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ОглавлениеCHAPTER ONE
FALLING SPARROWS: WORLDS WITHIN TEXTS
The Scope of This Book
The purpose of this book is to help you to write fantasy and science fiction stories. Writing is something you have to teach yourself, by practicing long and hard, but I hope this book will help you to practice more effectively. I shall try to achieve that by making you more aware of what you are doing when you write, enabling you to examine the inner workings of your stories and plan their construction more carefully.
Readers do not, of course, dissect stories in this way. Although they could, if asked, describe the characters or summarize the plot of a story they have read, they did not analyze its components while they were enjoying the text. Nor is it strictly necessary for writers to carry out such analyses as they write; indeed, the ultimate aim of teaching yourself to write is to make the process of writing as comfortable as the process of reading.
Ideally, writing ought to be like riding a bicycle: something you know how to do without having to think consciously about exactly what it is that you are doing. In order to get to that point, however, it may be necessary to go through a phase when you work step by painful step, planning beginnings and endings, thinking about plot structures, considering alternative viewpoints and learning. Some writers do not need to do this, because it all comes naturally to them, but they are rare—and it certainly does no harm to think more deeply about what the process of writing involves.
Many of the problems which arise in the course of writing fantasy and science fiction stories are common to all kinds of stories. Much of what I say in these pages will, therefore, be applicable to any kind of fiction writing. I shall try to bring the particular problems of writing fantasy and science fiction into clear focus, but in the interests of making this guide as complete as possible I shall not skip over the fundamental aspects of story construction. All I shall take for granted is that would-be writers can spell, punctuate and construct grammatical sentences.
As well as describing the particular problems of writing fantasy and science fiction, and offering practical suggestions as to how they might be solved, I shall attempt to explain why the problems arise and how they effect the various kinds of fantasy and science fiction to be found in the marketplace. The more you understand about the anatomy of stories and the ways in which readers use them, the better equipped you will be to find new ways to tackle the perennial problems—and novelty of approach is highly valued in fantasy and science fiction.
I shall not go to great lengths here to describe or define fantasy and science fiction. It is exceedingly difficult to figure out what it is that all stories within any publishing category have, or ought to have, in common—the article on “Definitions” in the Orbit Encyclopedia of Science Fiction consists of six columns of dense and convoluted argument—and if you have picked up this book you probably have as good an idea as anyone else as to what the terms might signify.
From the viewpoint of the writer, the most significant aspect of fantasy and science fiction is that stories of these kinds are either set in imaginary worlds or feature the appearance in the familiar world of some imaginary entity. Although such imaginary intrusions may take different forms in fantasy and science fiction, and may operate according to different rules, the way they function as story devices is very similar. There are far more problems common to both genres than unique to either, so it makes sense to cover them both in the same guide-book.
In subsequent chapters I shall describe the process of constructing real and imaginary worlds and populating them with human and non-human characters in a step-by-step fashion. Before I do that, however, it will be helpful to lay down some general foundations.
* * * *
The Pleasures of Creativity
Why should you want to write fantasy and science fiction?
There are, of course, many possible answers to this question and it is highly likely that every writer’s motives are mixed. Writers can express ideas and emotions that are important to them but have no other means of expression. Some of these ideas may be fantastic and some of the emotions may be given clearer voice in fantastic fiction. The free exercise of the imagination can be exhilarating, and it offers scope for many kinds of artistry. We are all fantasists at heart; however mundane our everyday lives may be we are all dreamers and daydreamers, and our daydreams are among our most precious and personal possessions.
In the final analysis, what writers love about writing is the power of creativity, and writing fantasy or science fiction offers greater scope for the exercise of that power than writing most other kinds of fiction. With these opportunities, however—as with all opportunities—come certain difficulties that writers of other kinds of fiction might not have to face, but the reward is worth the risk.
The real world is a vast and complicated place, which we must take as we find, but even writers who choose to set their stories in the known world, accepting all its limitations, have a precious kind of power. The power we have to control what happens in our lives is very limited; the richest king there ever was could not control the thoughts and feelings of the most wretched slaves bound to his obedience—but even if you were the poorest writer there ever was, who never sold a line, you would have far greater power over the worlds within your texts than that.
