Dialogue, a New Twist on an Old Dance

With all the time and effort you put in, trying to capture the essence of dialogue in order to be able to write it in your own creations and teach it to students and clients,you had not thought this before.  This enables you some expressive dialogue of your own.

"All this time.  What were you thinking?"

What you were thinking is that you had to be vigilant about rough edges in your own dialogue, because yours was still giving off the tell-tale signs of conversation.  What you finally thought was to announce to a class at USC one Tuesday afternoon, a tad more emphatic and deliberate than your normal presentation, "Dialogue, you see, is not to be construed with conversation."

Standing at the coffee truck during break time, debating on the wisdom of a coffee truck cinnamon roll, you were approached by a student who told you, "I've never seen you as pissed.  Which writer wrote such bad dialogue that you went off like that?  I hope it wasn't one of us."

You felt compelled to tell him the truth,  You were speaking with such emphasis to make sure you remembered.  And yes, you were a bit miffed with yourself for failing to see what had become so apparent to you.  Dialogue gives the impression of  conversation, but the occasions in published literature or commercial fiction are rare when it sounds conversational.

A number of years later, during a break time, a pleasing and talented young woman said, "If I get you correctly, the trick is to make 'Fuck you.' sound conversational and to make "Hey, how's it going?' sound like 'Fuck you.'"  You were not surprised when she began to publish on a regular basis.

In what appears to be a continued reason why you should continue teaching and taking on editorial assignments, while in the act of preparing notes for a lecture on dialogue to a class of promising beginners in which there is one student, not yet thirty, who is well ahead of the class learning curve, you came on a formula that had the same effect on you.  You wrote two words, separated by an equals sign.  Dialogue, you wrote, = Action.

Two ladies seated at a nearby outdoor table in the Lucky Llama patio, while being served their coffee, asked the waitress, hitching their heads toward you, "Is he always like that?" The waitress, who certainly has occasion to know you, smiled.  "Occasionally a bombast.  Otherwise, quiet and thoughtful.

In retrospect, you think what you said as you were making the connection was "Eu-fucking-reka." Your outburst could also have been "Fuck, yeah."  You are known to have said either in moments of extreme regard for the universe.

When delivering your mini-sermon to the intended audience, you were further motivated to add to the picture the analogy of dialogue being like a pair of dancers, each bringing to the scene ability and style to articulate his or her individual self, also accomplished enough--or not--to produce a chemistry one person alone cannot project.

Dialogue may be the equivalent of Fred and Ginger, dancing, which for you is a delightful picture of sinuous, joyful pushing, pulling, skipping, competitive interaction.  Not all exchanges are so exuberant or sophisticated.  Someone may be getting his toes stomped on, or someone may be trying to escape a disadvantage.  

However instructive it may be to describe dialogue as confrontational or founded in irony, dialogue should be seen as the same sort of action an actor presents whether registering a facial emotion, hesitating in the wording, or combining the delivery with another, competing action.

If your living quarters had a bathtub, you think you'd draw yourself enough to lower yourself into, perhaps with a book and a cold beer, the better to celebrate your Eureka moment.

The Writer's Journey from First Page to Last.

The greater the distance between a starting point A and its destination, point B, the greater the possibility you will think of the venture as a journey.  We speak of a visit to the grocery store or the post office as a trip.  If we are in some traffic-intense landscape such as Los Angeles or San Francisco or midtown Manhattan, we tend to elevate the venture from a trip to an ordeal.

Journey has a nice sound to it, resonant of mature, well-thought-out deliberation rather than something undertaken on the spur of the moment.  Without giving the matter much serious thought, you begin to see you've always reserved joyrneys for something lofty, important, mind enhancing.  

You would never consider making a journey to Goleta any more than, when you lived in Los Angeles, you would consider Van Nuys as a serious destination.  You've had occasions to visit Goleta.  Indeed, your Toyota dealer is there, but even though necessary, a trip to Goleta to have your car serviced is among the last things you'd consider a journey.

While it is true that you have on occasion gone to Van Nuys, often the reason was part of some dark whim or, more likely, to traverse it.  Van Nuys is not a place you go on a journey; Van Nuys is a place you drive through.  Van Nuys is not a destination, 

Journeys are about destinations, which may be mental or physical, philosophical or geographical, thus a bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel, is about a journey from childhood to some early part of maturity.  There are sentimental journeys in which the traveler follows the path of nostalgia or curiosity, returning to places that once afforded inner peace and inspiration.  One famous sentimental journey becomes the title for a 1768 novel by Laurence Sterne in which, at first, there was no destination.  

