May 1, 2003: Six weeks after the US-led invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in front of a banner that read, “Mission Accomplished.” He announced that, “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”
US combat operations in Iraq would continue for eight more years. While exact numbers are disputed, most estimates suggest there were hundreds of thousands more casualties of the Iraq War after Bush pronounced the mission ended.
Growing up in the United States, I learned about story structure in elementary school. Teachers pressed chalk to the blackboard (I’m fifty-one years old; yes, we had blackboards) to draw the same graph showing the Introduction, the Rising Action, the Climax, the Falling Action, and the Resolution. This was the Official Structure of Stories, a universal truth applied to everything from Star Wars to The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
Later on, I took creative writing classes in college and attended workshops where I learned about three-act structure, try-fail sequences, the Hero’s Journey, and more. As I grew as a writer, I started to sit at the head of the workshop table, passing along the lessons I’d learned. How to write strong openings that immediately engage the reader, how to escalate the stakes and heighten the tension in each act, and how to wrap up all the loose ends with a satisfying ending.
The problem, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, is that story structure is an illusion. Endings doubly so. Those illusions—those lies—can distort our thinking in potentially destructive ways.
January 22, 1973: The United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of “Jane Roe,” protecting the right to abortion and overturning many restrictive state abortion laws. While protests and debate continued, Roe v. Wade was described as “settled law,” with many Americans believing that the core right to abortion was now safely enshrined in law.
In 2022, the conservative-majority Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Short of death (and arguably, not even then), our stories don’t stop. The pace of our lives ebbs and flows, and change is pretty much constant. Relationships, careers, health, technology, society…it never ends.
That can be a problem for storytellers. Books and movies and plays are finite things. They have to start and stop somewhere. Part of the writer’s job is to pick the best place to impose that arbitrary beginning and ending.
As writers, we’re taught that beginnings and endings have a lot of work to do. The beginning has to hook readers and make them care about the characters and their problems. The ending has to answer the big questions raised throughout the story. It has to demonstrate change in the protagonist. It has to resolve, one way or another, the central conflict of the story.
Personally, I enjoy a good story arc, especially a good ending: Gollum and the ring falling into the lava, Iron Man’s climactic snap, the Doctor triumphing over a fleet of Daleks, and so on. I take comfort in answers and victories and the belief that characters I’ve come to care about have won their battles and earned their rewards.
Wouldn’t life be simpler if the world actually worked that way?
Endings are lies. And those lies shape how we think about the world.
November 4, 2008: Barack Obama became the first Black man elected President of the United States. It was a powerful moment and a monumental turning point in the story of race and racism in the United States. From a Gallup poll later that year, “70% of Americans expected race relations in the US to get better” after Obama’s election.
A follow-up poll in 2016 told a very different story. “[M]ore say that race relations have gotten worse as a result of his presidency (46%) than say they have gotten better (29%).”1
In psychology, the term “schema” refers to a mental framework that helps people organize, process, and remember information. For more than a hundred years, scientists have studied how different schemas help us filter and classify our experiences.
Schemas include our expectations about other people and ourselves, but also our expectations about events and social interactions. In some scenarios, schemas take the form of scripts. Or, as psychologist Gemma Gladstone put it, schemas are stories, and those stories are the lenses through which we see the world.2
Stories shape not only our expectations but also our beliefs. Research has found that stories can be even more persuasive and powerful than data. While people generally see statistics as more informative and convincing in the moment, “as time passes this effect reverses and the effect of stories on beliefs is larger.”3
We persuade and are persuaded by stories. We communicate in stories. We think and remember and understand the world through stories. Because of this, the structure we impose on stories and storytelling matters. Story structure—beginnings and rising actions and climactic scenes and endings—matters. Especially the lie of endings.
Anyone with an iota of awareness or historical understanding recognized that electing Barack Obama president in 2008 didn’t magically end racism. But the story of our triumph over racism was powerful. If you were writing a book—at least for a US audience—wouldn’t the election of our first Black president be a great ending? That moment of victory, shattering the racial glass ceiling at the highest position in the nation.
We think in stories. We think in beginnings and endings. And so there was a tendency among many people to close the book on racism. Because the work was finished and the story was over. People took comfort in that ending, in the triumph of equality over hate.