Within your texts nobody, be he slave or king, philosopher or lunatic, can consider a thought or experience a feeling without your say so. Without your specification, no one within your texts has any thoughts or feelings, or any existence at all. Writers of realistic fiction use this power sparingly, but it has no limitations of its own; a writer of fantastic fictions can easily overstep the bounds of actual existence.
Within your texts, anything can happen; all you have to do is say so. If the crippled boy requires a miracle before he can walk again, you can work it simply by saying “and then he got up and walked.” If you want God to descend from His Heaven to bow down before the child in question and apologize for putting him in the wheelchair in the first place all you have to do is write it down. Within your story, even God is only one more character (or not, if you care to rule Him out); the power of Creation rests entirely in your hands. Within your story, not a sparrow will fall without your taking the trouble to record its fall, and if you do not want sparrows to fall at all you can save the entire species from that inconvenience with a single sentence.
Writing might be unalloyed joy, were it not for the fact that power is always shadowed by responsibility. Thankfully, the absolute power that writers have is not weighted down with absolute responsibility. It can neither be suppressed nor diminished, except by choice. All writers know, however, that the joy to be obtained from creativity is not a product of the writing process—actual writing is hard work, more taxing in some respects than manual labor—but a matter of looking back at something written and taking pride in the accomplishment.
Many writers actively hate writing, but they love having written, especially if they have written something that seems to them to be worthwhile. This is where the responsibility comes in: if the story is to be reckoned truly worthwhile, that judgment has to be endorsed by someone other than the writer. It is good to have godlike power over your creation, but it is even better to have worshipful admirers to inform you that you have exercised that power wisely and well. Because it is done in private and in solitude it is sometimes possible to forget that writing is essentially an act of communication, but no writer should ever lose sight of potential readers.
* * * *
Writers and Readers
It is because writing is addressed to readers that the power of the writer is subject to certain constraints. You, as the writer, can do anything at all, but if it is to be worth doing then it must be possible for you, as the reader—and, hopefully, for other readers too—to approve of it. Some writers are perfectly content with their own approval, but even they probably feel that such contentment smacks of cowardice. Most writers use their own approval as a kind of filter, to sort out that which should enjoy the privilege of not falling prey to the avid DELETE button before the finished product is submitted for the approval of others.
The absolute power that a writer has to determine what happens within a text can begin to seem rather feeble when the need for reader approval is added into the picture. For this reason, writers exist in rather uneasy relationship to their potential readers, particularly to the editors who function as “gatekeepers” regulating the flow of texts into the marketplace. The godlike power of the writer can be abruptly reduced to the severely limited power of a humble servant when the completed text falls upon the desk of an editor. Writers fear editors, and sometimes come perilously close to hating them (which helps to explain why so many editors end up married to writers, at least for a while).
Because writers can do anything at all within the worlds of their texts there is a sense in which anyone who can formulate words can be a writer. Because every act of writing assumes a reader, however, there are all kinds of matters which writers have to bear in mind if they are to make what they write intelligible, interesting and admirable—even to themselves. The first and foremost issue that the writer must consider in making this attempt is plausibility. The world within a text must be designed in such a way that it is acceptable to the reader.
It is often assumed that “plausible” is the same as “believable,” and that “believable” is the same as “possible” but in fantasy and science fiction these equivalences break down. If a story is about events that are supposed to have happened in the ordinary course of affairs in the real world, then the inclusion of events that the reader considers impossible may indeed make the story unacceptable by rendering it unbelievable. When a story is set in an imaginary world, however, it is much harder to decide and define what is and is not believable, within the context of the story.
Even a story that begins in the world familiar to the reader may be modified by the intrusion of some magical object, alien being or new invention. Because such intrusions—which I shall call “novums”—are not ready-made aspects of the familiar world the writer has the freedom to say exactly what they can and cannot do. Even if the novum belongs to a familiar species, it is still adaptable to the writer’s whim. For instance, if you want to write a story featuring a vampire you can decide for yourself how much of the conventional image created by Bram Stoker you want to retain, and how much you want to discard. If you want your vampires to be able to operate in daylight all you have to do is say that they can, and if you want to impose conditions limiting their ability to do so you can make up whatever conditions you like.
