Endings...
The quest for a conclusion for the 'Drowning Woman' story and the unresolved ending of 'Picnic at Hanging Rock'
After two years of writing the draft ‘Drowning Woman Poem Project’ story, you’d think I’d know how it ends by now. I know it must end. I’m sad and relieved that it has reached the need for a conclusion. But I’m not yet certain exactly what the ending is. Not knowing is a type of surrender at this part of the process. Likely before the chosen ending becomes clear I will have to re-read/overview what I’ve laid down to this point, then revise/edit/kill my darlings.* I remember having to cull 20,000 words from ‘The Return’ story for my doctoral thesis during 2017 (which was published as The Return of the Girl Behind the Door in 2021). My word limit for the thesis was strict, and my supervisor a skilled editor/English teacher. It felt a brutal battle at the time, cutting away all those laboured over words that seemed so precious to me then.
*'“Kill your darlings” - editing out unnecessary sections/characters/storylines/prose from a work of creative writing, for the good of the whole.
Despite not being sure I that can write one definitive and apt ending, I am playing with the idea of ‘endings’ before I take a break from this creative endeavour for the sake of gaining objectivity. There are four possibilities I have briefly brainstormed.
THE UNEXPECTED ENDING - ‘the twist’ at the end of story is a risky venture, and works best when there have been clues left throughout the narrative. I have used this once before in The Return of the Girl Behind the Door, and I vividly remember a reader’s response after reading the last chapter; “This is a very tricky story!” I did lay down clues which my thesis supervisor picked up by a third of the way through the story. She had lamented that I had seemed to discard a character after the prologue, and how she wanted the story to be told in this particular character’s voice. However, I didn’t discard her, I hid her in plain sight and the twist at the end was to reveal that she had been there all along right under the reader’s nose. The risk of using this ending is that it can divide readers; some people don’t like the feeling that the author has tricked them, while others love the idea of re-reading a book to find all the breadcrumb clues embedded in the narrative. I’m a reader who enjoys this kind of ending.
As far as the ‘Drowning Woman’ story goes there are two questions I’ve been sitting with where a character-twist finale may be fitting. Who is the narrator, is she one of the characters? Who is the ‘mad woman’ that shows up in the second to last chapter, is she significant to the ending or even the whole story?
THE EXPANDED ENDING - ‘the epilogue’ knots off any loose threads and sums up what happens beyond the book’s end cover, sometimes jumping forwards in time. This kind of ending is usually satisfying or settling; the character has a future, they live on and we have insight into how they move forward, what they do, who they might meet or where they end up. In The Return of the Girl Behind the Door I abandoned the initial epilogue that was published in my doctoral thesis which was focused on the main character’s future trajectory after a lengthy voyage (‘expanded ending’). Between writing the thesis and rewriting for publication, I'd become committed to the idea of writing a third follow-on story about what happened on the voyage I had so obliquely mentioned in my thesis. I decided to write a new epilogue (pictured above) in The Return of the Girl Behind the Door where the ending was left 'unresolved', leaving the possibility for the sea-journey. The voyage remains unwritten, though there are draft ideas and conceptual images for the third story. I haven't gotten any further than that.
In my imagined expanded ending/epilogue for the ‘Drowning Woman’ story, the narrator gives a summary of Mara’s trials, deeds, undertakings with Lady Death, and what mission she ultimately becomes known for. It’s nice, but maybe a bit too tame for me in a story that has a tendency towards endarkenment and whose narrator is archetypally tricky, and sometimes feels like a ‘dangerous old woman.’ You can read more about the narrator in a SUBSTACK post from last year, link at the bottom of this page.
