“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.)