Bookending Your Blog Posts

Photography: James.

A fairy tale can be described as a story that begins “once upon a time” and ends “and they got married and lived happily ever after.” There’s more to it than that, of course. Folklorists have come up with a bewildering list of categories and types to describe all the different ways in which wolves eat people and princesses end up happily hitched to handsome princes. But you always know when a fairy tale begins and you always know when it ends.

Blog posts don’t have such obvious little techniques. Writers hurl themselves in, hoping to create a first paragraph that will look inviting, stand out on a home page, and generate enough curiosity to pull the reader into the body of the post.

You can start big, with a concept (as this post does), attaching the idea the article contains to a bigger theme and setting it in a context that gives another depth of meaning. Or you can use the first few sentences to summarize the point of the article. That’s a favorite of news reports; if the reader is going to give up halfway through, he or she should at least take away the main information the story offers.

Those two approaches alone should be enough to kill the blank page and get the words moving.
Ending the post though is often a little trickier. You know when you’ve said enough – or, if you’re a pro on commission, when you’ve reached your word count – but you need an ending that tells the reader your point is made. Movies roll credits, magazines have a back-of-book section, and books have conclusions. Nut apart from the one-paragraph summary crafting an end that feels final but which still leaves the idea firmly planted in the reader’s mind (where, hopefully, it will grow into a beautiful thought) usually takes a bit of wit and planning.

How Do You Say It’s Over?

One option that always works is to bookend the article. Refer back to the metaphor or the argument made in the first paragraph and you’ll show that your piece has passed through a process: the opening paragraph introduced a concept, the body did something with it, and the end showed what happened to it.
It’s a strategy that appears to be standard at The Economist. The newspaper’s recent obituary of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a double nuclear survivor, for example, begins:

“WHEN he had stopped crying, Tsutomu Yamaguchi would tell you why he called his book of poems “The Human Raft”. It had to do with the day he forgot to take his personal name-stamp to work, and had to get off the bus…”

and ends:

“He began to be comforted by three things. One was a set of drawings of the 88 Buddhas of the Shikoku pilgrimage, whose outlines—robes, haloes, calm hands—he devoutly painted in. The carbonised, face-down Buddhas of his tanka found peace again. The second comfort was in “simple acts of kindness”. And the third was an image of his life as a baton, passed on every time anyone heard or read his testimony. All these batons might form, together, another human raft.”

The metaphor, repeated at the end of the article, gives the readers a sense of closure, provides the image with a new meaning — and ends the story. There might not be a marriage or a feeling of happy-ever-after, but as readers, we know the story is finished, and as writers we’re shown another way to say “The End.”

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