happy endings

by

We are all story tellers

I’m a story teller. It isn’t just what I do; it’s an intrinsic part of who I am. That said, it is a matter of degree. I’m more infected by the need to make stories of all I see, think, and experience than most, but to a degree, all human beings are storytellers. It’s part of our nature to seek patterns, to join things together in our minds in order to make sense of them, and what is that but a story?

We don’t experience life; we experience our story about our life, and in that story we are always the central protagonist. We may be the victim, the triumphant champion, the martyr, the beloved—we probably change roles depending on who we’re with, in fact. But we are the heroine of our own story.

It probably can’t be avoided, given we can never know all the facts. Our senses—even the instruments we make to extend our senses—can’t detect beyond certain wavelengths of light and sound. We know of animals with senses we cannot even name, and have to describe in terms of those we have: feeling sound or smelling light. Even with our limited range, we can’t handle the constant sensory bombardment, and have to learn to filter out what our brain classifies as unimportant, in order to comprehend what is left.

That’s why police interview more than one eye witness to a crime; why historians seek more than one contemporary account of an incident; why three people can each take a completely different message from a conversation, and all swear that their own is the only true report.

What we can do is avoid embellishing. I can only report the facts as I experienced them, but I don’t have to add to them (at least in real life—in story space, adding to them is my job).

What we can do is be gentle with one another. I tend to be cautious about telling someone else they are wrong, or suggesting that they lie. All I can say for certain is, ‘that is not how I experienced it.’

What we can do is remember that every other person on the planet has just as much right as us to regard themselves as the centre of their story, and those around them as the supporting cast, the characters dignified with personal names and backstories. I am the heroine of my own life, with my own personal romantic hero, friends, relatives, and neighbours. But to other people, I’m just part of the faceless crowd.

After all, that’s their story.

by

Happy endings and other myths

“I write dark because happy endings are boring,” said the young novelist sitting next to me on last Thursday’s panel at the Paraparaumu library.

I’d already had my turn at that question, so all I could do was make faces and shake my head.

I’ve written elsewhere about why endings of any kind are a myth. Nothing in real life truly begins or ends; it simply changes form. As a person and as a writer, I like to choose an upward trajectory as my stopping point for my stories.

As to boring! Leo Tolstoy said, in Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I’m inclined to regard the opposite as true. The path to unhappiness is endlessly predictable; the path to happiness, being strewn with so many more obstacles, is full of twists, turns, and human striving. CS Lewis commented, “How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different the saints.”

Although, to be fair, an unhappy ending for our hero or heroine might be an extremely happy one for the villain! The mermaid failed to win the prince and faded away to sea foam, but the sea witch was up one gorgeous voice.

(Yes, I write dark. But my hero and heroine are guaranteed a hard-won happy ending.)

by

Courtship on WIP Wednesday

Those who write romances also write courtships. Before the happy ending, some sort of wooing has to happen, short or long, impassioned or almost accidental. Courtship between other characters or in other genres of story may have tragic endings or trickle out into nothing, but even so, we often see them. The pressure of a courtship is a gift to the writer, allowing us to show and develop character.

This week, I’m inviting writers to post an excerpt in the comments from a courtship in their current work in progress. Mine is from my short story written for the newsletter that will go out this week. My couple married when she was still a child, separated immediately after the wedding, and haven’t seen one another for years.

When he made his way to the church, he wore the gloves she had sent him last Christmas, the muffler she had knitted for the Christmas before. His pocket bore two of the handkerchiefs she’d embroidered with his new crest; beneath the muffler, a tie pin she’d given him fastened his cravat. He was one of the early arrivals. The manger, the seat for the Virgin Mother, and a couple of rails on posts stood lonely in the transom, waiting for the players. Word of who he was must have spread, however, for friendly villagers escorted him to a chair near the front of the nave, and a dozen people made the opportunity to stop by and tell him he had a wonderful wife.

The sheep came first, herded into place by the shepherd and his helpers. Then someone led out the cows and tethered them to one of the rails. A crowd of angels processed solemnly through the nave, hands in prayer position, heads bowed, eyes dancing. Finally, the moment Hal had been waiting for, Dolly led a donkey up the aisle, and Hal’s heart stopped at the sight of the woman on its back.

Dolly had been right. She was stunning. She was looking down, so he could see little of her face beyond a white forehead and dark brows and lashes. The blue shawl he’d chosen for her in Kowton was fixed to her head by a wreath of flowers, crafted in silver, that he’d found in Baghdad. The shawl flowed over her shoulders and down her sides, but it was so light it clung to a form that dried his mouth and brought his baser self to painful attention. He’d married before sowing any wild oats, and then kept his wedding vows, waiting to return home to Willa. The part of him he’d thought under perfect control wanted to wait not another minute longer.

Hal shut his eyes, and gritted his teeth, and once he knew he would not run roaring up the aisle to carry Willa off, he opened them again.

She had taken her seat in the transom, and was staring straight at him.

***

This was going to be a disaster. When she’d received Hal’s message, she had very nearly panicked. Only Eliza’s good sense kept her from taking a horse and riding away into the night. Instead, she had donned the veil that was part of her costume for the tableau, fastening it in place with a silver circlet he had sent her and putting on the matching necklace and earrings. Not, perhaps, appropriate for a carpenter’s wife, but the marquis’s wife wanted him to know she treasured his gifts.

