this story, the beginning was easy to find, because it happened on the same day as my five-second moment. Early in the story, when I find myself parked in the Citgo station, sitting behind the wheel, I say:
I’m angry, but I’m also sad. I’m twenty years old. I’m a McDonald’s manager. I make $7.25 an hour, and I am the richest person I know. My mother is living on welfare with my pregnant teenage sister. My brother joined the army a year ago, and I haven’t heard from him since. My father disappeared from my life ten years ago. The only person I know who can help me, who even has a credit card or a car that can make this hundred-mile trip to New Hampshire, is my friend Bengi, and he is off on some college weekend. I can’t get in touch with him, because in 1991, when you want to call someone, you need to make a phone ring on a wall, and you need to make that phone ring at the moment the person you want to speak to is near that phone, and you need the number for the phone to make it ring, and all of that is impossible for me to get.
This was not the plan for my life. . . . I was not supposed to be this alone this early in my life. You’re not supposed to be twenty years old and have absolutely no one in your life to call for help. As I sit there in my car, staring into that field of orange and yellow, I see my future ahead of me. An endless series of moments just like this one, when I need help but will have none.
This is the opposite of my ending. This is me, sitting in my car, thinking about how alone I am in this world, doomed to a life of solitude. It’s how I felt in that moment, as foolish as that may have been.
In reality I had a bunch of friends waiting at home for me. I had The Simpsons, beer, and laughter in my very near future. I was a long way from experiencing the loneliness of that man on that day. I just didn’t know it at the time. I was sad and frightened and feeling sorry for myself.
Luckily, my beginning was already embedded within the narrative, less than an hour from my five-second moment.
If only every beginning were this easy to find. More often, the beginning is much harder to find because the opposite of your five-second moment does not happen on the same day or even in the same week as any possible beginning.
For example, think back on the story of my wife’s discovery that I was hungry as a child. Finding the beginning of that story was challenging. I knew the five-second moment of the story was the moment at the dining-room table when my wife reveals that she knows my secret — I was hungry as a boy — and probably knows me better than anyone ever in my life.
So I ask myself: What is the opposite of someone uncovering your secret?
The opposite of someone uncovering a secret, I decided, is the creation of that secret. The initial decision to keep something secret. For me, this meant dipping back into my childhood for moments of hunger and shame, so that I could show my audience how and why I decided to keep my childhood hunger a secret. I had plenty of moments to choose from. Too many, in fact. Herein lies the challenge:
Which moment works best? Which of the dozens of anecdotes from my childhood should I use? If you’re a good storyteller, who believes that these choices matter a lot (and they do), it’s not an easy decision. I want to choose the anecdotes that serve my story best. They need to show a variety of contexts in which hunger and shame ruled my life. Ideally, at least one will be funny and one will be heartrending. I’d like them to take place in a variety of settings. I’d love for at least one to echo something at the end of my story.
When we search our past for the beginnings of our stories — which storytellers do quite often — we have a mountain of material from which to choose. Less effective storytellers latch onto the first thing that comes to mind rather than making a list of anecdotes, analyzing them for content, tone, the potential for humor, and connectivity to the story before deciding.
I also believe that great storytellers know this: The first idea is rarely the best idea. It may be the most convenient idea. The easiest to remember. The one you personally like the most. But rarely is the first idea the one that I choose. First ideas are for the lazy. The complacent. The easily satisfied.
I fight for my beginnings. I struggle to find the correct entry point to a story, and I believe that every story has a perfect entry point. The ideal place to start. More than half of the time I spend crafting stories is spent searching for the right beginning. Once I’ve found it, the rest of the story often flows easily. The correct beginning makes the rest of the choices seem much more obvious.
I also try to start my story as close to the end as possible (a rule Kurt Vonnegut followed when writing short stories). I want my stories to be as temporally limited as possible. I strive for simplicity at all times. By starting as close to the end as possible, we shorten our stories. We avoid unnecessary setup. We eliminate superfluous details.
In “Charity Thief,” I begin with the disintegration of my right front tire. It’s the inciting incident that leads to all my trouble. But
in an earlier, unfinished version of the story, I started the story with my booty call to New Hampshire because it was an amusing encounter. The girl with whom I spent the weekend lived in a two-room loft above a garage and slept in a closet just large enough for a twin mattress. She called this space the Bat Cave and had decorated it with twinkle lights and silken scarves. There was a lot of humor to be wrung out of that arrangement.
The girl was also an interesting character. She was five years older than I and worldlier than I will ever be. I had met her a year earlier while on vacation. I waved to her car as she drove by. She pulled over and asked Bengi and me if we wanted to hang out with her and her friend.
We did. Bengi’s date with the friend didn’t go anywhere, but I ended up ditching my friends for the rest of the week and sleeping in the Bat Cave.
The stories that resulted from a simple wave of my hand are both surprising and hilarious, but in the end, they were all left on the cutting-room floor, both because they did not serve the story well and because I wanted to start as close to the end as possible.
The tire, I decided, was the closest possible starting point to the end. The audience needs to know why I am stuck in New Hampshire without any money. The tire is the reason.
This process is not uncommon for me. I often start my story in one place and end up working my way closer and closer to the end as I revise.
The best example of this is a story I tell about arriving in Boca Raton, Florida, with Elysha, who was my fiancée at the time. We realized upon arrival that neither one of us had a valid driver’s license (both had expired the month before), so we couldn’t rent a car from our prearranged rental company.
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