More than one critic has seen Sterne's Sentimental Journey and another novel best known by its shortened form Tristram Shandy, as an enlightened look at the post-modernist, post-impressionist, and metafictional novels of the most recent fifty years.  You're of that mind as well because you like the notion of men and women who have appeared from time to time, seeming to  depict a world and way of looking at it that differs from other contemporary views of literature.

Although known more as a storyteller and novelist, your own choice for bright star in the literary firmament was essentially a travel writer.  Witness The Innocents Abroad, whose successes prompted Roughing It, A Tramp Abroad, Following the Equator, and the magisterial Life on the Mississippi.  

In a true sense, Huckleberry Finn was an epic journey down a river Twain had piloted many a steamboat, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court packed some of Twain's favored devices of travel, ironic comparison, and time travel into one novel.

A journey is not to be undertaken lightly; there is often some subtext or motive behind it, suggesting the participant has given considerable thought to some hoped for outcome.  As you become involved with a project, however short or long, you realize the importance of setting off with an intriguing thematic flourish in the first sentence.  The immediate goal of that sentence is to provide you, as composer, with the next sentence, then the next and the next, past endings of chapters, meandering with the weight of the waters of a descending stream into the last line of the story.

That will have been a journey.  To make certain those who read it remain, your best strategy is to make the journey as white knuckle as possible, playing on all your fears, conspiracy theories, and  weaknesses.  As you move from sentence to sentence, the metaphor of white water rafting or kayaking growing stronger in your imagination, remember your hand, draped over the edge of the craft,dipping into the water, and then, around the next bend, the sight of alligator or crocodile, causing you in sudden fear to withdrawn your hand from its casual immersion and bring it into your lap, where you can watch it more closely.

Simply and more complexly put, you are not the same person after the journey.  For all you recognize a bit of nagging frustration and occasional self-examination on the brutal side, you are smug for a time at the end.  You remind yourself of one who has consumed one or two glasses of pinot noir with a top sirloin or rib eye steak, content for a few moments, at some measure of comfort with the world.

Soon, all too soon, the effects of the steak and wine will have worn away.  You are quick to remind yourself you will recover.  But not too quick, nor will the recovery be that complete.

As a younger man, many of your physical journeys began with a late-at-night-scratching or meowing outside your bedroom window, awakening you from young man dreams and young man frustrations.  With wakefulness came the curiosity.  Which of your friends had become drunk enough to need tangible adventure?  Was it Don, whose drunken visits seemed to require camping trips to California or Nevada ghost towns?  Was it Jerry, whose personal, drunken bouts of angst seemed to favor revitalizing experiences, which often meant some godforsaken outdoor spa?  Was it Richard, who promised he had at least three bottles of a respectable red.

There is something soothing about waking up hungover in some mountain or desert remove, seeing how far you'd traveled to get away from whatever it was causing you trouble in the city.  In the early dawn chill, the length of your morning pee and the intensity of your hangover headache remind you of the purpose your had for being here, at this remove from your inner demons.

The smell of campfire coffee, of the sort you'd never drink at home, reminding you of the journey you were embarked on.

Alternate Universes: The Writer's Reality and Misunderstandings

An understanding can be seen as an arrival at a perspective where information is processed into a useful too.  Before you had the understanding, you were searching through the tool kit, either assessing implements or trying to find one specific device with which to engage a specific task.

From another perspective, you may encounter a thing which at first offers you no clues to help you discern its purpose.  After some examination, you may arrive at a vision or understanding of the function that thing is meant to perform.  

There is one such device that once resided in your tool drawer but has long since been moved to your cooking utensils drawer after an ah-ha moment you reached when you were trying to open a jar with an unmanageable top, your hands gripping, but not able to move the top so much as a scant millimeter.  

Your ah ha moment featured a vision of how the device now in your cooking utensils drawer could be used,  Your presumption became a fulfilled event.  You understood the function of the device and have used it with some regularity over the past several years.

You venture the understanding that all understanding is directed at one or more purposes.  You could, for instance, understand about a thing or concept that it has no meaning in your life or, indeed, that a thing or concept or condition is of no use to you.  

