Or: Thoughts on the problem of works left unfinished.
Recently my mother bought me a copy of Diana Wynne Jones’s final novel, The Islands of Chaldea. I haven’t read it yet, because every time I pick it up I start crying. Partly out of sadness because she is gone, and there will never be any more Diana Wynne Jones stories. Ever. But also partly out of gratitude, because we get one more ride. This is thanks to her sister, Ursula Jones, who finished the book after Diana passed away.
Diana was lucky, I think, to have a sister like Ursula, who was able to take up the ropes and bring the ship in, as it were. Other writers had no one. Others had someone, but they were not up to the task.
Thinking on this, and reflecting on my own mortality, it has become obvious that I will leave at least one incomplete work when I go. In the unlikely event that I die in a car crash tomorrow, I will leave three novels, a novella, and a whole series of short stories hanging. And since I cannot see an end to my writing—I will hopefully be writing up until the day, if not the hour, that I die—I have no reason to presume that, should I die in sixty years from a degenerative illness, things would be much different.
So the problem of what will happen to my unfinished work will remain. And while I realize there will (hopefully) be a lot of time for me to refine this idea, here is what I would like to happen to my unfinished works (and I cannot imagine it changing much):
I don’t want any one person to finish my work. Even assuming there is anyone I would trust to do so (there currently isn’t), and assuming that they survive me, I still wouldn’t want someone other than me finishing my stories.
Even so, I don’t want my stories to go unfinished. I want my readers to find out what happens. I want them to have closure. So even though I usually abhor the idea of giving the reader the task of coming up with their own endings, this is more or less what I would like done with my unfinished work.
To be precise, all my work that is functionally unfinished (completed first drafts will not count: there must be significant chunks of story missing, and I must have not gotten to write THE END yet), should be given over to whatever fans I have managed to earn, to complete at their discretion.
There will be no One True ending for the works I leave unfinished. Rather, there will be a multitude of endings. Because if I’ve learned anything from the fanfiction community, it’s that they as a body of people are more creative than most individual writers. I would not trust one person to complete my stories, but I would trust the collective writers of ArchiveOfOurOwn.org. I would trust the people who loved my work to come up with the endings that pleased them best, and write them down for other people to read. And if you were a fan, and saw a fan-ending you didn’t much like, well, you could write your own. And it would be just as real.
Far from being left with no endings, my readers would have a plethora of endings, and could build their ideal ending if they pleased. And it would forever be an open field: a person who discovered my work long after I was gone could still join in.
No one might ever arrive at the ending I had intended, but I think the odds are good, given enough time, that some of them could come close.
I’ve heard some writers scoff at fanfiction, and though I respect their opinions, I disagree. I find fanfiction and fanon (fan canon) a welcome relief from the straitlaced world of popular media—that can also serve to keep original writers on their toes. I read fanfiction (though never fanfiction of my own work—if any exists), in part because I want to challenge myself to be as original and creative and brave as the fifteen-year-old girls writing civil war, space opera, or firehouse AUs (Alternate Universes), or post-canon fix-it fics, or just plain-old, wild, gay smut, for their friends.
I tell a lie. There is one person I’d trust to finish my stories for me, but as she is already in a place where her stories can no longer reach the living world, I will gladly bequeath mine to my fans. I can only hope that, should I live a hundred more years, that vibrant community of earnest, loving, devoted writers will still be going strong—and that, by the time I am finished here, I will have managed to earn some who are ready and willing to take on the task.
My only other request would be that, although they are of course free to come up with whatever endings they liked, they remember that I prefer they make them happy ones.
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Goldeen Ogawa is a writer, illustrator and cartoonist. To keep tabs on what she is doing you can follow her on twitter @GrimbyTweets, and on Tumblr. You can also send her an email at goldeenogawa@gmail.com.