Any narrative move that turns a story into fantasy is, in essence, one that deliberately crosses the boundary of accepted possibility. A narrative move that turns a story into science fiction is slightly different, in that the “novum” it introduces will be represented as something that scientific theory establishes as conceivable, but which has not yet been encountered or invented. Introducing such a novum still crosses an important boundary, however, by opening up the question of what might or might not be possible.
Once these kinds of boundaries have been breached, it is no longer sensible to equate plausibility with believability and believability with possibility. Nevertheless, it still makes sense to talk about the plausibility of fantasy and science fiction stories, and about the various features of imaginary worlds to which writers must pay attention if they want their stories to be acceptable to readers. Ideally, of course, we do not simply want to make the worlds within our stories acceptable; we want to make them seductive, or even irresistible—but achieving plausibility is the first step on that road.
* * * *
Real and Imaginary Worlds
If it is to be plausible, the world you create within your text needs to be coherent. All the elements of it should fit together into a satisfactory and appealing whole. You must remember that the world of your story is entirely contained within your text; all the things that the reader needs to know about it have to be written into the text and all the things that you write about it ought to be consistent with one another.
Stories that are supposedly set in the real world—including fantasy and science fiction stories in which the real world is supplemented by some kind of novum—have a measure of solidity and internal consistency already built in, “borrowed” from the world with which the writer and reader are already familiar. I shall call these stories “known world stories” in order to distinguish them from stories set in imaginary worlds.
Known world stories have some obvious advantages. If you say that your story is set in London then all the streets and buildings of the actual London—and, for that matter, the rest of the world—will be tacitly present in the world of your story, all neatly laid out and fully functional. Such stories have disadvantages as well; if you borrow your coherency from the real world then you have to be acquainted with all the relevant details of the real world’s coherency. If your characters have to take a train from London to Brighton you will need to know from which railway station trains to Brighton leave, and how to get there on the tube. Cashing in on the coherency of the known world requires research.
The burden of accurate reproduction causes many writers to use imaginary settings even when their stories are set in the known world. The characters in various TV soap operas are firmly located within the greater geography of England but on a local scale they inhabit streets, or even whole boroughs, which cannot be found on maps. The coherency of fiction is, in fact, dependent on not borrowing too much of the coherency of the real world. Giving a detective an address in Baker Street might help him to seem more real, but if he is to be slotted into the reality of Baker Street without actually colliding with the brute facts the address has to be one that does not actually exist.
Stories that are set in the known world can only take this “slotting in” process so far. You can set your story in an imaginary village, town or county without troubling your readers too much, and you can even slot a small country or two into the Middle East or the heart of Africa, but the bigger your invented space is, the greater the pressure it exerts on its borrowed coherency. It used to be easy for writers to insert whole countries like Ruritania and Graustark into the confused map of middle Europe, but it is far more difficult to do so plausibly now that we are so much better informed.
Inventing villages, towns or countries brings practical problems of its own. You can stock them with whatever buildings you like, arranged to suit the convenience of your plot, but you must spell out those arrangements. Moreover, the things you invent must be consistent with the realities you have borrowed; they must be the kinds of things that could exist in the midst of real villages, towns or countries.
While your characters were in London intending to go to Brighton you had the advantage that Victoria station was already “there,” whether you had bothered to mention it or not, and your readers can imagine its presence as a “set” even though you have not described it. On the other hand, when your characters are in Little Drippingham intending to go to Buckhampton, you are obliged to invent the station or bus stop from which they will set out, and this may require a certain amount of descriptive labor if your reader is to be able to picture it as a setting and believe in it as an addendum to the real world.
In fantasy and science fiction stories this kind of narrative labor becomes much more intensive because the settings involved may be much more remote, and the manner in which the imaginary settings “dovetail” with real settings may be much more complicated. Inventing a plausible alien world might require you to gather many kinds of information—geographical, ecological, historical, technological and so on—into a coherent set. This might require considerable cleverness as well as a good deal of research.