You'll have understood enough about the circumstances to understand the relationship between understanding and inertia.  Once an understanding is in place, it tends to stay in place until some greater need arrives, mandating a deeper, greater understanding.  The inertia could also lead you to understand how this particular understanding is obsolete, thus no longer of immediate value.

Some of the things appearing near the top of your priority triangle relate to a greater understanding of yourself, an ongoing examination of what aspects of your understanding are growing into obsolescence or, perhaps of equal negativity, aspects of your understanding that are wrong.

Difficult to say how long you've been on the trail of sifting error and misunderstanding from your intellectual and emotional hard drives.  Suffice the matter to say understanding is a filter through which you view reality.  Your reality as a person begins with you in context with the bubble in which you abide, extends to the way you see the universe in which your bubble is located, then periscopes for otherwise impossible views of reality through books, photographs, and information dumps.

Your understanding of reality is the equivalent of you ranging through the sock drawer to find a matching pair or the tool drawer to find an appropriate tool.  You could, as is your wont, chose not to wear socks.  In fact, you cant recall the last time you wore socks.  Was it that time in late July when you wore sweat socks to prevent a blister from your walking shoes?

You're not entirely sure why the accuracy and integrity of your view of reality matters as much as it does.  The excuse that an accurate sense of reality is of primary importance to a writer holds little weight; you know any number of successful writers whose sense of reality is best described as idiosyncratic.  So, for that matter, is yours.  

You don't get many frequent flier miles for knowing the sun revolves about earth rather than the reverse, but even thinking through the implications of believing the earth orbits around the sun, you arrive at an understanding of how understanding works.  You would be likely to make other misconceptions, to be guilty of even more misunderstandings than you are already guilty of owning.

A primary reason for your own, idiosyncratic priority triangle is the number of flaws you find in the written and spoken words of others.  You do not set forth each day to write to contest the understandings of others as much as to define and share your own.  This approach is based on your understanding that you are more likely to have your own beliefs changed or honed by listening to others than the others are from reading or listening to you.

In the time you have left in your present format, thoughts of fame and fortune set aside, your notion of the good writing life is the understanding that you have written more understandings than you have written misunderstandings.  Yes, you know story is filled with confrontation and disagreement; you don't mean those kinds of misunderstanding.  Rather you mean that the world as you see it is based more on things that are probably right as opposed to things probably wrong or probably questionable.

A Writer's Working Day: Promises to Keep

In some cultures, a promise can be a sacred pledge, valued over any other transactions,  When carried out according to pre-agreed terms, the fulfilled promise speaks volumes to the participant and to the culture in which it was forged.

Other cultures and their resident circumstances may produce a vision of promise as an inherent quality for growth into a meaningful maturity and, thus, an artistic, athletic, scientific, or intellectual benefit.  X shows great promise.  This becomes a statement indicating a capacity for even more extensive growth and many, if not all, the qualities associated with maturation.

The promise you think of most often in such circumstances is the one embedded in genre fiction, those special, idiosyncratic places in library or bookstore shelves where lines are drawn between such basic categories as literary and mainstream, and where the category "General" is more an outlier, buried among notional, individualistic tiers, bursting with promise and personality.

This causes you to think of the promises held out to you by libraries.  Before you thought to assemble your own collection of books, you saw the library as an infinity of promise, with books to fill every need, be the need curiosity, loneliness, information, adventure, or escape.  

You could not believe your good fortune when you found yourself hired as a page at the Beverly Hills Library, therein to replace books left out on the tables by browsers, or to return the books piling up at the check-in-stand, where customers returned books they'd checked out.

You were so impressed with the library that soon, your own books bore tags with the Dewey Decimal System Code.  Not that you had so many books at first, but still, you knew where they belonged and who their neighbors were.  The first book of yours to find its way into a library was a collection of poetry for which you'd written the introduction.  

Such was your nature at the time, your introduction began, "Ladies and Gentlemen, I wish to introduce you to a book. "  The book got into the library in the first place, because you left it there, filed in its proper place in the Dewey spectrum.  A year later, when you went back to check, you found your book was not only there, it was listed in the card catalogue.

Not that many years later, when you were working for publishers, libraries held forth another form of promise.  A few decent orders form a library, say New York, or Brooklyn, or Los Angeles, and the book was no longer a foundling, it was a paid form entity, the costs recouped.  Now, it could start earning royalties for its author.  Since your job depended on books that earned their keep, you were alert to the promise of manuscripts from writers. 

