on-writing-well

A Writer's Decisions 283
own. We had been warned that Sahara nights were cold and
had brought sweaters along. I put on my sweater, rolled up in
a blanket, which slightly softened the hardness of the desert,
and fell asleep surrounded by an immense stillness. An hour
later I was awakened by an equally immense racket—our
Bedouin family had brought in their herd of goats and their
camels for the night. Then all was quiet again.
In the morning I noticed paw prints in the sand next to
my blanket. Mohammed Ali said that a jackal had come by to
clean up the leftovers from our dinner—of which, as I
recalled the chicken, there must have been quite a few. But I
didn't hear a thing. I was too busy dreaming that I was
Lawrence of Arabia.
[END]
A crucial decision about a piece of writing is where to end it.
Often the story will tell you where it wants to stop. This ending
was not the one I originally had in mind. Because the goal of our
trip was to find a salt caravan I assumed that I would have to
complete the ancient cycle of trade: to describe how we
returned to Timbuktu and saw the salt being unloaded and
bought and sold in the market. But the nearer I got to writing
that final section, the more I didn't want to write it. It loomed as
drudgery, no fun for me or for the reader.
Suddenly I remembered that I was under no obligation to
the actual shape of our trip. I didn't have to reconstruct everything.
The real climax of my story was not finding the salt caravan;
it was finding the timeless hospitality of the people who live
in the Sahara. Not many moments in my life have matched the
one when a family of nomads with almost no possessions offered
to share their dinner. Nor could any other moment distill more
vividly what I had come to the desert to find and what all those
Englishmen had written about—the nobility of living on the
edge.