Ending on a question

Confession: I'm hoping that this weekend's contest will jumpstart me back into actively composing, because I'm just not feeling it right now.

Reading:

• "Toga Party" by John Barth
  

Writing:

• Untitled Dark Fantasy Project

Revising:

• "Cora and the Sea"

Future Projects:

• Dairhenien's Library - Development
  
• Floorcraft - First rewrite of 1-5, first draft of 6-8
• Ferian Fetlock - Next chapter, "Ferian Fetlock Catches a Cold," followed by "Ferian Fetlock Takes a Wife."
  
• July 26th 24-hour Short Story
• "Motley" - Expansion
• "Fireworks and Earthworks" - 5% into first draft
  
• Untitled School Mistress Story

Unpublished Stories/Status

• "The Revenant" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
  
• "The Frost Fugling" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
  
• "Leaves and Sunsets" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
  
• "Motley" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
  
• "Black Pudding" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
  
• "A Happy Ending" - 1st Draft, Unsubmitted
  
• "Illuminated" - 3rd Draft, Unsubmitted
  
• "Pictures of the Old Port" - 5th Draft, Unsubmitted
  
• "What Price Stamps" - 3rd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "Ferian Fetlock Cures a Horse" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted
• "A Cup of Coffee" / "Morning Tea" - 2nd Draft, Unsubmitted

I just finished "Pa's Darling." I'm not sure quite what I was expecting after that first incredible paragraph, but what I found was a different kind of story than the one I expected.

It was all exposition, or at least virtually so. The dialogue presented was in snatches of a line or two here and there, and served to make the narrator's recollections come to life more than plain exposition would have.

A couple of passages indicate the conceit of the story, that it was being physically written by the narrator. (She even reminds herself to hide the manuscript from her husband.) On the outside, the story is pure backstory, childhood and first marriage and second marriage, leading up to the death of her father.

But it actually goes deeper than that. The narrator is not a writer, although she is intelligent. she must have had some impetus to write, such as great emotion to deal with. And I believe that is the case. The last "event" in the story is an argument between her and her husband Dicky. That argument took place just before the supposed composition of the story. The argument was about her father. So her purpose for writing was to deal with both the loss of her father and, as the closing passages indicate, the way her father has effectively ruined both of her marriages.

The story ends on a question, which is often considered bad form. I actively dislike stories that end on punctuation other than a period. I once read a halfway decent novel that ending on an ellipsis.... I felt so cheated. But in this story, the question mark works, and it's because of the structure.

You see, although the author, Louis Auchincloss, was writing a short story, the narrator, Kate Phelps, was not. She was writing for herself, and what is more natural than writing a piece for yourself that ends on a question? Unlike an essay, the "thesis statement" of a diary entry is often the last line, and when that line is a question, it usually poses the question which the entire piece was trying to ask all along. It's just that it sometimes takes writing effort to get to a clear statement of that question.

I would now have to go back and reevaluate a lot of what I thought about that first paragraph. The end result is so much richer than I had noticed at first. How much of the way the narrator presented herself was done with a sense of irony? And more importantly, is that something that I could ever learn to do?

Publication Status:

• Submitted: 2
• Accepted: 1
• Rejected: 1
• Pending: 0