Endings and Hard Decisions

The interesting thing about writing is the sheer amount of craft that goes into a single moment.

Stories tend to climax when a major character makes an important decision – Luke Skywalker turns off his targeting computer and uses the force, or Katniss Everdeen refuses to play by the rules of the Hunger Game and refuses to kill the final competitor – and everything else in the story tends to focus on making that decision as meaningful as possible. Character arcs, themes and conflict. Narrative voice and carefully developed metaphors. All just an elaborate construction to contextualise a single difficult decision and imbue it with meaning.

We aren’t built to make hard decisions. Even something as simple as “I should start getting some exercise,” is met with considerable resistance as we delay and make excuses. Watching fictional characters make those hard decisions is a promise that one day, if it really mattered, we could overcome that resistance and make the hard call.

It’s also a promise that hard decisions do mean something, in a world where it can feel like no decision really matters.