Happy Endings

Fiction novels these days have mood swings.

As with a lot of other things in life (predestination and free will, for instance), people tend to swing one way or another on happy endings.  There are two mistakes novelists make when writing endings, and that's either to make it too happy or not happy enough.

This particular subject was brought to my attention by a person named Hana who commented on my post about fantasy cliches.  She wrote this:

" I, personally, adore writing teen fiction, so long as I never finish with the all too familiar 'happy ending.' Life has loose ends, odds that won't match up, people that end up alone, afraid, and without hope. You can't tie a story up with a pretty red bow and and call it a masterpiece. Often, things are left unfinished, words remain unsaid, and regret lingers in the air. If we are steering from cliche its not the subjects I stress to look out for, more-so the endings. "

I agree wholeheartedly that things aren't as easy as many books portray it to be. There needs to be grit. Too many novels make everything tie up in the end, easily and without cost. There needs to be cost, otherwise there won't be meaning. The world doesn't work like that.

But here is where I differ, very strongly.

I never have the excuse to write a completely realistic novel. As a writer, I have a vision of a sort of world that is different from our own, a better sort of world, the sort of world that is sanctified - even if we never get there.  But you cannot change the world unless you show what it could be, not what it already is.

Maybe fathers leaving their kids is realistic, but it's certainly something we want to change.  Maybe there's a story where the dad comes back - or never leaves at all.

Say somebody got lost in the wilderness. He's starving, he hasn't had water for hours. What good would it do to come up to him and describe to him his story, front-to-back, thirst and all? It would certainly be realistic. That is, after all, the way his life worked.

But say I sat down and told him a different story, one that was less realistic. Say I told him that if he had the strength to cross the wilderness, there was a lush oasis on the other side. Say that I told him that there was water there, and fruit he could eat, and a way to get back to civilization.

Realistic? Maybe not. But it gives him something a "sober realistic novel of to-day" (as Chesterton would say) never could. It gives him hope. It gives him vision. It gives him the motivation to change.

As a novelist, I'm not in the business of showing the world as it is. I'm in the business of changing the world into what it could be.

And, as a disclaimer, this involves showing the world as it is, but not stopping there.  The first three-quarters or Tornado C show the world as it is - the fantasy world, anyway.  But as things rise to a climax, that is where my story departs from our perception of what is "realistic".  My story has a happy ending.  Not one without pain or loss, but a happy ending.  Because even if unhappy endings are realistic, that's not what each of us wants in our own lives.

That doesn't mean I'm going to write perfect characters and completely happy endings and god-from-the-machine climaxes. But that does mean that I'll never write a book that is completely realistic - because realism is a portrait of depravity.

I'm not going to write a Brave New World. I'm going to write a Lord of the Rings.

What do you think?  Happy endings or not?  Do you agree with how I defined realism? Why?  I'd love to hear your thoughts.