I don't think I know how to write a happy story.
For a while now, I've only written depressing and cynical stories because I thought that those were the only stories worth telling. It felt more "meaningful" to write about unrequited love and my worldly insignificance, as opposed to feel-good stories involving people finding happiness. I felt better too: in a way, sad stories are a form of indulgence.
But now I realize that those depressing stories are actually the easiest stories to tell. Everyone has their own problems and everyone has their moments of sadness -- put those moments into writing, and there you have it: instant realism, instant emotion, instant captivating story.
My impression is that we judge stories with happy endings far more harshly than tragedies. Since they always run the risk of becoming sappy and cliche, we set our standards for happy stories incredibly high. But depressing stories? So long as they can trigger some form of emotion within us, the stories seem all too real.
See, we're so much more skeptical of happy stories because we have trouble believing that they ever happen in real life. We shake our heads in disgust at storybook teenage romances, and we deem saccharine any tale of a marriage that forever stays exciting and impassioned. We dismiss stories that travel down a straight, flowery path from point A to B, and we convulse at even the slightest suggestion that there is indeed one true love for each and every one of us. It's no surprise that we do: we haven't experienced these things for ourselves, and so we naturally find these stories to be, well, stupid.
But maybe these things do happen. Maybe they happen all the time. Maybe it's just that when they are about to happen, we're too busy brooding over the depressing stories to realize it.