* * * *
The Art of Extrapolation
Even if you are working with wholly imaginary worlds, the problem of slotting the imaginary into the real still has to be faced. Stories that are set on planets orbiting distant stars or stories set in a “Secondary World” like Tolkien’s Middle-Earth still have to borrow some of their coherency from the reader’s acquaintance with the actual world. The worlds in which planetary romances and Secondary World fantasies are set may have an entirely invented geography and an entirely imaginary history but their basic physical conditions are usually transferred without any elaborate commentary from our world. Magic may defy scientific laws but it has to work within the framework of the laws which it violates, as a series of exceptions. Even in the boldest fantasies it is taken for granted that without magic to hold them up, the castles in the clouds would fall, and that, without magic to aid her, the heroine who is deprived of oxygen will asphyxiate.
Science fiction writers sometimes test the limits of borrowed coherency almost to destruction. Stories have been written about the inhabitants of the surfaces of living worlds or neutron stars, two-dimensional or four-dimensional worlds, and worlds entirely contained within the mind of a dreamer or the software of a computer. The whole point of such exercises is, however, to extrapolate coherently from the accepted laws of physics and the known phenomena of chemistry. Even those very rare stories which deliberately alter one of the laws of physics do so in order to examine the logical consequence of making one such change while holding all the other laws constant.
Extrapolation is the key to establishing the coherency of your imaginary worlds. The artistry of fantasy and science fiction stories depends on your ability to figure out what the logical consequences of introducing particular novums may be. This applies just as much to fantasy as to science fiction; magic may be invoked to give your hero three wishes, but you must then figure out how he might choose to use those wishes and what the consequence of each wish would be. The appeal of your story to its readers will depend on your cleverness in figuring out exactly how the wishes are to be fulfilled; such tales usually thrive on the irony of consequences that are wholly logical but unforeseen by the user of the wishes.
You may, if you wish, imagine that there is a contract between yourself and your readers whereby the readers grant you a license to establish any novum you wish in your story, provided that you promise to look after it properly. Looking after it is exactly what you will have to do; in constructing your story you will be continually asking yourself what would follow, logically, from the situation as it presently stands.
You might think that the simplest and most obvious novums would soon be used up, as writers calculated all the likely outcomes of their use, but this is not so. There are any number of ways in which a person granted three wishes might choose to use them, and any number of ways in which their choices might go wrong. The same is true of invisibility, identity exchanges, time machines and all the other staples of playful “what if?” stories.
When novums are introduced in sets rather than singly—as they have to be in any story of the distant future or any story set in a wholly imaginary world—the possibilities of extrapolation are infinite. Making a future society or an alien world seem coherent can be difficult, because of the hard intellectual labor you have to put into the examination of possible consequences, but it can also be exciting. Some writers become addicted to the business of extrapolation, treating it as a kind of game.
Creating an entire imaginary world can be a lifetime’s work, and there are writers who have spent lifetimes doing it. At least some readers felt, as J. R. R. Tolkien did, that they wanted to know a great deal more about Middle-Earth than was revealed in The Lord of the Rings, and the supplementary information he assembled now fills a dozen further volumes. It is not unknown for fans of a particular story-series to become so interested in the world of the story that they long to take part in the extrapolation of its history and imaginary societies; Marion Zimmer Bradley’s “Darkover” series generated the Friends of Darkover, whose members were licensed by the author to set stories of their own there, and it is nowadays common practice for groups of fantasy or science fiction writers to produce “shared world” story series.
Mercifully, there is a world of difference between coherency and completeness. The exhaustive creative work done by Tolkien in support of Middle-Earth is not compulsory. You do not have to fill in every detail of every world you invent for the purposes of a story; provided that you can maintain the appearance of coherency you can operate on a “need to know” basis. The artistry of designing plausible imaginary worlds is as much a matter of leaving things out as putting things in; as long as you can convince your reader that everything you actually mention is part of a coherent whole, the whole itself may remain vague.
