Do Not Write the Sunset

My first published essay ends on a sunset over the fjord, and I would delete that paragraph today if the piece were still mine to revise.

I do not think the sunset was badly written. I revised it four times, cut two adjectives, checked the colour words against what I had actually seen. The problem was not the execution. The problem is that a sunset over a fjord is not a sentence about that fjord. It is a sentence about sunsets, borrowed for the occasion, and no amount of careful phrasing changes what the sentence is actually describing underneath the specific place names I had attached to it.

The interchangeability test

Call it the interchangeability test: take a descriptive sentence, remove the proper nouns, and ask whether it could be dropped, unchanged, into a piece about an entirely different place, on a different coast, in a different country, without the reader noticing anything was wrong. My fjord sunset failed instantly. Strip out the name of the fjord and the sentence describes a sunset that could have happened over any body of water anywhere sunsets are visible, which is nearly everywhere. Nothing in the sentence depended on my actually having been at that specific point on that specific evening. It depended only on my having once seen a sunset, which is true of almost every reader holding the book, and tells them nothing they did not already know before opening it.

Compare a sentence from later work I still stand behind: "The last godwit left the flat at 0640, ahead of the tide by eleven minutes, a margin I had watched narrow every spring for six years." Remove the proper nouns and this sentence collapses, because there is nothing generic left to salvage. No other flat has this bird leaving at this time by this margin in this specific narrowing pattern. It cannot be moved to a different coast because it was never actually about coasts. It was about one measured fact, tied to one place, that happened to occur near water.

Why the sunset specifically

I am picking on the sunset because it is the purest case, the image every nature writer reaches for when a piece needs to feel finished and no specific fact has arrived to finish it with. A sunset asks nothing of the writer that observation usually asks. You do not need six years on a coast to notice the sky reddens at the horizon. You need to have been alive on a clear evening once, which every reader also has, and the sentence that results carries no information the reader did not already privately possess. It functions as a signal that the piece is ending, a closing chord, and I think readers have learned to recognise it as exactly that: not an observation, a stage direction telling them to feel moved now.

The honest objection

A sceptic could say this rules out one of the oldest and most reliable images in the language for a reason, and that a sunset recurs across centuries of writing precisely because it does real emotional work, marking an ending, a threshold, a day's close, regardless of which specific evening produced it, and that demanding every image pass a specificity test would strip writing of its inherited, shared vocabulary in favour of a narrower kind of precision that not every sentence needs. I think this objection is right about older, more ritualised forms, where a sunset functions inside a known convention the reader is in on, an elegy, a closing hymn, and the image is doing its job by being recognisable rather than specific. My objection is narrower than banning the image everywhere. It is aimed at nature writing that presents itself as observation, as a report of having actually looked at a particular place, while reaching for the one image that requires no looking at all. In that context, and only in that context, the sunset is a small dishonesty, a claim to have seen something dressed in the clothes of a thing everyone has already seen.

What replaces it

The fix is not banning endings that feel large. It is checking whether the sentence doing the ending could survive having its place names removed. If it can, and most sunsets can, the sentence is not describing your fjord. It is describing the category fjord belongs to, and the category was never what the reader came to this particular piece to learn about. My essay's real ending, the one I would write now, is the godwit and the eleven minutes, because that sentence, unlike the sunset, dies the moment you try to move it anywhere else, which is the only proof I trust that it belonged to this place and nowhere but this place to begin with.