Must an ending be happy?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SlidingScaleOfEndings

I don't know about most, but I prefer at least some optimism in the ending.

However, many famous and well written novels and stories have sad endings. The Time Traveller's Wife and My sister's Keeper are 2 that spring to mind.

Some readers will say Yes, and some will say No. Depends on how you define Happy or not Happy...

My preference as a reader, endings should have a conclusion to all the questions and conflicts that have occurred during the course of the book and that is what makes me happy.

The ending HAS to be logical and satisfying, as suggested by the set-up before it.

That said: A truly miserable ending is hard to pull off while keeping it satisfying - It can be done, and often is in Literary, but a bittersweet ending is easier to write and to read.

Is there a difference between happy and satisfying?

Yes...

... This doesn't seem like it can be a serious question. Haven't you ever read or watched a masterpiece with a devastating ending? There are seriously so many examples it's not even worth mentioning any.

Remember that sad endings can still be uplifting though.

Definitely not. I prefer unhappy endings.

thothguard51 said:

My preference as a reader, endings should have a conclusion to all the questions and conflicts that have occurred during the course of the book and that is what makes me happy.

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I totally agree with you. As long as the important points are adressed and answered, then I'm happy. If I'm happy, I don't tend to prefer one kind of ending over the other.

I think the ending has to fit the book. Like, readers will be quite pissed if the book seems to be setting up a happy ending--is all cheerful and light and fluffy--and then all of the sudden the author yanks the rug out from under it all. But if it's clear in the book that Bad Things Can Happen, I think readers can accept an unhappy ending too. I can, anyway. An ending doesn't need to be happy--it just needs to wrap up the conflicts in the book and fit with the rest of it in terms of tone and style.

This is the type of question where I'd rather be wrong and believe the answer is "no" than accept a world where the answer might be "yes".

Ed Panther said:

... This doesn't seem like it can be a serious question. Haven't you ever read or watched a masterpiece with a devastating ending? There are seriously so many examples it's not even worth mentioning any.

Remember that sad endings can still be uplifting though.

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Thank you!!!

If there is a rule that agents or publishers won't read or will tend to nix MS with unhappy endings, I truly feel all author's owe it to the personal integrity of the craft to ignore it. Write your story with the *real* ending first. You can always write a happy ending to make it publishable later.

God, I hope not. My book is not uplifting at the end. That said, it's labelled dark fantasy so it's not necessarily expected.

I know some agents do say they don't want downer books, but not all. So write it the way it needs to be and don't sweat it.

that was me!

Hey, didn't mean to give you the wrong impression in a short sentence.

It's not that your ending has to be happy. I think resolution is a better word. Closure. Completeness. I felt your ending was incomplete. Still not the right word, but I hope you understand better. Uhm, if someone gets killed trying to conquer his fears, that could be a complete story. But if a someone tries to conquer his fears, and never succeeds, it doesn't feel complete (assuming that's the main theme of the novel.) Sometimes there's no success like failure . . .

Remember. I am not critiquing your novel. I am critiquing your query. 90% of the time when something feels wrong in the query, it's OK in the novel. You've got 100K words to get it right in the novel, only 250 to get it right in a query. You've spent years on your novel, maybe a few weeks on your query. Much more difficult. I'm totally incapable of getting the flavor of my novel across in my query.

I really have no idea whether your ending works in your novel. How could I? I haven't read it. But I felt it didn't work in your query, and an agent might have the same problem.

So sure, sad endings can be very powerful. Look at Love Story. Your job is to convince the agent of that.

Of course not.



...Having said that, I do not like downer endings. This is probably the number one reason that I stop reading a novel part way through. I see the ending coming, flip to the end to confirm my suspicions, and chuck it across the room.

I hardly think that's normal, though.

EDIT: so, to specifically answer your question, I do feel cheated if I don't get at least a bittersweet ending, but I can't speak for most readers. Also, I try choose books accordingly. I do not understand catharsis one bit.

Maybe this is the pessimist in me talking, but I find books more satisfying if they don't have happy endings. How often does life end up with everything wrapped in a neat, happy bow? Novels should be realistic.

The Collector is one of my favorite books of all time, and man does it have a depressing ending. Realistically, that's the only way it could have ended without me raising and eyebrow. I don't think it would be considered a literary pioneer it didn't end on a negative note.

It all depends on the individual novel, of course. It has to have a logical ending that fits the rest of what you've written. Even novels that end on a happier note have to have some elements that don't work out for the protagonist.

Just glancing at my top shelf: Pete Dexter's The Paperboy, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, Nick Cave's And The Ass Saw The Angel, and China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. Their endings vary from "Everything sucks and everyone dies" to "Well, shit." But they're pretty damn good. I think all of them won major awards and/or critical acclaim.

