How do you start a story?  How do you end a story?  These can be extremely vexing questions for any writer.  But one thing anyone can remember when you hit this wall is that you were actually taught the best way to begin and end nearly any piece of writing in Middle School.  Remember? Tell them what you’re going to tell them.  Tell them.  Then tell them what you told them.

That, of course, sounds super-pedantic and boring, which is exactly the opposite of what anyone wants when they’re writing a story.  And even when it comes to writing school essays that advice seems really pedantic and boring, and also really repetitive and stupid-sounding—which makes it that much harder to write those darned school essays, which started out as a really stupid, boring assignment to begin with (or at least that’s how I always felt about it, and I was one of those weirdos who really liked school).

But, that all is because, like any really foundational technique, there’s a lot of nuance to applying this advice really well, and when you’re in sixth grade you don’t yet have the writing skills to whip out a lot of nuance.  With lots of practice, and if we want to graduate high school, we all manage to accrete a little bit of nuance.  We learn one or two snazzier ways to hook the reader at the beginning (like the leading questions I started with up above); and we learn how craft a concluding sentence that ties things up nicely; so, beginning and end, it doesn’t seem so blunt that we’re just repeating what the essay is about.  But…

But.  Like my TaeKwonDo instructor teaches us, employing good technique well doesn’t just come from perfecting the ‘physical’ aspects of a technique, but rather in reaching an understanding of why THAT is the right way to do a thing.  Once you understand why, it in fact becomes more difficult to do something the wrong way.

So, what is the WHY in ‘Tell them what you’re going to tell them, and then tell them what you told them’?  I would argue that it’s all about handling reader expectations.  When that comes to fiction, it’s very easy to imagine that the purest form of Story is a recitation of something that actually happened exactly the way that it happened.  But that’s not Story, that’s just communication (which is a big deal!  But Story is still a level-up from communication).  Again, why do we tell Stories?  We tell them to teach lessons.  They might have evolved into really complicated lessons, but even when the writer doesn’t necessarily intend to provide a lesson with a story that they’ve written, that aspect of what Story is is so baked into human brains that we’ll almost always (even if it’s unconsciously) try to draw some lesson from any story that we read or hear.

And so expectations are a big part of the why of stories.  To put ourselves in learning mode, we expect that the introduction to a lesson will be relevant to the lesson that we’re going to learn.  And to have a satisfying learning experience, we want the final aha! or conclusion or consequence to be something that was integral to what was embodied within the story itself.  Not only that, but it makes us feel safer if that’s true, because then conclusions in general are predictable, and we can steer our lives with more assurance, knowing that the stories we’ve learned from gave us some of the wisdom we hadn’t yet gained from experience.

Now, I think sometimes writers (and even some readers) resent this, or at the very least they want to shake things up.  Because real life isn’t perfect and contained and logical like a story is, and that in itself is an important lesson that perhaps they want people to learn.  But, when the urge to totally break out of the story-telling mold strikes, remember these two points:

1. A story with a really good twist is awesome.  Even awesomer if it seems like it comes out of nowhere and just wasn’t predictable from the start.  But ‘seems like’ is an important caveat in there.  If you’re reading a mystery and the answer is actually totally random, most of us will be pretty pissed off.  The Twist is only ever the most brilliant and the most satisfying when the pieces were there for the reader to put together.
2. Lots and lots of people read fiction primarily for enjoyment, and often even for comfort (even when they’re reading a horror novel).  And one thing that really makes a reader comfortable is feeling like they understand what to expect from the story in their hands, at least in broad strokes.  (I’m even more particular, in that one of my pet peeves is not knowing how far along I am in reading a story—a problem that pops up with e-readers and short-story collections most often—and I’m always just a little uneasy with a story if I can’t easily tell how soon ‘til the end.) This is why fiction genres are a thing—because people are more comfortable and have more fun with a story they kinda know what to expect from.

So, talking about the Why is very helpful but, like in any lesson, we need some sort of details or examples or something to make any of the above actually useful.  Let’s start at the beginning again.  And let’s start, again, with the fact that most people know a lot of this stuff already, in their bones.  (This is true of a lot of physics and astronomy concepts too, by the way, but that’s a different essay.)

Fundamentally, even brand-new writers know that they need, somehow, to start their story with what the story is about.  At the very beginning, lots of us think that what the story is about is the main character (MC).  This is one reason why a lot of us wind up with some awful scene near the beginning where the MC is staring into a mirror so that we can describe what they look like in specific detail.  Yes, if they reader doesn’t have some picture of the reader in their mind from close to the beginning, it will make them stumble.  But! the story is NOT about what the character looks like.  Ergo, shoehorning in a precise MC description right at the beginning is not the urgent or necessary (or wise) move.  Try to resist.

