It's probably not much of a surprise for me to say that I prefer to write stories with happy endings. I know it's cliche, and expected, but to be frank, I don't care. Call it cliche all you want, but look at all of the stories out there that get recognition. How many of them have happy endings? I mean really. From the books that are taught in schools to the ones that get made into movies, how many of them have happy endings? Especially in more recent years. I'd say lately, sad endings have become far more cliche than happy endings.
And I think that's bullshit. I think the world needs happy stories. There's too much sadness, too much anger, and too much fear. Those stories need to be told too, surely, but not to the frequency that they have been as of late. I fear for the day a story having a happy ending is considered the bold choice. And lately it seems like we're getting closer and closer to that day.
Even stories that do have supposed happy endings are really more bittersweet than anything. I understand that people have a desire to write stories that are true to life. As a writer, I know that my own experiences are where I draw the vast majority of my inspiration from. But I also know that I read stories to get away from the real world far more often than I do it to try and emulate it. I'm not interested in reading stories that I could believe myself being in. I want to read stories in which I wish I was in.
When I was a kid, everyone read fiction. No one ever though to themselves, man, I wish this book were more realistic. Why would we? True stories were boring. They didn't tickle our brains the way these imaginative fantasies could. We would run around the playgrounds, pretending we were characters in books we had read or shows we had seen. No one ever wanted to be the villain, so we made up our own in our heads, and they were huge, and powerful, greater than anything the real world could contain. And it was fantastic.
As I grew older, I saw the people around me start to stray away from these things, start to focus more on what they could see and touch, and I didn't understand. Nothing about what we had done had become any less fun. It had just become too "childish."
So I learned to contain it. I didn't want to, but I didn't have much choice. Playing pretend wasn't a thing I was "allowed" to do anymore. So I found new ways to get it out. And I wrote. It was something I had done before, but not with the new vigor that came from this lack of fun in my daily life. I poured the joy from the games I had played into my writing. And no one would ever want to play as the guy who lost, so why would I write that character? We wanted to beat the bad guy. We wanted to be victorious. And just before I became "too old" to play my games, we started to realize that we wanted to get the girl. So I decided that was what I wanted to write.
In my adult life, limited though it may be, most people I have talked to say that they remember these days. And a lot of them miss them. The miss the simpler days, when we could play and have fun and not feel restricted by responsibilities. That's what I want to tap into. I want my stories to make readers happy. I want my readers to imagine themselves in the position of my characters, and think about how fun and cool it would be. There's downsides, sure. There always are. Even as kids we knew that you had to lose against the bad guy at least once before you could beat them in the end. It wasn't as fun if it was too easy.
I live in a world of a lot of sadness and darkness. I see and hear about people on a near daily basis who have problems, who are closer to death than I can imagine, who have lost hope. I don't like that world. So I choose to make my own. I choose to make worlds in which hope is the leading factor. Where happiness is attainable. I feel like people have forgotten that that's an option, and I want to remind them of that. I want people to read my writings and smile.
So call me cliche all you want. But if at any point you read something that I wrote, and it makes you even the tiniest bit happy, then I win.
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