Question: What do I do with a disappointing ending?
I had presented my story about the family at the beach to my workshop group and their feedback highlighted elements of the story’s ending which were felt to be in some way disappointing.
This lead to discussion of how this sense of disappointment manifested from the elements I had created. There was a point in this story where the reader lost connection with the family as an immediate point of focus and contemplation, which had been more intimately constructed at the beginning of the story.
Because of this observed shift, I found myself analysing the pay off for the reader. As a group we acknowledged that stories don’t have to be tied up neatly, with all questions answered. What was observed was not the desire to see the protagonist’s dilemma resolved through action, rather that there must be a stepping off point which satisfies the reader. However, this sense of satisfaction works on many different levels.
In the case of the short story I am working on, insight into the emotions of the mother in relation to her husband and children shifted further from the here and now of the family’s actions at the beach, towards her memories and reflections on events in her past. The problem was not the journey these conscious associations took the reader on, the absorption of focus on the mother’s emotional dilemmas, but rather the loss of connection which occurred. The disappointment seems to come from the lack of reconnection with the reality of the family dynamics at the latter stage, bringing the reader back to a sense of journey and purpose.
I could see that omitting the physical and emotional return also compromised the thematics, where the narrative had begun to build tension through the construction of physical and emotional contrast. For example, the metaphor of birds, flags and kites offer a conversation about freedom and restriction. That is, freedom from responsibility and freedom from the physical and emotional burden of mothering; wanting to flee, fly, but not being physically or emotionally able. Being held back. At the beginning of the story, the mother observes a lady who flies a kite. At the end of the story, the mother watches the same lady reeling the kite in. I want this moment to be synonymous with the mother’s shifts in conscious thought; being brought back to reality on many levels.
Bringing the family back into the reader’s minds helps to achieve this sense of progression; that thoughts move on, events move on and nature suits itself. So, I have reintroduced the families’ presence as a form of challenge to the mother’s reality, but I have done this with questions and actions which in themselves have no resolution. In this instance, a decision by the mother is offered to the reader as bereft of any real and lasting purpose. The stepping off point leaves the reader in the moment of contemplation, highlighting the finishing point as insignificant in meaning without the journey to it. They are made mutually exclusive.
It so happens that in our mode of reflection on the things we have written, our group discussed how often committing to an ending can be the obstacle between writing and completing a draft. Something can stop you from wanting to finish. Perhaps this is the point at which you need to question, what is holding you back? Ashley suggested that not finishing a piece can become habitual. Stories need a beginning middle and end; a spine to hold things together, but this spine can be held in loose connection. The ending shouldn’t be predictable, hyperbolic or ridiculous, rather it should have a sense of the circular, by inviting the reader to ask what they have learned as a consequences of the interactions or emotions you have set up in your story.
Ashley reminded me that consequence is not the same thing as resolution and what the reader seeks is a sense of cathartic release. This is important to the story I’m working on, because whilst the mother’s internal dialogue offers a release of pertinent emotions, the external action demonstrates her inability to gain physical or even emotional release from the constraints of family responsibility. I can see that emphatic and resolute action, like the protagonist’s decision to leave, can also manipulate in the reader a sense of emptiness, provoked by the feelings of loss and disintegration. These negative emotions are still congruous with the cathartic effect that Ashley speaks of.
This notion of the cathartic has also invited me to reflect on the whole journey of the workshopping experience. What is the pay-off? Well, it’s the critical reaction to my writing: surprising, sometimes alarming, but always useful. I have been offered insights into my characters or plot, such as discrepancies or connections, which being so close for so long may never have revealed themselves to me. Writers need a critical eye. Placing what I have written alongside the work of others, in the context of other writing in its drafting stages, has caused me to reflect on and challenge methods of approach in my own work. There are ways of talking about the way I write and the way that others write. I have learnt about the effect my writing has on an audience and the demands we place on those who try to tune out the White Noise and listen.
I am learning to follow a line of enquiry and have faith that it will deliver me someplace I want to be, not to resist because I may feel at first I can’t comprehend the thematics that are emerging. I won’t have all the answers or even all the questions at the beginning of the drafting process, but that is o.k. It may feel like I am fitting square pegs into round holes, but there is a way through and of the short stories I have worked on recently, I am most surprised by the notion that just when you think something has gone as far as it can go, it can go a whole lot further. You just need to find the route back in. There is nothing disappointing in this, the ending can be just the beginning of a whole lot more.
Written for and published by the Unthank School of Writing 2015/16
Carrie Patten 