I've written before that I strongly feel that the ending of any story has to be justified by the story itself. The brighter the end, the darker the journey needs to be. However, recently, I've found myself wondering whether keeping everything so dark for so long is really in the best interest of the audience.
Yes, we want to get readers emotionally invested in our work, but sometimes getting too dark can drag down a piece of work into the doldrums of despair. Take a pair of my favorite TV shows - The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. Both stories are not only well told, but they're infamous for keeping their characters in the shittiest of circumstances. Any victory in The Walking Dead feels like cause for a celebration, even if that victory is something as simple as not getting beaten to death with a baseball bat. Game of Thrones has gotten better, but people are always dying, and not just the baddies.
I've gotten to a point in my life where I'm kind of tired of sad and depressing. And I'll lose my mind if I read a story that ends on a down note. When I was younger, stories like The Good Son or Skull got my blood pumping, but I find myself nowadays cursing the writer and hoping he or she has to listen to Barney on repeat for all eternity.
Grit matters...but too much grit destroys. Readers need occasional, tiny victories to know hope is still alive. George Bailey needs to marry the girl, Parzival needs to put one over on Nolen Sorrento, and Luke Skywalker needs to escape from Darth Vader. Dark moments should be used a little more sparingly, or at least in conjunction with lighter moments that let the reader know not everything is lost.
I don't know what it is - maybe it has just been the crappiness of society in general the last ten years or so, but I find myself wanting more and more of a happy escape in my fiction. If real life can't work out, maybe fantasy can. Don't get me wrong - I'm not going to make everything sappy, but crapping on people simply for the sake of crapping on them isn't playing well any longer. That crap should at least fertilize something.
Yes, we want to get readers emotionally invested in our work, but sometimes getting too dark can drag down a piece of work into the doldrums of despair. Take a pair of my favorite TV shows - The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. Both stories are not only well told, but they're infamous for keeping their characters in the shittiest of circumstances. Any victory in The Walking Dead feels like cause for a celebration, even if that victory is something as simple as not getting beaten to death with a baseball bat. Game of Thrones has gotten better, but people are always dying, and not just the baddies.
I've gotten to a point in my life where I'm kind of tired of sad and depressing. And I'll lose my mind if I read a story that ends on a down note. When I was younger, stories like The Good Son or Skull got my blood pumping, but I find myself nowadays cursing the writer and hoping he or she has to listen to Barney on repeat for all eternity.
Grit matters...but too much grit destroys. Readers need occasional, tiny victories to know hope is still alive. George Bailey needs to marry the girl, Parzival needs to put one over on Nolen Sorrento, and Luke Skywalker needs to escape from Darth Vader. Dark moments should be used a little more sparingly, or at least in conjunction with lighter moments that let the reader know not everything is lost.
I don't know what it is - maybe it has just been the crappiness of society in general the last ten years or so, but I find myself wanting more and more of a happy escape in my fiction. If real life can't work out, maybe fantasy can. Don't get me wrong - I'm not going to make everything sappy, but crapping on people simply for the sake of crapping on them isn't playing well any longer. That crap should at least fertilize something.
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