As long as it's interesting, people will dig it. But don't build up a big warm fuzzy feeling of hope all through the book and crap all over it at the end. That peeves me. If it's pretty clear from the start that this probably isn't going to end well, it's much less of a "downer". Know what I mean?

I think the question isn't whether a story can have an unhappy ending (well, duh, of course it can) or whether happy endings are more popular than sad endings (I dunno but I imagine so), but whether agents and publishers have a rule making a unhappy ending from an unknown author a nix.

I can't answer that as I know nothing about agents or publishers but I'd imagine there are some who would but many who would not. I wouldn't view an individual "happy endings only" publisher as a serious concern for my unhappy story any more than I'd view a "science-fiction" only publisher a serious concern for my non-sci-fi story.

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Ed Panther said:

... This doesn't seem like it can be a serious question. Haven't you ever read or watched a masterpiece with a devastating ending? There are seriously so many examples it's not even worth mentioning any.

Remember that sad endings can still be uplifting though.

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James Donovan said:

This doesn't seem like it can be a serious question. Haven't you ever read or watched a masterpiece with a devastating ending? There are seriously so many examples it's not even worth mentioning any.

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Huh?

Goldenleaves said:

Is there a difference between happy and satisfying?

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The human mind seeks order. The story's ending has to make sense for it to be satisfying.

In other words, the book is a set of equations and the ending needs to be their correct solution.

When a story has a premise, the ending is the final key that unlocks the puzzle. As the reader travels through the story, their mind assembles all the little facts into a picture, and it also struggles to see the underlying logic behind that picture.

The story ending provides the final few clues that allow the reader to grasp the underlying order. At that point, they have been guided to the solution the writer wanted to "prove"--i.e. they can now say what the book's premise was.

If the book's premise is, "There is hope, but not for us," then the characters will get a sad ending but there will be hints that their world as a whole is going to get better.

If the book's premise is, "Everything is corrupt and the universe mocks us," the characters will get a sad ending and there will be no hope for their world either.

Both those endings can be satisfying without being happy. They just need to be consistent with everything that happened in the novel prior to the ending.

A book with the premise, "Love conquers all," will have a happy ending for the characters and will likely take a neutral stance on their world.

All that said, there are plenty of books that seem meant to be pure entertainment, not an argument in favour of a premise.

However, most of these have a default premise, and it's a very deep one. Human beings are social animals and have a concept of justice. Justice is not a universal concept; it's an idea specific to creatures that evolved to live and work together.

So books that are meant to be pure entertainment generally default to the premise, "Good actions are rewarded and evil ones are punished." (Where "good" and "evil" are pretty much defined as "selfless" and "selfish", i.e. either good for society or bad for it.)

And this is what provides the satisfying ending for the reader. It's also usually a happy ending, which is appropriate for books that are intended to be pure fun.

I like sad endings with a little bit of hope in there somewhere. Whether it's mostly happy or mostly sad, I can't stand endings where the author takes way to long to wrap things up.

I really like sad endings when they seem appropriate.

I don't like sad endings when they just do it to evoke some emotion, when it seems out of place (Jodi Picoult's Handle with Care...ugh. I can't read her anymore).

No.

It can be sad. It can be bittersweet. For example, one of my books ends with the goal being achieved, but the characters are imprisoned. Not exactly happy.

I've always felt that an ending should be natural and appropriate, and not forced and/or unrealistic. That applies whether it's happy, sad or neutral.

tko said:

It's not that your ending has to be happy. I think resolution is a better word. Closure. Completeness.

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/\ This. /\

The story should finish what it begins. In Law & Order, even when they lost the case, or the "bad guy" got away, the questions were answered... or left hanging in a way that made you realize that there were no answers to be had. (This worked for them because part of the problem with the justice system is that you really don't know exactly what happened, either physically or in the minds of the parties involved. You can have all the evidence in the world, and still never precisely answer the question of what happened, or why... and, as cops and lawyers, they only have a finite amount of time to focus on a single case before they must move on to the next one, whether or not they reach the resolution they want.)

As for your query, I couldn't tell you, not having read it. As a reader, I'd prefer if there was some hint of hope or healing - not necessarily a "happy rainbows forever" ending, but something to indicate that the MC was starting to move forward and at least attempt to heal, that they'd passed through the heart of darkness and come out stronger. If it's just one horrible thing after another, proving again and again that scars are permanent and no happiness can be found after such physical and psychological devastation... well, it may be authentic, but that's not my kind of story.

JMHO...