The minimum that your reader needs to know is everything that is essential to the workings of your plot, plus as much additional information as may be required to bind that information into a satisfactory set. You need to reassure your reader that the various elements of your imaginary world do fit together—that the world makes sense—but that can usually be achieved simply by making sure that there are no glaring inconsistencies.
The longer your story is, the more detail you will need to fill in if you are to maintain the illusion that the world of the story really is a plausible world, and the more work you will have to do to make sure that the details do fit together in a logical and pleasing fashion. In many short stories, however, it is only necessary to provide a “slice of life,” which does not have to get to grips with ponderous matters of history, ecology and so on. As long as you can include a few significant details that are cleverly linked together you will do enough to captivate your readers.
* * * *
Plausibility and Probability
Readers who object to the use of anything explicitly supernatural in stories often overlook the fact that supposedly realistic plots are often so wildly improbable as to be absurd. We are all used to seeing characters in stories defy the calculus of probability with casual ease. We know perfectly well when we get to the end of a story that if the heroine is hanging from a window-ledge by her fingertips it will not even matter if she lets go; the hero will still contrive to grab her and haul her to safety. Whenever the hero of a story says that “it’s a million-to-one chance but it just might work” the move is virtually certain to succeed. In stories—especially in the climaxes of stories—heroes can always do what needs to be done, no matter how unlikely it seems.
There is, in fact, no “probability” at all within the world of a text. There are no matters of chance and no coincidences. A character in a story may throw a pair of dice or draw a card from a pack, but the outcome of any such action is decided by the writer. If the writer decides that the character will throw double six or draw the ace of spades that is what will happen. It is, of course, open to you to throw dice or draw a card in order to determine what you will write next, but that is a calculated abdication of choice, not a matter of chance—and the chances are that the story produced by the dice or the cards will be lousy. The nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine cases in which the million-to-one shot didn’t work remained unrecorded because they had no value as stories.
This observation puts the quest for plausibility into a slightly different light. Your readers are participants in your story and they have an active interest in its construction and continuity. They want the story to make sense and to form a satisfactory whole, and will welcome anything you do towards that end—but they also want the story to be exciting, and will be sympathetic to any device you use to enhance its excitement. Because readers like stories to keep moving, and eventually to arrive somewhere interesting, you have a license to engineer all kinds of opportunities and coincidences without regard to matters of probability. In the worlds within texts every decaying rope-bridge is certain to hold together just long enough—or, if it breaks, will allow the hero to clamber up the limp remnant to safety—and every honeymooning couple whose car breaks down at night is sure to find that the one lighted window they can see in the distance belongs to a haunted house. The unlikelihood of such occurrences is no threat to plausibility.
The readers’ willingness to accept improbabilities that serve to keep the plot moving is more than matched by their willingness to accept improbabilities that make a contribution to the integrity of the story, binding its parts into a whole. For instance, literary dreams usually serve this sort of purpose.
If real dreams serve any purpose at all, we have no idea what it is; in spite of our perennial tendency to search them for insights and omens, their meanings remain stubbornly unclear, and they remain obstinately devoid of any prophetic power. Literary dreams, on the other hand, are always meaningful and sometimes uncannily prophetic; if they were not they would have no place in the story at all. Literary dreams must be revelatory, at least so far as the reader is concerned, and most readers are only too happy to overlook the fact that real dreams are not like that. Even in known world fiction, dreams invariably serve this kind of integrative function, but in fantasy and science fiction dreamlike visions can be granted much greater powers, and routinely are.
The most elaborate attempt to account for the meaning of real dreams was, of course, advanced by Sigmund Freud, who attempted to read them as symbolic accounts of his patients’ anxieties and neuroses. Whether this kind of analysis has any use in clinical practice is unclear, but its utility in constructing and decoding literary dreams is considerable. Nor is it only dreams that can be symbolic in stories; the predicaments of the characters can be mirrored in all kinds of ways: by the weather, by the presence and fate of significant objects, by the blooming and fading of flowers, by the strange behavior of animals, and so on. In a story, everything observed and everything that transpires may have a meaning within the story’s scheme, which objects and events rarely, if ever, have in the real world.
