In our Craft Capsule series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 218.
The killing of the elephant was unfortunate, George Orwell might have written, but the crowd wants what it wants.
Sometimes, Virginia could have thought, a moth simply has to die, and watching it only makes me stronger.
And although she longed to be a Hollins Pond weasel, Annie ultimately recognized that she would be incomplete without her Apple iWatch and Costco membership.
I’m glad the essays I know and love end precisely how they end, but there’s a reason their authors are considered luminaries: They know how to strike a balance between providing a reader with satisfaction and maintaining authenticity of emotion. It’s a difficult tightrope to walk; early instruction of essay writing often centers around the academic and persuasive essay, forms that insist—with unfortunate, dogmatic resiliency—that the writer spend the final act of their essay summarizing and concluding, rhetorical gymnastics that regurgitate the very argument they’ve spent at least three body paragraphs outlining and defending. They are forms, in other words, antithetical to irresolution.
But as a professor of creative writing, and the essay in particular, I want my students to lean into ambiguity, complication, and uncertainty. The essay, after all, originates—etymologically and conceptually—in attempting, in trying, in prioritizing a desire to trace the outlines of an experience without confirmation of resolution. The best essays, Philip Lopate famously wrote, necessarily begin in a place of doubt, and I believe what John D’Agata once taught me: The essay’s function is to mimic a mind on a page.
As a professor of the essay, then, I find it often takes me weeks of “unteaching”—exposing students to far more nuanced examples of the essay, asking them to sit in irresolution, discussing the poignancy of endings that don’t feel overly simplified, or tied too neatly with a bow—before this instinct to reiterate begins to rub off like a stubborn label. Breaking my students of this habit is the first of many steps in training them to be more literary creative writers—and perhaps more capable of complicated, empathetic thought. As much as it may be a symptom of early learning, it also seems an issue of confidence: Young or early-stage creative writers are more inclined to doubt that their work has imprinted on their reader. Thus this need to “hammer home.” Compounding the problem is the thoughtfulness of my students; in a world irrefutably marred by division, discomfort, and suffering, they’re reluctant to leave their reader feeling any way but good. They often consider their essay’s ending a conceptual Band-Aid to a hurting world, and while sweet, it means first drafts with final sentences I am forced to underline and annotate, writing in the marginalia, Too neat! and Less is more! and Reading Rainbow moment!
By Reading Rainbow moment, I mean specifically a tendency towards saccharine, downright corny final lines, the kind that end nearly every segment of that vintage show before a tonal da dun dun, an auditory punchline as familiar as the music that plays during the show’s opening credits: Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high. I show my students clips of these segments during the second or third week of classes and they cackle; their professor is Very Old. But I find calling out platitudinous lines in a playful way helps students identify those lines in their own work. Sometimes, while teaching essays I’d argue are near-perfect, I’ll ask my students to call out a Reading Rainbow sentence that might’ve once existed—trite, hackneyed final sentences an author might have penned—before we study the authenticity and power of the one they chose.
“It’s a choice,” I remind them. “To trust your reader to make connections and your writing to make them possible.”
Later, after they’ve turned in their own first drafts, I take our lesson one step further. I tell them about an afternoon now almost two decades removed, when in a one-on-one conference in graduate school, my workshop instructor—a very famous writer—pulled his chair next to mine and slowly read aloud the final two pages of a fifteen-page essay I’d penned on visiting a close friend for the first time in his maximum-security prison, where he remains to this day. The final two pages outlined—in a way that very much held the reader’s hand—what that visit had and had not changed for me, how it made me critical of America and our cultural attitudes about mental health and crime, how it underscored the necessity of disrupting and abolishing the prison industrial complex. My instructor read these pages out loud before lowering his glasses gently.
“This isn’t very good,” he said, “is it?”
I am lucky he said these words in private, but he had the right to say them out loud. The final two pages were slapdash, loose-end–tying paragraphs I’d fired off because I didn’t trust the visceral work I was doing. I had hoped he—and everyone else in that graduate workshop—wouldn’t notice, and I felt stupid when confronted with how immediately he had.
I tell this story now and the students in my classroom gasp. Their mouths hang slack, their eyes go wide, and usually at least one student boldly raises their hand to try to tell me that instructor was an asshole. What cruelty, they tell me.
What a favor, I say instead.
I was, after all, a very young writer and student then, and I had my own unlearning to do. I admired my instructor more than almost any other writer—this remains true—and he believed in the work my words had been doing authentically, earnestly, until I began to panic and overwrite.
“What about this,” I tell them. After he lowered his glasses, after he called me on my bad writing, after he made me squirm a bit, my instructor pointed to a sentence buried on the thirteenth page—a moment where, after our visit ended, I pushed open the door to my friend’s prison and, on the way to my car, passed beneath a flagpole where an American flag bigger than a bedspread ripples in the wind.
“This,” he told me, “is where this essay ends.”
Unsurprisingly, it’s also how the book I’d later write on the same subject ends, because the work that image does feels far more meaningful than any exposition. After all, no reader wants pages or even paragraphs of pontification masquerading as a final gesture. Readers want an image, a moment, a camera panning over a page, and a sense of trust that we will draw connections.
How can you find the more evocative ending? Start from the final sentence and strike more than you keep. Cut, cut, cut any line that soothes or placates, explains or summarizes. In time, you’ll find a line—oftentimes paragraphs, if not pages up—that is sharp with authenticity but subtle enough to make the reader think.
This is your stronger ending, and I promise, butterfly in the sky: It will take you twice as high.
Amy Butcher is an essayist and the author of two books, including Mothertrucker (Little A, 2021), which explores the realities of female fear, abusive relationships, and America’s quiet epidemic of intimate partner violence against the geography of remote, northern Alaska. The book earned critical praise from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and the Wall Street Journal, among others, and excerpts of her new book were recently awarded a 2024 Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Her essays have also been awarded notable distinctions in the 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, and 2021 editions of the Best American Essays series. Additional essays have appeared in Granta, Harper’s, the New York Times “Modern Love” column, the New York Times Sunday Review, the Washington Post, the Denver Post, the Iowa Review, Literary Hub, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Fourth Genre, and Brevity, among others. She is an associate professor of English at Denison University and teaches annually at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and the Sitka Fine Arts Camp in Sitka, Alaska. She splits her time between Columbus, Ohio, and Alaska.
image credit: Tuyen Vo