What Is One Thing All Your Stories Have In Common?

[defaux]

Melancholy.

I have realised, literally just tonight, that I don't write happy endings. At all. At best my stories end ambiguously, but more often they are sad.

I spent the evening practicing writing with a positive inflection, just to see if I could.

 

[Altani]

Melancholy.

I have realised, literally just tonight, that I don't write happy endings. At all. At best my stories end ambiguously, but more often they are sad.

I spent the evening practicing writing with a positive inflection, just to see if I could.

Yeah, I mean, I’ve been contemplating how I want to end my series I’ve been writing a long time, and I think the ending is going to end up being bittersweet. Like, you kind of win, but you kind of lose, too, because that’s how life is.

 

[defaux]

I keep circling back to this thread, but I feel like I have just had an epiphany. It's something so obvious that has been right in front of me, I just haven't seen it until now.

I don't write antagonists. So how do I create conflict? My protagonists usually—possibly always—confront various aspects of themselves. They are their own antagonist, often unwittingly playing both roles.

Perhaps this is why I find it challenging to write happy endings. How do you win when you are yourself the greatest challenge? What does victory look like when it necessarily also means defeat?

 

[Homer Potvin]

I keep circling back to this thread, but I feel like I have just had an epiphany. It's something so obvious that has been right in front of me, I just haven't seen it until now.

I don't write antagonists. So how do I create conflict? My protagonists usually—possibly always—confront various aspects of themselves. They are their own antagonist, often unwittingly playing both roles.

Perhaps this is why I find it challenging to write happy endings. How do you win when you are yourself the greatest challenge? What does victory look like when it necessarily also means defeat?

Person vs themselves... or man vs himself, as we were taught in the 90s. It's a fundamental conflict in all literature and one of the oldest archetypes, so you're fine there.

 

[Naomasa298]

I wrote an unambiguously happy ending once.

I promise not to do it again.

Although seriously, the editor asked me to make it even more upbeat and happy.

 

[Rzero]

For quite some time, I believed that the stories I came up with were all so different that they might not even be recognizable as coming from the same writer. And it's true that genre and voice and tone vary quite a bit from project to project, but my two and a half drafted novels and over a dozen outlines for potential books have formed some patterns.

I have a tendency to crush my characters with tragedies that force impossible decisions in morally murky new realities and test the persistence or fragility of their identities in the aftermath. Triumph and salvation usually have a high cost in my stories, whether through sacrifice or inevitable loss. The balance often ends up bittersweet.

I build very different worlds, but they usually have one thing in common: a high-contrast juxtaposition of the ordinary and the fantastical. I strive to create authentic sensory realism in more or less recognizable realities with sff and other genre elements that are simultaneously intrusive and inevitable. That's the goal, at least.

I just noticed/remembered that the OP asked for one thing, but it's too late. I'm not deleting one of those, lol.

 

[Kerrin]

I wrote an unambiguously happy ending once.

I promise not to do it again.

Although seriously, the editor asked me to make it even more upbeat and happy.

i LoVe iT wHeN tHaT hApPeNs although it's with music / lyrics more often than prose. I'll be asked "couldn't you make a happier version?" and be like... "this is the happier version."

 

[Rath Darkblade]

I'll be asked "couldn't you make a happier version?" and be like... "this is the happier version."

If your happier version has people asking for something happier, what's the gloomy version like?

 

[Smitty91]

All of my characters are exclusively animals.

 

[Tallyfire]

Right now, all my stories are about stars.

 

[GoldMoon]

The protagonist starts from a weak beginning, as a nobody, and works themselves up to power/leadership. Also shields. There's always some sort of shielding somewhere in it.

 

[JLT]

Looking back on the stuff I've written, I find that there are only two common threads, both described by Kurt Vonnegut.

1. The character must want something, even if it's only a glass of water.
2. When Kurt's father was on his deathbed, he remarked to Kurt, "You know, there's one thing about everything you've written: you never had a villain in them." Kurt replied, "That's one of the things I learned in the army."

The second item reflects defaux's post earlier, in that there may be opposition, but true evil is never the driving force.

 

[Schism]

Not sure if in all of them but most of my protagonists seem to have some sort of hallucinatory bent. I was thinking that randomly the other day, how most of the main characters, for one reason or another, tend to have a fixation with mental imaginary. Although in some cases, it's not entirely a hallucination.

Many of the novel length projects also deal with some form of grief, if not that a morbid preoccupation with death, or the darker side of human existence.

Another consistent element might be love gone horribly wrong.