Thanks to the promises inherent in libraries and bookstores, you had a job you could love rather than bear, a job that nourished you and had you yet another step closer to the job you wished even more, and which was approaching, although not at the speed you'd hoped.  Your pay grade was not bad, but you were still trying your hand at pulp novels, which you'd write in the evening, after coming home from publishing work.  

These after dark ventures written between the hours of nine and midnight or one, brought in enough to allow you to eat out rather than take the time to cook.  Although you misinterpreted the promise of these pulp novels, and short essays for a few Western historical magazines, you were at least doing what a writer should do, which is write.

Your favorite genre is the mystery, which has among its inherent promises the challenge of a puzzle.  Who killed X, and perhaps Y, then Z?  Followed by the motive and, of course one or more detectives who attempt to solve the crime.  You also enjoyed the Western, which promises to be a novel set in the era of the American West, and which so pleased you to be writing them that you actually learned from reviewing the inherent genre promises as set forth in a book you acquired as editor from an author who had written some fifty of them before turning his hand to being story editor of a famed TV series.

Writing is also a promise you make to yourself, which is the promise to cull material of little or no interest to you, send it off into the limbo of the delete key.  You promise to remind yourself at all times how difficult writing is, but to remind yourself, nevertheless, that it has the potential for fun.  You promise yourself to try.  Largely, your critical senses keep you honest.

Part of a day's work is sending eight or ten pages off to infinity it, on reflection, they bore you or you find yourself skimming more than reading,  Promise?  Yes.

First-person Narration: You'd Better Have a Convincing Reason

Back in the day when written language was still a plaything of the wealthy or those in religious monastic orders, a storyteller would appear in the marketplace, then start right in with a story such as The Iliad, which had an intriguing hooker, all right.  "Achilles was pissed, and he wasn't going to take it any more."

Perhaps not in those words, but close enough.  And for a fact, Achilles had a perfectly good reason to be pissed, both facts you can check in most translations of The Iliad.  They often begin the phrase, "The wrath of Achilles," before going on to other stuff, such as how he was not only not going to fight any more, he was going to remove all his soldiers from the ongoing siege of Troy.

And the storyteller was not about to tell you up front why there was a siege of Troy in the first place, which had to do with that yutz of a prince of Troy, Paris, getting fucked over as a result of his being a judge in a beauty contest.  

The storyteller may have not been able to read, but he had enough smarts to memorize The Iliad, just as likely The Odyssey, and the gods only knew what other pot boilers and best sellers he had tucked away in hopes of passing the hat during a tense point in the narrative.

As storytelling grew in range and sophistication, the storyteller might well have learned to read, if only to keep up with the new stuff being turned out.  He might well have begun his approach with, "Once upon a time," or as a variation, "In the city of X, there lived a man named Y, well-known for his miserly traits."  

The storyteller would then proceed to narrate the story in the equivalent of the third person dramatic point of view.  A man who.  A woman named.  The storyteller might throw in an occasional comment, should he feel the necessity, but if he had a story that got the protagonist into enough trouble or mischief, authorial comments were unnecessary.

Most of us at the current stage of storytelling are used to attending, depending on our choice of church, a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday lecture, known as a sermon.  We are also used to being lectured by teachers, politicians, and historians.  This would tend to explain the first person, I narrator, but not entirely.  

Some early stories, Samuel Richardson's estimable Pamela among them, were written as a series of letters, which were believed to be actual letters, written by actual persons, not some enterprising printer named Richardson.

At a point when you've just begun to feel comfortable with your grasp of the eighteenth and nineteenth century novels, you experience the equivalent of the literary rug being pulled from under you when you realize you can;t answer your own question, which is:  When did the first person narrative first appear and when did it catch on as a popular medium.

More rug disappears when you ask the question, Why would a storyteller want to use the first person point of view?  A simple, obvious answer, particularly in reference to eighteenth and nineteenth century audiences would be that it seems authentic on its face.  

Who but a real person would write using the I approach to telling a story?  But the matter does not have to stop there.  In fact, when you are pontificating to students, you are not above asking them why they wish to use first person when the story is clearly a story?  