When readers detect the symbolism of objects or events within a plot, or perceive patterns made by the recurrence of particular motifs or events which echo earlier events, they are not offended by the improbability of such contrivances. They like to discover such links and unities, and their pleasing qualities are more likely to add to the plausibility of the tale than detract from it. All these devices are available to you for use in securing the coherency of your stories, in addition to the logic of extrapolation.
* * * *
The Moral Order of Worlds Within Texts
The fact that readers are so very willing to entertain improbabilities in the stories they read informs us that the most important aspect of the coherency of imaginary worlds is not a matter of logical consistency. The principal reason why readers are so happy to entertain improbabilities within the stories they read is that those improbabilities usually work, at least in the end, to the advantage of the heroes and the disadvantage of the villains.
The real world does not distribute its rewards and punishments according to any discernible moral order. As Saint Matthew and everyone else has observed, the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. The wicked are no more likely than the good to be struck by lightning or devoured by cancer, and the virtuousness of the good offers no perceptible protection from suffering and misfortune. Many people insist that there must be a further life after death where the moral account-books will be balanced and we will all get what we really deserve, but not everyone can believe that—and in the meantime, we must seek what solace we can in stories where things work out differently.
As the writer of a story, you always have the power to make things come out right: to make the guilty suffer and to reward the innocent. You might have good reasons for not wanting to do that, and your readers might sympathize with those reasons, but you do need to bear in mind that the decisions you make in constructing your plot have this kind of “moral weight.” In much the same way that the world of your story requires a certain logical coherency, the events that occur there require a certain moral coherency. This does not mean that you must always operate as a benevolent creator, but it does mean that you must bear the responsibility of the benevolence you refuse.
It is because of their relationship to moral order that the events in stories matter so much to their readers. We are joyful when the heroine of a story achieves her heart’s desire because we feel that she deserves it—and we feel that so strongly that we experience a sharp sensation of sorrow if, instead, the unfolding logic of events within the story brings her to despair or destruction. Your power to move your readers—to make them happy or sad—is based in their willingness to care about your characters, and that willingness is rooted in their desire to see justice done. However remote the world of your story is from the known world in terms of its physics or geography, and no matter what kinds of magic or superscience operate there, it is as tightly bound to our notions of moral order as the most accurate reflection of the known world.
Our capacity to “identify” with characters in fiction is not at all dependent on similarity. Anyone who has been part of an audience watching Steven Spielberg’s film E.T. or J. M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan must have seen large numbers of people reduced to tears by the plight of imaginary characters who do not resemblance us at all—so little, in fact, that the part of E.T. is played by a plastic doll and the part of Tinkerbell by a spotlight.
The reason why we have such considerable sympathy for these non-human characters, while we righteously loathe the all-too-human foes who threaten them, is purely a matter of moral compatibility. The simple fact is that we love the good guys, whoever and whatever they may be, and we hate the bad guys. When E.T. finally goes home and Tinkerbell is applauded back to life after drinking the poison that Captain Hook intended for Peter we feel uplifted—so uplifted that we might weep with joy in a way we very rarely have occasion to do in response to real events.
We feel uplifted, too, whenever the villain in a story goes bloodily to his destruction, although in those instances we are more likely to cheer than weep. We do not cheer because we are sadists, who revel in the pain and ignominy of others, but because we recognize the moral propriety of the villain’s consignment to a Hellish end. (This fact is unfortunately overlooked in most discussions about the role and effects of violence in the media, which is why so many of those discussions are futile.)
Once we have recognized this, we can easily understand why most people would rather read stories with happy endings than stories in which the pressure of “realism” causes writers to withhold rewards for the good or to let the wicked get away scot free. We can also understand why it is that so many readers like to read the same kind of book repeatedly. What these readers are doing is participating in a ritual of moral affirmation whose force depends on continual repetition—in which respect it is similar to all the other kinds of affirmative rituals with which we are familiar: legal rituals, religious rituals and the rituals of petty superstition.
