I tend to think in terms of overlaps – pizza pan thinking instead of muffin tin compartmentalizing.   A story’s beginning may be a kind of walking start; or it could have a more static descriptive start or be a conversation.  Beginnings seem to vary without complaint.  Endings, on the other hand, often get a bad  rap – too abrupt, too over played, too neat, and the most common is no resolution.  The ending to Thomas Franzen’s most recent book Purity is a good example of resolution without conclusion or of  ambiguity that creates possibility and exploration.  See also Isabel AIlende’s The Infinite Plan, Christina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban, Don Delillo’s Point Omega, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, to name only a few.  And in The Sense of an Ending,  as novelist Julian Barnes describes the things one might think of at the end of a life, he gives readers perfect open ended-ness in last lines like these:  “There is accumulation.  There is responsibility.  And beyond these, there is unrest.  There is great unrest.” I like a good ambiguous ending, created by various levels of framing, a blurring of boundaries, the reverberating echo and, as the anthropologist Victor Turner suggests,  a theater of implied meanings.  I most appreciate Milan Kundera’s words from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting  as regards the place of ambiguity in fiction:  “The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.”