Five Reasons Why Happy Endings Can Be Bad For You

1.     In life, not every story has a happily ever after.  And even when good things do happen, it is rarely all good.  Most of life it about balance, and good can’t exist without bad.  With a lot of stories, though, even semi-unhappy endings aren’t very good.  Even if an ending isn’t happy, even if the hero does die, it has to have some meaning, some form of closure.  But once again, life isn’t always like that.  Humans make mistakes, and more often than not, they don’t get the chance to right them.  

2.     It seems like every story has to have a happy ending now.  Why?  Partly because sequels are so popular at the moment.  What’s becoming even more common is to have the hero pretend to die, or almost die, but never put them in any actual danger.  Six recent example:  StarTrek Into Darkness, Halo 4, Dark Knight Rises, Sherlock Holmes: A Games of Shadows, The Avengers, and Pacific Rim.  Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.  Out of those, all share very similar endings, and four deal with the hero personally delivering a bomb, supposedly to go down with it, and then miraculously surviving. 

3.     Happy endings can be irresponsible.  I’ve always argued that censorship of certain content is unfair and irresponsible.  Particularly since I write a lot of military centered stories, censoring the horrors of war seems completely unfair to those who have suffered through them.  To portray their experiences as anything less that what they experienced seems to me to be doing them a disservice.  If you’re uncomfortable reading about war, then imagine what it’s like for those doing the fighting, or the innocent people who get caught in the crossfire.

4.     Happy endings let readers off the hook, and undermine any emotional value of the story.  This advice I first received from Michael Meyerhofer, my first creative writing teacher.  I’d written a story dealing with commercialization and the environment, and ended it with a joke.  He said that the joke undermined the power of the story because it let readers off the hook, lightening the mood and distracting them from the true purpose of the story.  

As Alan Alda's character, Hawkeye, says in M*A*S*H, "War is war and Hell is Hell, and of the two, war is worse.  There are no innocent bystanders in Hell."

      That’s not to say humor is out of place in serious writing, M*A*S*H did a great job of balancing the two, particularly later in the series, but ending on a positive note can leave people feeling content rather than pondering the meaning of the writing and wondering how it applies in their own lives.  

      A recent story that does a good job of not letting readers off the hook is Lotería, by Mario Alberto Zambrano.  In the end, the protagonist makes an interesting decision, one that leaves the reader with mixed feelings and really lets the themes play out fully.  It gives the reader something to think about, and that was really refreshing.

5.      It can be inhuman.  Sometimes in order to achieve a happy ending, writers force characters to make decisions they probably wouldn’t if they were human. Anymore when I write, I try to portray characters as realistically as possible, even if that means sometimes letting them make decisions that are different from what people expect from traditional stories. It wasn't something I did when I started writing, or even until recently.  I grew up in a world of happy endings, and even when I killed off characters, it had to matter.  

      But I think it can often be more important to stay true to the humanity of a character and let them make the decision they would make, rather than forcing them into an unrealistic situation just to find closure.  That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy stories with closure, just that sometimes they can be frustratingly unrealistic.  I’m curious to see what other writers think of this.  

      One story that does an excellent job handling its characters realistically is the video game The Last of Us, in which the protagonist makes a controversial decision at the end. It is a decision many people might disagree with, and not one you’d expect. Yet it makes the most sense for that character, and is true to his humanity.

Now, I’m not saying that every story has to have a darker ending, not at all.  There is be a place in the world of literature and film for optimistic, escapist stories, but it should be a place, not the majority or the entirety.  Also, as I said, mixed endings that leave the reader thinking are, in my opinion, probably both the most realistic and the most effective.  

Interactive Storytelling

My rather aged Xbox 360

While literary citizenship tends to focus primarily on books, it has led me to consider other areas where I find compelling stories.  To me, the story matters more than the medium.  I’m double majoring in filmmaking and creative writing because I like to write and I am a very visual person, but also because both are excellent storytelling mediums. 

However, taking a survey on the books in my life made me think of other places I find stories.  A primary one for me would be videogames.  I find that I probably play videogames as much if not more than I read, and I probably spend more money on videogames each year than on books (partially because games cost more). 

At this point, books are widely considered “legitimate art,” while videogames are not.  Likely this is just growing pains, since videogames are relatively new and books have been around for a while.  Movies went through a similar phase in their early years. 

Minecraft cover art

Another part of this may be that Minecraft, for example.  Yet it’s still incredibly fun to play, and allows for the players to create their own narratives.  Others seem more like somewhat interactive movies, consisting mostly of cutscenes and telling a story, but with almost no gameplay.  It’s a difficult balance to achieve, and one style is not necessarily better than another.
some games have no story,

Yet even when games do tell a story, frequently it isn’t a very good one.  This is something the industry seems to struggle with.  A lot probably has to do with balancing story and gameplay.  Battlefield 4 left a lot to be desired as far as story, but the game parts of the campaign were still fun to play.  On the other side, The Last of Us had an incredible story, but I’ve heard the gameplay was repetitive. 

It takes a long time for a game to produce both, and distributors are trying to crank out as many games as possible.  However, games with longer development periods can be successful.  Take GTA V as an example.  It was in development for far longer than the other blockbuster games of 2013, and did better as a result (despite a rocky online launch).

In future blogs, I may take a look at some other examples and continue to try and figure out where videogames belong in the community of storytelling.  I don’t necessarily think they should be judged in the same way books are, but games like The Last of Us have proved that videogames can tell compelling stories as well as books or movies.  My hope is that as this blog continues, we’ll see the quality of storytelling in games rise.

Now is a bad time to write.

With a busy, multimodal life, this is a typical excuse.  

My sophomore year at Ball State I took Cathy Day's novel writing course, and that forced me to find time to write every week, something that helped me make significant progress.  Unfortunately, as a double major, I sometimes have semesters without any writing classes, and frequently it can be "hard to find time."  

Undoubtedly, there are specific conditions under which I prefer to do my writing.  Sitting in an open meadow surrounded by indian paintbrush at 8,000ft with a clear view of snowy peaks would be one.  

But in this way, writing can be a bit like advice I once heard about having children.  If you wait until you're ready, it's never going to happen.

For a Ball State creative writing major, English 425 (special topics in creative writing) is a required class.  And while there are a lot of special creative writing topics I would love to explore, the English department only offers limited options.  Cathy Day's course on literary citizenship I had heard about, and it seemed the more interesting of the two (I think the other was something about poets).  

As much as I don't use social media and know that perhaps I won't always enjoy the class, I think it will be a good learning experience and will help me in the future.