: Re: Should the opening of a short story mirror the ending? When I was in school, my English teacher told me that a short story's beginning should mirror its ending, or at least the conclusion

@Angie602

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It's very hard to guess what precisely your teacher meant, but here's the closest piece of advice that I know: A story's ending should mirror its beginning, because otherwise, you have probably begun or ended you story in the wrong place.

Consider: where is the best place to begin the story? Usually you want to begin it with the introduction of the central conflict. Otherwise you're just marking time until the conflict actually begins.

And where's the best place to end the story? Pretty much as soon as the central conflict is resolved. Readers won't stand for you ending the story before you resolved the primary conflict, and if you continue for long after its resolved, then the main tension is gone and the reader doesn't really understand why the book keeps on going when the story is over.

Add to this that the reader will generally understand the first conflict presented as the story's major one. It would be very confusing to begin a murder mystery with a scene focusing on a romantic relationship, or a romance with a scene focusing on solving a crime - while these would be fine as secondary plots, whatever you introduce first is usually what the reader will understand as being the more important, central conflict.

So we could phrase all this advice as: Clearly set up your primary conflict in your opening, and clearly resolve it in your conclusion. You don't always need to follow this advice to the letter and down to individual line - but particularly if you're talking about short fiction, which needs to be very concise and free of flab, it's a very good guideline. And making the mirroring very explicit is a good tool to make the conflict and its resolution clear and powerful.

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