THE FULL CIRCLE - the story ends where it began; a ‘hero/heroine’s journey’ motif. I do like these kind of endings provided they don’t feel pointless or that it comes to mean nothing beyond being caught in a repeating pattern despite all that the character has been through. I want to see the character has grown, isn’t stuck in whatever cycle they broke out of in the first place, and they disrupt repetitive story-loops or negative expectations underlying the role they struggled to discard. Letters to a Missing Woman and The Return of the Girl Behind the Door make up a full circle together; a heroine’s journey in two parts. The derelict house motif that the main character leaves at the beginning of Letters to a Missing Woman is returned to in the last third of The Return of the Girl Behind the Door storyline. The historical site of lost power/lost voice, becomes the same site of reclaiming power/voice. After the confrontation a new kind of house is built; a ‘dreaming hut’, (pictured above) and the main character continues on with her quest and her own life.
A full-circle ending of the ‘Drowning Woman’ story has a number of possibilities. The beginning lines in the introduction open with statements about the nature of deeper/darker tales and how they are potent for creating change from within, and that as one young woman listens to the Drowning Woman story her metamorphic rebirth is slowly set in motion. I’m questioning the idea of a plot that leads back to this point or something similar in the early chapters of the story. Another alternative might be how the main character at the end of the tale follows the trail or takes on the mantle of the storyteller (as the Hag did) either to perpetuate the sea-tale or to subvert it. There is a lot to consider with this kind of ending. If I bring this tale full circle then I would like to finish with something simple, whimsical, satiating, a little dark, and what feels right for the whole storyline.
THE UNRESOLVED ENDING - ‘the cliffhanger’ keeps the reader guessing, leaving them with more questions than answers. It’s popular use is in a book series as a hook to reel us into reading the next installment. The ‘unresolved ending’ of The Return of the Girl Behind the Door is pictured above. “I looked at the image of a boat on her wall and imagined myself sailing with the Dark Mother in strange seas. It occurred to me that there had been no mention of time. I could feel my hands clinging onto each other as if one was land and the other was my reluctance to lose sight of the shore. The map on the wall had strange names I had never heard before. The room grew darker and more unfamiliar. With trepidation, I asked, ‘How long?’ She reached out to me reassuringly, ‘Until you have become a Journey Woman…’”
The unresolved ending is not always popular in stand-alone novels, annoying or frustrating readers, and sometimes disturbing them.
One notable example, according to Goodreads, of an unresolved and disturbing ending that had a powerful effect on readers is Picnic at Hanging Rock (published 1967). Joan Lindsay compellingly tells a tragic story set in the year 1900 on Valentine's Day. Three teenage school girls and their teacher wander away from a school picnic at Hanging Rock (in the Macedon Ranges - Victoria, Australia) and disappear. Despite an extensive search only one girl is found alive, and she cannot remember what has happened to her companions. The others have inexplicably vanished. Noted as being one of the most successful Australian mystery novels, I studied it at high school during the 1980’s in my English class. The story’s ending haunted and taunted me; I was consumed with the designed uncertainty it engendered, but it also left me to imagine a conclusion that I could accept. We presented an assignment on our version of what happened and then I moved on, and gave very little thought to it.
The author did write a final chapter which hinted at the mysterious disappearance of the two teenage school girls and their teacher, describing an ‘occult’/gothic kind of disappearance (i.e. the large monoliths at Hanging Rock took the missing bodily out of the time they had inhabited into a kind of between life and death state, and then they crawled through a hole into the earth; the end). One commentator’s opinion on this chapter referred to it as, “bonkers.” Lindsay’s publisher advised her to cut it from the novel because the overall story was stronger without it. Lindsay herself starts the novel with a mysterious air that the events might be fact or fiction, but everyone alive at the time it is set is dead now, so who can tell. Right from the beginning she leaves us hanging in suspense; is it true or not? This ambiguous statement is a clever device that has sent many a reader/turned researcher on a wild goose chase. No evidence has ever been found that the events were factual. Having read the cut last chapter, (posthumously published in Lindsay’s The Secret of Picnic at Hanging Rock) I totally agree with the original publisher’s call and I didn’t find it satisfying to read the ending. I usually like ‘between’ or ‘liminal’ concepts, but I didn’t like this. The gothic/esoteric idea that Lindsay conveyed was a bit too obscure for me.