But endings are lies. The backlash to Obama’s presidency was inevitable. As author and journalist Wesley Lowery noted, “in moments of Black racial advancement, we see America’s white majority lash out with rhetoric, with policy, but also with violence.”4
Recent years have seen the gutting of the Voting Rights Act; extreme attacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts; crackdowns against the teaching of race and racism in history classes; and an explosion of open, explicit white supremacy.
1963: The first measles vaccine was made available. Prior to the vaccine, measles killed an estimated 400–500 people each year in the United States and caused the hospitalization of tens of thousands more. Vaccination drastically reduced these numbers.
2000: Measles was officially declared eliminated in the United States.
2025: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 2,144 known cases of measles in the US.
We’re taught that the Story of Slavery ended on June 19, 1865. Just like the Story of LGBTQIA+ Equality ended with Obergefell v. Hodges on June 26, 2015. And the Story of World War II concluded on September 2, 1945, putting an end to Naziism and fascism.
Those dates are important and worthy of remembrance and celebration. But they weren’t endings, no matter how much we want them to be. And when we treat them as such—when we decide a given fight is won and done—it sets the stage for that story to continue. We turn our attention elsewhere, and then we act surprised that, to quote a much-maligned line, “Somehow, Palpatine returned.”
None of this is to say that Western story structure sows the seeds of all our ills. The world isn’t that simple. But trying to force history into a linear schema of discrete Beginnings and Endings certainly waters those seeds.
Consider the East Asian four-part story structure called kishōtenketsu. Kishōtenketsu is built around relationships and harmonization, with an ending that doesn’t necessarily provide neat answers to every plot-related thread. Author Henry Lien writes that this structure “is not necessarily based on conflict, tension, and resolution. It is more interested in exploring the unseen relationships among the story’s elements than in pitting them against each other.”5
Another example comes from author Leslie Marmon Silko, who describes the Pueblo tradition of storytelling as being “like a spider’s web—with many little threads radiating from the center, crisscrossing each other.… You must simply listen and trust, as Pueblo people do, that meaning will be made.” Again, the structure doesn’t emphasize endings and resolution, but rather meaning and connection.6
How would my country be different if we thought beyond beginnings and endings, beyond winning and losing? If our schemas prioritized understanding and recognizing connections? If we learned to view events not through a simple linear framework, but through a more complex structure of spirals and interconnecting threads?
This isn’t an essay about the evil of endings and Western storytelling. Endings can resolve tension and answer questions and give us permission to let go and move on. Whether it’s walking away from an unhealthy relationship or graduating from college or learning to live again after the death of a loved one, a schema of beginnings and endings can help us take those necessary next steps.
But we can’t limit our thinking to that one artificial structure. We can’t fall into the trap of thinking endings are natural and real.
As author Frank Herbert said, “there is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”7
If we want to improve our thinking, we need to seek out stories that move beyond the lie of endings. Stories that give us new ways of seeing our past and future. Diverse stories we can incorporate into our thinking to help us understand the world in new ways.
And given the state of the world today, we need those stories now.
January 3, 2026: United States forces bombed Venezuela and took President Nicolás Maduro and his wife back to the US as prisoners. One reporter asked President Trump about the often-disastrous history of attempting regime change without a plan for what comes next. Trump dismissed those concerns, saying, “With me, we’ve had a perfect track record of winning.”
The only thing missing was a “Mission Accomplished” banner.
1 Jones, Jeffrey. “In U.S., Obama Effect on Racial Matters Falls Short of Hopes,” Gallup, August 2016.
2 Gladstone, Gemma. “How to stop your life playing on repeat,” November 2025.
3 Graeber, Roth, and Zimmerman, “Stories, Statistics, and Memory,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 139, Issue 4, November 2024.
4 Kaplan, Erin Aubry. “The ‘American Whitelash’ Is Far From Over,” Politico, July 2023.
5 Lien, Henry. “Diversity Plus: Diverse Story Forms and Themes, Not Just Diverse Faces,” SFWA, January 2021.
6 Silko, Leslie Marmon. “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective,” English Literature: Opening Up the Canon, 1979.
7 McNelly, Willis. Interview with Frank and Beverly Herbert. February 1969.
© 2026 Jim C. Hines