The smartasses among your students will remind you that Melville used the first person in Moby-Dick because Ishmael is the only survivor and Melville wanted a survivor of The Pequod as a reliable narrator to give credible weight to the many philosophical implications.  

You can reel off a number of first person novels you like, in particular because they force the novel to accomplish something more significant than amusement.  These observations, so far as you are concerned, are true enough, but they don't take away your curiosity about why a given writer would chose first person as a vehicle for a novel unless there were a purpose.

Well and good that one of your favored novels, The Postman Always Rings Twice, is rendered in first person, and its author was never less than shrewd in presenting his narratives.  But there is no real reason for the narrative filter to come through Frank Chambers in the first when the novel could have worked in the third.  Best you can come up with here is that first person makes it seem more like a confessional gone wrong.

Every time you see first person narrative, you begin to look for one or more reasons the author to use it.  Why is he or she so eager to tell you this story?  You can see a major reason for first person, which has the narrator wanting to set a record straight or to provide a revisionist history.  Beyond those reasons, your brow will continue to furrow whenever you see the opening sentence reveal the first person version.

Making a Scene: Tools of the Trade

With the infrequent exceptions of novels such as Marilynne Robinson's moving Gilead, which is narrated through a group of letters, most modern stories are related in the basic dramatic unit, the scene.  A useful way of examining the scene is to begin with the premise of it as an arena, even though the setting may be in a place such as church or synagogue, or even a public library.

Each of these settings has the potential for fulfilling its dramatic destiny as an arena or at least a crucible. The arena is an enclosed area in which there are expectations of a contest.  The crucible is a container, used to heat elements to high temperatures.  Already the concept of setting takes on connotations of contest, of competitiveness, of elements being subjected to unusual forces.  

In keeping with these implications, a church or synagogue may become arenas where moral values clash or where tradition and innovation become opponents.  A public library suggests a setting in which intellectual, cultural, emotional, and spiritual concepts become the equivalents of grudges or extreme differences of opinion.

Characters enter these scenes or arenas or crucibles, bringing expectations with them.  Characters are known for their expectations.  Characters without expectations have no place in a story, either in a literal or figurative sense.  In fact, you could say of a character who had no expectations that she was not yet developed to the point of belonging in a story.  Characters without expectations are like day workers, waiting for jobs at for-hire locations, not sure what their job for the day will be until they are hired and given a specific chore.

Characters, in scenes (or arenas or crucibles) bring forth their agendas, attempt to gain as much result as possible, as in the case of Richard, Duke of York, whose agenda in Shakespeare's Richard III is clear; he wishes to become King of England.  In remarkably similar fashion, Frank Underwood, a United States Congressman and, in fact, House Majority Whip, wishes to become President of the United States.

In our introduction to a story, we discover clues relating to the agendas of each character as we watched interact in scene after scene.  If we have any experience at all with reading stories, watching dramas, we have a built-in awareness of the pattern of events, where the front rank characters pursue their agendas, meet opposition, then run the risk of losing whatever ground they may have gained.  We also understand on some level how a particular chapter is ended or the story brought to a complete halt when and if the protagonist reaches the goal.

If this happens and there are still several pages to go in the book, or if the dramatic version has only been in motion for a few scenes, we are justified in expectations of some reversal, surprise, or other complication.  Even in its day nearly four hundred years ago, Richard III followed these dramatic conventions, which Shakespeare plucked from yet earlier conventions of storytelling.

Within this sphere of stories being told in scenes, there are three basic approaches for relaying the dramatic events.  The first of these is narrative, which encompasses all the physical action taken by all the characters.  John enters the room.  Mary, who is already in the room, sees him, waves.  If she is seated, she stands up and waves again to make sure he sees her.  He does see her. He returns her wave.  This movement is narrative.  

A key to good writing, if the story is a print version, and as well good acting, if the story is staged or screened, is the way the characters and the actors who portray them are able to convey some clue about their state of mind or being through actions.  These actions may be small and personal, such as a sigh, a looking upward or downward, a grin, a hesitation.  The actions may also be more global and generous, such as posture, modes of speaking, and the wide vocabulary of body language.

Another means of delivering dramatic information has been called interior monologue.  The character is considering elements relevant to the story.  Now what? he wondered.  Hoo boy, this was not going according to plan.  Of course a character's thoughts about another character can be helpful to the reader.  What a mistake to have thought Fred could get through with this on his own.  