She’d known who he was immediately, though he was at least six inches taller and considerably broader. The eyes hadn’t changed, though. Besides, he’d said he’d be there, and no one else was a stranger. He’d stared straight at her, then shut his eyes, his jaw stiffening, a grimace passing over his face. He hated her on sight. She wanted to run, but she wouldn’t spoil the tableau. She dismounted, as they’d rehearsed, and collected little Michael from Clara, and then took her seat before looking again at Hal.

He opened his eyes and her gaze was caught. Everyone else disappeared from her consciousness. Only Hal existed. Willa was inexperienced but not stupid. That was heat in his eyes. He desired her, and his desire sparked her own. She shifted uncomfortably, uncertain whether she liked the feeling Hal had set alight. The baby sucked in a deep breath and let it out again, and she looked down, feeling both relieved and bereft to be released from Hal’s thrall. She refused to look at him again until the tableau was over, though she could feel that the weight of his gaze never left her.

 

by

Happy ever after – in praise of marriage

After writing about women who never marry, I’m now turning to the topic of people who are still happily married many years after the wedding.

Some people object to romances and their HEA endings because they imply that women can only be happy and complete if they are married (or in some other form of long-term committed romantic relationship). As I’ve said in discussions on the last happy ever after post, I think this is a serious objection and one worth listening to. While the nature of a romance novel requires the main protagonists to end up together, I can see no reason why important secondary characters couldn’t be thoroughly happy in single blessedness.

On the other hand, some people object to the HEA endings because they’re unrealistic. Such people point to the divorce rate, and to historic records of unhappy marriages.

So let’s examine those assumptions. In the West, we currently have a divorce rate of around 30% to 35%. So couples have around two chances in three of being together until one of them dies. We can assume that some unhappy couples will never divorce, but – given the ease of divorce in the West – I’d suggest we’d be erring on the generous side if we said that accounted for another 15% to 20% of couples. Even if we take that unlikely percentage, though, that still means 50% of marriages are happy; 50% of married couples get their happy ever after. I’d buy a raffle ticket with those odds.

Ah, you might say, but historically a lot of marriages were arranged. And arranged marriages are less likely to be happy. Not so, apparently. Happiness seems to be more about the attitude of the couple than the degree of choice over partner.

I’ll admit to a bias. I’ve been married for 43 years, and I love my personal romantic hero more each day. My sister and my brothers, and my husband’s sister and brother are all still with the first person they married. Two of my three married daughters are still married to their first-choice partner, and the third has recently remarried.

My PRH and I once coached engaged couples. One of things we learnt in our training is that couples that stay together often report that they started marriage with an image in their minds of what their old age together would be like. Forty-five years ago, almost to the day, my PRH and I went carol singing around the pensioner flats in the town where we lived. One elderly couple invited us in to sing to them, and we were much struck by how tender they were with one another. As we left, I said to PRH and he to me: that’s what I want – that kind of love when we are old.

I still love to see happy couples celebrating their love for one another in their old age. I still want that for my PRH and me. And I want to write books where the reader believes the protagonists have that kind of future, and where they have older couples they can admire whose marriages are still strong and passionate after decades of loving. I’m taking my theme from the first three lines of Robert Browning’s poem:

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
by

The happy endings myth

happy endingOne of the criticisms I’ve heard of romance novels is that they have happy endings, and ‘happy endings are not realistic’.

The critics are, of course, quite right. Happy endings do not happen in reality. And neither do sad endings. In fact, endings of any kind are a totally artificial construct. My personal story didn’t begin with my conception; my conception was simply an event in the story of my parents, and my story is an integral part of that. Nor will it end at my death. What I’ve made (children, garden, quilts, books) will carry on after me.

Whenever we write and whatever we write, we impose an artificial structure on reality. We choose a point and call that the beginning. And we choose another point and call that the end.

In the continuing story that was the life of my fictional character Stephen Redepenning, I could have chosen a different place to start and to stop. I could, perhaps, have started with the intrepid young adventurer boarding a ship for Canada. I could have followed with the adventure of his life as he found a place in the wilderness, entered into a trade agreement with locals that he sealed by marrying one of their daughters, and built his own small fur trapping empire. I could have ended as he stood in the smoking ruins of his log cabin, looking at the graves of his wife and children and swearing vengeance on their murderers.

It might have been a good story. But it isn’t the part of his life that I chose to tell.

I like stories that end on an upward trajectory, not a downward trajectory. If I like the protagonists, I want them to have hope. I want to feel that they have a chance for a happy future. To me, the end of the story is more about the writer giving me food for what happens next. In my imagination, the story continues.

(And, if I don’t like the protagonists, I have no objection to someone else in the story having the happy ending. Hamlet’s tragedy turned out rather well for Fortinbras.)

The romance novel’s ‘happily ever after’ is not about perfect resolution of all problems; it’s about convincing the reader that the protagonists will support each other through whatever problems arise. Romeo and Juliet was always going to be a tragedy, not because the lovers died, but because of the type of character that Romeo was. If they’d lived, he would have been on to the next hot chick within a month or two.

But Bassanio and Portia, in the Merchant of Venice, face trials together and win through, and we’re confident that they’ll be able to continue to do so.

I met my PRH at a prayer meeting nearly 46 years ago. Our lives together have hit rough patches here and there, with internal and external trials. But facing them as a couple has made us stronger. Whatever happens in the years left to us, we’ll cope. Now that’s a happy ending.