Not Always Happily Ever After
While chatting with Jean last night, she mentioned a blog post by Rosina Lippi about sad endings. Took me a while to read it - Rosina was evidently having site problems - but she's spot on. Personally, I find endings where everything's tied up nice and sweet and the world is perfect again to be aggravating. I like things to be a bit more real, where the character keeps on keeping on not because they won the golden ring, but because to not keep on keeping on means the bad guys won.
Anyone who's read my books knows I don't write HEA endings. Hurt characters stay that way, folks die, most get physically/emotionally/mentally maimed... Yet, they go forth onto the rest of their lives, battered and bruised but not yet broken. That's not to say that I harm characters for harm's sake, each death, each painful episode serves a purpose within the scope of the book or the overall story I'm telling. In real life, senseless things happen all the time, but in a book it all must make sense and serve a purpose within the whole. Like the example she gave from the sequel to Lonesome Dove, having a beloved character kicked in the head by a horse and killed in the opening bits serves no purpose and it aggravates the reader, potentially to the point of never reading that author's work again.
It's important to play fair, not necessarily nice, but within reasonable rules. People don't always win and characters shouldn't either. You never know how grand they can become, or to what depths they'll crawl, until the worst lands upon them and leaves scars. As a writer, making those lasting scars is one of my most favorite parts of the job. It shows me that my characters live and breathe. What can be better than that?
Anyone who's read my books knows I don't write HEA endings. Hurt characters stay that way, folks die, most get physically/emotionally/mentally maimed... Yet, they go forth onto the rest of their lives, battered and bruised but not yet broken. That's not to say that I harm characters for harm's sake, each death, each painful episode serves a purpose within the scope of the book or the overall story I'm telling. In real life, senseless things happen all the time, but in a book it all must make sense and serve a purpose within the whole. Like the example she gave from the sequel to Lonesome Dove, having a beloved character kicked in the head by a horse and killed in the opening bits serves no purpose and it aggravates the reader, potentially to the point of never reading that author's work again.
It's important to play fair, not necessarily nice, but within reasonable rules. People don't always win and characters shouldn't either. You never know how grand they can become, or to what depths they'll crawl, until the worst lands upon them and leaves scars. As a writer, making those lasting scars is one of my most favorite parts of the job. It shows me that my characters live and breathe. What can be better than that?