Start Your Story with the Beginning and the End

Many writers have an idea for a story but often no clear idea how to start or end it. If that describes your dilemma, stop right there. Before you can create a story, you absolutely must know how it begins and how it ends. You don’t have to know all the gritty details, but you must know the overall picture.

Most beginnings and endings are related like this:

• The beginning is a small version of the ending
• The ending is a much bigger version of the beginning

In “Little Miss Sunshine”, the opening scene shows Olive intently studying a beauty pageant winner to mimic her actions. This opening scene foreshadows the much larger scene in the end when Olive is actually competing in a beauty pageant.

The beginning is not only a small version of the ending, but the beginning also introduces the core conflict of the story, even if we aren’t aware of it at the time. In “Little Miss Sunshine”, Richard, Olive’s father, gives a motivational talk where he divides the world into winners and losers. That’s going to be the core conflict Olive must face throughout the story.

The beginning introduces the story’s core conflict. Then the ending resolves this core conflict.

In the beginning of “Little Miss Sunshine”, the core conflict is whether people are winners or losers. Then the ending scene resolves this conflict by showing us that people are always winners as long as they try.

So the beginning scene includes the following elements:

• Introduces a small version of the final battle in the end
• Introduces the hero and their goal
• Introduces the villain and their diametrically opposite goal
• Introduces the core conflict of the story

Then the ending scene includes the following:

• Shows a much larger version of the final battle
• Shows the hero and villain locked in battle to see who will win
• Resolves the core conflict, often by having the villain lose

Just by focusing on the beginning and ending scenes of your story, you can define the main structure of your entire story. Once you can see the broad picture of your story, filling in the details should be much easier and fun.

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