All these examples, from the third sentence on, are varieties of interior monologue, thought by a character as opposed to being offered by the author.  By the time we get to interior monologue, we've been given clues to help us decide through whose eyes and reactions we are being given the dramatic information.

The third and most demanding of ways in which dramatic information is brought on stage is through what the characters say to others.  Let us say a scene is being seen through the point of view of a busy mother, who has been interrupted by one of her two daughters.  "Mommy, Mary hit me."  Okay, that was dialog.  Spoken, specific information.  The mother will undoubtedly show some physical sign of irritation, which takes us back to narrative.  "Hit her back," the mother says, then returns to her work.  Dialogue and narrative.  A moment later, the second daughter appears, which is narrative.  "Mommy," she says, "why did Susy hit my back?"  

This is dialogue.  It is also funny, because it is an implied description of the child, Susy, as a literal-minded individual.  This particular implication and all others in story are a part of the attraction story holds for us.  As writers, we are well aware of the big three ways of advancing story, narrative, interior monologue, and dialogue, feeling the comfort and contentment of having eaten a well-prepared meal, but if we miss the possibilities of implication and evocation, is the story completed?

Closure: The Writer as Negotiator

When something such as a performance or an event or relationship ends, you are led from experience with such things to accept a finality wrapped around some kind of emotional response.  

Most performances are structured to produce a complex braid of feeling, ranging from the joyous one to be had from the final portion of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to the cautionary one from either of Shakespeare's resounding tragedies, Hamlet or Macbeth.  You can, in most cases, anticipate a return visit to any or all three of these.

When an event comes to an end, you may be giddy with the overall pleasurable weight of your experience during the event or, still in the positive zone, relief at the event being over.  The ending of a relationship often produces a spectrum of response, ranging from abject grief, which is likely the most intense and complex of all emotions, to the kind of relief characterized by a sense of unfettered freedom.  Such endings can also be the occasions of anger or resentment.

The on-again-off-again relationship between conventional wisdom and your own experiences has left you with the notion of reality as a raw, mindless, uncertain condition that contains endings.  Indeed, what could be more of an ending in reality than the extinction of a species?  Yet reality appears to you to have more endless events than events with some sort of resolution.  

Aware that this vision of reality, say a forty percent share of nicely tied-off endings to a sixty percent slice of randomness, becomes a factor in describing the reality that is you.  This vision could, in fact, be tied to the observation that your own position as an outlier outweighs your sense of conventional behavior.

This leaves you often at odds with the things about you that have ended, distracted by a curiosity that leads you to wonder about randomness, and somehow caught up in producing written works wherein you provide an ending.  No question that your view of endings leans to the more ambiguous ones than those spelled out in detail.  

Ambiguity is the trampoline to curiosity.  You find a few drops of curiosity are more than enough to allay crankiness based on boredom with the endings about you that you tend to find manufactured or uninteresting.

You have of late become intrigued with the notion that the individual has a dramatic genome, one that makes the individual responsive to story in a deeper way than has been assumed.  Some individuals, say those with your approximate ratio of neat reality to random reality, require a sense of ending resolutions.  If they don't get resolved endings in reality, they will seek it in music, much of which is resolved, in story, which has significant degrees of resolution, or the kinds of essays that relate to endings of eras or events.

Those whose ratios tend to approximate yours find the need to read and listen to music, and also to create in some artistic fashion, in order to apply hands on to endings.  Or so it seems.

In many ways, reality has for you the analogy of the contents of a desk drawer--your kind of desk drawer, which is by nature one you tend to straighten from time to time, only to have its contents scatter without any apparent design or motive.

You have begun to see closure, the step beyond ending, as a neatening of a desk drawer you know will soon lose its interior design.  Such desk drawers mean a great deal to you for the surprises they often afford.  One of the very first places you look for missing things is in your desk drawer.  The second place is the interspace between the seat and back rest of the passenger seat in your car.  Each place has rewarded you with things you thought you'd lost, or with things you'd forgotten about and were delighted to rediscover.

Closure is more than ending; it is ending with a sense of having entered a contract with reality.  Closure is more than mere negotiated settlement, it is the kind of ending that appeals to the sense of you rather than the sense of convention.  Having closure with a performance (your own or those of other individuals), an event, or a relationship allows you to walk your path, head up, comfortable in your role as a negotiator.