The importance of these observations to you, as a writer of fantasy and science fiction, is that the imaginary beings that you create can always command the intense interest of readers, provided that you can make the readers care what happens to them. You can achieve that by placing them in difficulties and dilemmas that bring the readers’ moral assumptions into play. Indeed, imaginary beings operating in wholly fantastic worlds may display moral issues in a “purer” way than any real world situation could. This is why talking animals are so often used to dramatize moral advice, why the plots of fantasy novels often take the form of all-out battles between Good and Evil, and why moralistic fantasies play such an important role in fiction written for children.
It is not, of course, necessary for you to frame your stories as fables with tacit or explicit morals—but you will find that many of the stories you write do have a fabular quality, even if you do not consciously plan them that way. The willingness of your readers to pity characters who are unjustly persecuted, no matter what kind of creatures they are, and to identify with the hopeful ambitions of the downtrodden, is the greatest advantage you have as a writer. It will license all kinds of improbable inventions and may well compensate for any small errors or inadequacies that afflict your logical extrapolations.
* * * *
Tragedy and Comedy
The fact that most readers prefer endings in which good triumphs and evil is confounded does not mean that writers are obliged to provide them—although writers working in certain sectors of the marketplace might find that they are under very heavy pressure to do so. Although your readers might be grateful to you for providing a morally uplifting ending, you do have other options that preserve other kinds of coherency.
One other option you have is to use your refusal to make things work out happily to generate the special feeling of sorrow and frustration we call tragedy. If you end your story with a sober and calculatedly harrowing violation of moral order, your readers will know that they are being instructed to recognize and lament the fact that, in real life, misfortune often falls upon the good and wickedness often goes unpunished.
Nowadays, of course, we apply the word “tragedy” to all kinds of events in the real world, but its original meaning pertained strictly to works of art. This broadening of application reflects the habit that news-writers have of trying to turn actual events into “stories,” in order to make them more interesting and more engaging. When we are asked to think of a real event as a tragedy, we are being asked to consider it as if it were a refusal of moral order rather than a mere absence.
The feeling of tragedy is, however, not the only one associated with episodes in stories in which characters are frustrated in their aims, and there are other effects at which you might aim, the most obvious alternative being comedy. Although its emotional effect is nearly opposite, the essence of comedy is closer than you might think to the essence of tragedy. Laughter and weeping are so closely allied that one may lead to the other, and we are all familiar with such observations as “you have to laugh, or else you’d cry.” It is not only “black comedy” that has a hint of cruelty about it; “slapstick” generally features blows and pratfalls that would be very painful were they not fictitious.
If you can make the failures of your characters sufficiently absurd, or even sufficiently prolific, your readers will know that they are being invited to laugh rather than cry. Most comedies are, in effect, little more than extended chronicles of failure and frustration, in which the hapless heroes are battered and bruised by the vicissitudes of fate but always bounce back. In many such accounts—examples abound in animated cartoons, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels (whose most popular character is Death)—large-scale disasters and extraordinary acts of violence and cruelty are routinely made to seem funny, often deliberately emphasizing the thinness of the line which separates tragedy from comedy.
Many comedies confine the humiliations to which they subject their characters to the mid-sections of their stories, ultimately resolving their plots with conventional happy endings, but many are content to end with one more pratfall even more spectacular than all the rest. These variations serve to remind us that stories may serve several different functions, of which the ritual is merely the most common. Pain may be nasty, but it is vital to our well-being because it offers us warnings when we are in grave danger; were we incapable of feeling pain, recklessness would lead us quickly to destruction. We do need the feeling of uplift that is delivered by stories with happy endings, but we must also learn to cope with the fact that the stories we are constantly trying to discover or create in our real lives will continually run into difficulties.
For this reason, while writers who always write stories with happy endings may earn the undying affection of their readers, writers who can turn their hand to tragedy may also earn their undying respect. Comedians can go either way; those who cultivate respect rather than affection are usually known as satirists. All these options are open to you, but it is worth bearing in mind that the legendary last words of the famous actor—“Dying is easy; comedy is hard”—only apply to stagecraft. For writers, tragedy and comedy are both difficult to contrive, by comparison with conventional happy endings.
