I almost always realize the ending to a story right away (but then I have to figure out how to get there by writing the story). Very rarely I have absolutely no idea how the story will end, and in that case I just figure it out on the page line by line. Today I wrote my shorty like that and I really enjoyed both the process and the result.
Working Title: In the Cookie Jar of Life
1st Sentence: In the margins Melissa wrote things like, “I sense that you know your characters well”—the narrator had told us that the wife would develop diverticulitis in twenty years and the husband had a flare of freckles on the back of each upper thigh, details that had no bearing on the story, and “That you loved your grandmother very much comes across clearly”—the young man had written four times, “I loved my grandma a lot.”
Favorite Sentence: What if it’s a really bad metaphor, like ‘his mousey bellow’ or ‘her runny lips’?
Word Length: 1,135
Photo by Matt Turner, December 2006.
Daily Shorty 
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