After all the suspenseful lead up to and the aftermath beyond the disappearances, what most readers were interested in were answers to the fundamental questions. With the disappearances, the other characters in the story descend into a kind of madness or torment about the unknown fates of the missing, and notably it seems that so have some readers. In search of answers, or to exercise the insanity of having unanswered questions, some readers and fans of the film adaption of the book (1979), would trek to the top of Hanging Rock and call out one of the missing girl’s name, “Miranda, Miranda, where are you?” This became a book/film cult activity. The power of the unresolved ending has in it the potential to create obsession.
Why I’m interested in this particular work and its ending, besides my own interaction with it, has to do with its setting. Picnic at Hanging Rock (book and film) was situated at an actual sacred Aboriginal site that has its own cultural/spiritual stories and uses for ceremony. Consequently, decades after publication in 2017, a campaign was launched by then PhD student Amy Spiers* to highlight the Aboriginal history of Hanging Rock, its catch-cry, “Miranda Must Go.” Spiers made a statement explaining her intentions, "The main goal of the campaign is to make people think about how obsessively we retell the story of Picnic at Hanging Rock, which is essentially a fiction of vanished white school girls. While on the other hand we actively ignore the removal and displacement of Aboriginal people that actually took place at Hanging Rock." The concern being that the myth of ‘Miranda’ had obscured and written over yet to be righted historical injustices and cultural ownership of ‘country’. - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-17/campaign-to-recognise-indigenous-history-hanging-rock/8187942
When setting a story in a specific location that already has important known historical or cultural stories, care needs to be taken. And perhaps this is why I didn’t like the formerly unpublished ending of Picnic at Hanging Rock. Though stories about disappearances at standing stones or burial sites are a common enough idea in folklore and historical fantasy writing, they are usually near the beginning of a story about entering into an ‘otherworld’ or another time period through a portal. They work well when the author has a solid knowledge of place/mythology/folklore and enhances the local stories, rather than obscure them. In my opinion as the reader, the cut chapter of Lindsay’s novel felt discombobulated; from the story to that point, from already existing stories, and from the land itself.
It’s not a preference of mine to use this ending in the ‘Drowning Woman’ tale because I’m not sure that it will suit the tone of the storytelling I’ve been developing. I’m also conscious of the importance of place. The second to last chapter’s location, ‘Sanctuary’, is inspired by a stretch of coastline here in New Zealand, which I want to be careful/ethical to not overlay unhelpful narratives upon. For the record, my work is one hundred percent fantasy fiction.
However, as part of my brainstorming process I’ll dare myself to explore what could be set up as a ‘cliffhanger’ climax in the last chapter, which might involve the age old conflict between the fearful land dwellers and Ocean’s current emissary coming to a head. This perpetual animosity has been hinted at through the story on in a number of chapters. If this clash becomes part of the story ending it could potentially leave readers with a few questions in its wake, but not likely to have them searching coastlines for answers and calling Mara’s name. While I may not favour this ending the exercise of allowing myself to sketch it out may bring its own clarity to enhance the final chapter I eventually decide to cast my lot with.
I hope to share some of the sketchy, roughly drafted endings in the not too distant future as a smorgasbord of potentialities from my creative cauldron.
*Amy Spiers “is currently a Vice Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at RMIT School of Art (2022-24), where she is engaged in research that explores the capacity of public and socially engaged art to critique and positively transform present society, and how such art practices might generatively address difficult colonial histories and social relations between Indigenous and settler peoples in Australia. She was recently awarded an Australian Research Council 2024 Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) for the project: The hard work of decolonisation: Truth-telling Australia's colonial past with art by non-Indigenous artists.” - https://amyspiers.com.au/About
Read more about the narrator here:
Thanks Idoya! 🥰
This is a milestone Maree, congratulations! I really enjoyed reading this post. What you say about being careful not to overlay stories that distort or distract from the most important stories/truths is wise. And that researcher’s work sounds really interesting!