Partly to help writers resist the above pitfall (but mostly because this is what usually aligns with what a story is actually about) a lot of advice for writers says that the story should begin with the Inciting Incident, or at least that this incident should happen very close to the beginning of the book.  The inciting incident is whatever event happens to set the MC down the path of the story.  If it’s a murder mystery, we might likely start with the murder or with the MC first encountering the crime scene.  If it’s a fantasy, we might start with the MC losing something (often by force) that they then need to go on a quest to recover in some way.  Starting with (or near) the inciting incident is pretty solid advice.  Very often it really does help with setting up those reader expectations for what a story is going to be about.  But—I’ve been saying ‘but’ a lot—don’t get so married to the inciting-incident advice that you forget Why it was offered in the first place: To get you to start the story with what it’s about.

Think for a moment.  Why do prologs (or epilogs) exist?  Lots of people don’t care for them and think they should all be banished.  But, if they’re there, it’s because the author felt there was a really key component to understanding their story that they couldn’t convey to the readers in some other, non-prolog way.  Or, lots of stories start not with a MC’s physical description, but with some scene that conveys what the MC is like as a person, because who the MC is still is very important and central to a lot of stories.

And, at the moment at least, that seems to me like the key take-away when trying to apply ‘Tell them what you’re going to tell them’ to the beginning of your story.  What is the key piece of information that a reader should know so that you, the author, can tell the story you want to tell well?  Find a way to start with that.  I ended up falling down the rabbit-hole of this particular essay because that light-bulb went off when I’d managed to do this with a novella I’m trying to edit.  The rough draft of the opening paragraph was awful.  It was almost incomprehensible—because I was trying for something atmospheric and descriptive, while also being mysterious.  But, for this particular story, the stakes are what is at the heart of both the plot and who the characters are.  So, once I focused that first paragraph of my novella on providing an outline (a clear outline) of the stakes for the reader, everything suddenly just seemed so much better.  Finally, I had found a way to set up some reader expectations that have a chance of holding up for the length of the story.

(Note, establishing the stakes is another reason for that common writing advice of starting with the inciting incident.  It really is good advice, as long as you remember why you’re following it.)

So, perhaps that will help someone write the beginning of a story.  But, honestly, beginnings are kind of easy compared with endings.  We can practice writing beginnings all day long if we want to.  But, to practice writing endings, you have to go and write a whole story or novel first!  It’s a lot of work.

For endings, at least of short stories, I think the go-to in a lot of people’s minds is that point way up above about how a Twist makes a really great ending.  Except, that’s not actually what that point above says.  It says ‘a really good twist is awesome,’ not ‘a really good twist makes for an awesome ending.’  Yes, a good twist can be like a great conclusion to an essay, really tying everything up in a neat, concise package.  If you’ve done it well, then the elements that went into making the Twist were all infused throughout the story you told, so in a lot of ways it is a method to ‘tell them what you told them.’

But, as just mentioned, a Twist tends to be really, really concise.  For a very short story, the twist is probably the last thing you want to say.  But for a longer short story, or a novella, or a novel, there are probably many sentences, or paragraphs, or maybe even a chapter or two, that happen after the twist has been revealed.  Or, if you don’t want your story to end with a twist (say, the MC’s killed the Evil Overlord and he really is dead), then what?  How do we wrap-up our story in a way that will feel satisfying to all involved (including us, the writer)?

I watched online a really useful lesson about writing stories (I think it was specifically flash-fiction?) by Mary Robinette Kowal.  In it, she talked about how it’s usually the most satisfying to close out the elements of a story in the reverse order that they were introduced, which means that, when all is said and done, the very, very last words in your story should in some way echo your very, very first words.  (She also cautioned that this is why the ending to Peter Jackson’s Lord-of-the-Rings trilogy feels so long, because he was diligently closing out every open-ended whatever in proper reverse order, and there were a lot of them (hint: this is why some stories have epilogs).)  This closing-out-order is a very prescriptive piece of advice, which some of us might find as dull and lifeless as the ‘tell them what you told them’ advice that I’ve been going on about.  But even if you don’t want to follow it to the letter, at the very least it can provide some really useful clues about where to go looking for how to end your darned story.  You can go look at the beginning again!  The answer very well might be staring you in the face.

But (yet another ‘but’), I think one reason that order-of-closing-things-out advice is so potentially useful, is because it will often point you back to: What Is The Story About!  Whatever the story is about is the thing that we need to ‘tell them we told them’.  I’m really sorry I don’t have a link or reference, but one of the most useful bits of writing advice I uncovered many years ago I found at a time when I was trying to figure out how to end one of my earliest short stories.  I’d drafted everything else and thought it was pretty good, but was drawing a complete blank when it came to what to write at the very end.  Then I found a piece of advice that said something like this:  Remember!  Your story is not about whatever cool element you’ve written a story around (for example, an alien invasion).  Your story is about how that cool element has affected or changed your character(s).  Once I read that, I was able to finish my story.  Because the ending of the story really, primarily, needed to tie back to what the story was about.

So, in the end, the lesson here isn’t so much that you should start a story by ‘Telling them what you’re going to tell them,’ and that you should end a story by ‘Telling them what you told them’.  The main lesson is that, as a writer, you need to know what your story is about.  Once you have that, whether it’s in the first draft or the final polishing stage, you can use that to craft the beginning and the ending that will be the most effective they can be, that best serve you, your readers, and your story.