Great Expectations: Hope Versus Happily Ever After
By Emilie-Noelle Provost | June 28, 2023 |
My mother loved cozy romance novels. Stacks of them were piled up around her house, and it was rare to find her at home without one by her side. Not being familiar with the genre myself, I asked her once why she liked these books so much. She said, “I love reading them because no matter what happens in the story, I know there will always be a happy ending.”
This got me thinking about readers’ expectations and authors’ obligations to fulfill them. The storylines in most genre fiction tend to follow trajectories that provide fans with a particular experience. In the case of cozy romance novels, this often means feelings of reassurance and contentment, especially when it comes to their endings.
But what about other types of fiction? What is the best way for writers to strike a balance between telling a story that’s meaningful to them that will also be meaningful to readers and give them sense of satisfaction at the story’s conclusion?
I think part of the answer might lie in our collective definition of what a “happy” ending is.
In my experience as a reader and as a novelist, an ending that feels satisfying and positive doesn’t always have to be one where everyone gets married and rides off into the sunset. For me, the most important thing is that a story ends with a sense of hopefulness.
If at the end of a novel a character has grown as a person and has learned something valuable as a result of their experiences, I almost always feel that reading it was worthwhile. This is especially true if I can relate to the character and his or her journey in a personal way.
One of my favorite novels is Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. While most people wouldn’t consider the ending of this book to be happy (one of the main characters gets beheaded by the Guillotine), it’s satisfying and hopeful in that it depicts human nature at its most selfless and noble during one of the bloodiest eras in Europe’s history, the Reign of Terror that led up to the French Revolution.
In fact, the stories that have held the most meaning for me have often been those that delve into the darkest places, that force their characters (and their readers) to take a hard look at realities they’d rather ignore. Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale comes to mind as does Paul Harding’s Enon and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See.
One thing these books have in common is the feeling of hope they leave readers with at their conclusions. In the midst of the worst imaginable circumstances, the strength and resilience of the human spirt manages to prevail. These books and others like them are beacons that can light our way forward during the worst of times. And I believe that feeling hopeful, that there is something better just over the horizon if we can manage to keep going, is what human beings need most, especially in the unsettled times in which we’re living.
Of course, all of this is not to say that a good old-fashioned happy ending isn’t sometimes exactly the right way to finish a novel. The feel-good ending is one of the reasons I love Heather O’Neill’s The Girl Who Was Saturday Night. It all depends on the story the author is trying to tell.
Perhaps the real key to meeting readers’ expectations is to first meet your own expectations as a writer. If an ending feels awkward to you, it won’t sit right with readers either. I learned this the hard way when I was working on my second novel. After a few beta readers said they thought the book would be better with a happier ending, I spend weeks trying to figure out a way to rewrite it. But eventually, I decided that my original, hopeful ending was best.
Do you prefer the books you read to have happy endings? Why or why not?
Have you ever rewritten the ending of a story to make it feel happier to readers?
What do you think the difference is between an ending that’s happy and one that’s hopeful?
Emilie-Noelle Provost is a writer, editor, and author who lives in a northeastern Massachusetts mill town with her husband, daughter, and three crazy rescue cats. She is an avid hiker and a fan of European crime dramas.
Emilie-Noelle has worked as an editor for four magazine titles and has written and published hundreds of articles. She is the author of two novels. The Blue Bottle, a middle-grade adventure with sea monsters, was published by North Country Press in 2018. Her second novel, The River Is Everywhere, the coming-of-age story of a Franco-American teenager, was a finalist for a 2023 National Indie Excellence Award, a 2023 American Fiction Award, and a 2024 American Legacy Book Award. The novel was published in March 2023 by Vine Leaves Press.
She is currently working on a series of novels set in Île d’Orléans, a historic island in the Saint Lawrence River near Québec City.
[coffee]
Hello Emilie-Noelle. It sounds as though your mother surrounded herself, literally, with happy endings. This suggests to me an idea related to readers. For some, life for whatever reason leads them to want to experience lives in fiction that reliably track toward happiness. Again, for whatever reason, other readers don’t want or need this. As for happiness vs hope, I doubt very many readers seek out stories that validate their own sense of hopelessness. What they probably read for is escape from hopelessness, boredom, etc.
My own perspective distinguishes between what impresses me as either authentic or melodramatic. If it rings true to my experience, I respect what’s on the page. If if strikes me as sentimental, I will stop reading. Sentimentality in a story means the writer is trying to draw from me an emotional response that hasn’t been earned by what’s happening in the narrative. But honest feelings of sentiment are very different from what’s sentimental, and serious readers can tell the difference.
Thanks for raising good issues.
Like your mom, I, too, love happy endings. But at the least, I have to have hope. I write for kids and even my darkest story will end in hope. Perhaps my favorite kind of ending is bittersweet because so much of life is like that–the end of something is often the beginning of something new; it makes the joy more palpable because we have experienced the sorrow.
I’m glad you stuck to your original hopeful ending. I was asked to change the ending of my novel, BOUND, but it was non-negotiable. We have to stay true to our characters. Thank you for your lovely essay.
I aim for a happy ending that is not just a Romance HEA, but an earned mainstream fiction one, with promises for the future that will also be hard work (and worth it), and a touch of dread – because the villain knows she will have more opportunities later – and thinks it will be her revenge. She might be right, but the plan is very realistic, and the dread a definite threat to that happiness.
I don’t know whether I want to tackle that fictional future – continuing the story – but I like leaving something hanging that is small and potentially deadly, a time bomb as it were – and that the reader, but not the other characters, knows about, and can worry about.
Thank you for the essay! It’s hard for me to believe in “happy” (as in, “Ta-da! Your deepest wish is fulfilled”) unless the story is humorous, sarcastic, or formulaic. Instead, I go for “hope, and the uncanny, defiant oddity of life.” I’m working on a couple of short stories, and for me, if I get a “tingle” as I write the ending, then I think I arrived at the right spot, and I hope that some of my readers feel a “tingle” too. That holds for my novel, as well. I strive for a profound, unexpected shift in the character’s understanding of themselves and their situation, which takes them beyond the initial problematic that drove the story’s dramatic arc. As a fantasy writer, I want this change to come about as a result of the confluence between psychic metamorphosis and a climax that is the opportunity for transformation. I’m a fan of Kafka and Murakami, and I often find a “tingle” in their work. Too much popular fantasy writing these days is rote wish-fulfillment. Margaret Atwood is an excellent example of a writer who doesn’t settle for cozy reassurances. What is dark in our lives is where the treasure is hiding. We count on art to help us get there.
I still like detective novels though I’m not as into them as I used be. My theory when I loved them was that I wanted to be told that the world made sense, questions had answers and ideally, an intelligent person could answer those questions by page 200 or so. This seems like an example of a hopeful ending. Given that either someone died to kick off the plot of almost all of them and someone else is going to jail as most of them end, with either victim or criminal usually being sympathetic, a truly happy ending is tough.
I won’t spoil myself on endings, but novels that even look like they have a less than hopeful overall tone have been a tough sell to me as a reader since the pandemic, and I don’t see me rereading “The Road” or “The Great Believers” anytime soon. I’m not quite as hardcore on this as your mom, but if someone wants to read happy books because life is hard enough, I find that understandable. I’m curious if markets reflect it.
Emily, I absolutely loved this. This is a great conversation! I don’t mind unhappy endings.. I for one like more realistic narratives! I have changed a lot when it comes to this, though! Sometimes I really just want all the happy feelings.