Interviews/ProfilesThe Agony Column interviews Ann VanderMeer.The Agony Column on NPR Report on Jeff and Ann VanderMeer (podcast).Dead Robots Society interviews Deborah Kent, who’s running Con-Jour 2.0 (podcast).Michael A. Ventrella interviews James …

I like books where I disagree with the protagonist’s choices, if the protagonist’s choices make sense for the protagonist, and I’m not particularly interested in didacticism or whether or not the “message” of the book is comfortable or progressive; what I want is not to be thrown out of the story by an unrealistic amount of either bleakness or lightness. If the setting is very bleak and the characters must truly fight to survive then I like a happy ending, particularly if a character I have liked has died; if the setting is generally pleasant and conditions are not too difficult, then I want there to be some twist in the ending so that the whole thing does not hit me with sugar shock. (Many books that others find comforting are anything but comforting to me, particularly romances and family narratives–but then that’s a matter of personal history.)

I hate to use this example, but I was at the gym last night and Steel Magnolias was on. Now, I sure as hell don’t agree with Shelby’s choices, but I have to really admire the funeral scene in that movie. That’s a sad ending that works for me. Occasionally something does work like that. But I do suspect that a lot of Great Literature is deliberately intended to be as tragic and sad as possible, probably because it gets them awards. And that isn’t always organic to the story.

I think it’s also a statement on the particular society she’s in. Even in that time period, there were other ways to live. Lily just can’t see them. Her very limited society has come to feel like the whole world. It’s like some horribly dysfunctional office when you can’t imagine having any other job.

I don’t mind ‘unhappy’ endings at all – as long as they WORK. Nothing annoys me more than a story nosediving when there was a perfectly reasonable way for it to end differently. And I don’t mean that it has to very dramatically ‘be no other way’ for things to go, just convince me that for whatever reason this happened and that’s the way it is. That’s one of the reasons I stopped reading the Valdemar series *I love these books I’m not attacking them* I’m just saying that I got a bit tired of the same tragic sequences. Not that they all ended ‘badly’ but well, they are a bit heavy at times. And I don’t think they had to be.

That said, I also agree that you write a story ‘the way it needs to be writ’. I’ve had my sister ask me numerous times ‘Why (insert nearly ANY question here)?’ And many times all I’ve been able to say is ‘That’s the way it needed to be written’ to which I get a scowl and a ‘hmmmph’. I would never ask a writer to change something just to make the public happy (standard marketability aside) and that’s one thing I fear most as a writer trying to be successful – that I’ll finally get an agent, an editor and they’ll ‘love’ my book and then tell me to change most of it… of course, first, I need to get that agent…

This is very, very true. As a reader, I live for happy endings. Sad endings make me want to throw the book across the room, even if they are well done. However, as a writer, I lean a lot more toward ambiguous endings. :>

Yeah, sometimes it’s confusing to be me.”

*choke* (note to self: put down the tea when reading this blog) LOL! Yes. My reader self and my writer self both agree with you. Thank you!