Imo, if it's only ever happy, it's not real. I want what I write to be a gut-punch, for someone to wonder if it really happened, or know it could have, if the names were changed. To recognize it as part of the human experience.

I expect there's no doubt on which side I sit, being as how a good murder makes me smile all day. But I'm still a pretty fervent redemptionista too, and my sense of humor, I like to think, keeps me out of Lehane Country.ETA: Can you imagine that amusement park attraction? Lehane Country Safari. When you come in, an actor that looks like your dad kicks you in the gut. Then you take your beat-up ride through the streets of Southie dodging wife-beaters and pissed-off gangbangers, pausing for Hopeless Love, and the dismemberment in every third car. It's the crappiest place on earth!(But it hurts so good)

I think overly-happy and overly-grim fiction each make people feel better about real life -- in both cases, I think it's "see, life could be like that," for better or worse. To me they are just flip sides of the same coin. Although as a reader, I find the overly-happy just makes me dissatisfied.

As a writer, I constantly have to guard against a tendency to be too nice to my characters. You see, I like them! They're such lovable little figments! I want them to be happy, with sunshine and puppies! But it's not a story unless there are challenges and conflict, and happy endings are more satisfying if they're dearly bought, so I keep asking myself What Would Joss Whedon Do?

That said, in my own work I'm all about the happy ending. But that's just me.

I like happy endings, too, believe it or not. But I rarely finish anything.

DH says he's a cynic, and that a cynic is a disappointed idealist. I suppose that's what I am. I think that's why I've liked Joss' and Tim's work so much. They give us an earned happiness, sometimes even an unearned joyful time. But almost immediately, with no warning, comes a gut punch, a reminder that life is full of both light and dark, and that you can't have happy sunshine and balloons and fairies and not have the death and dismemberment, the pain and the fear and the sorrow.

I didn't decide to write that way, but my longest pieces have that dark turn in them. I want happy endings. I think I'm just afraid to trust them, that there's always another darkness lurking behind the bunnies and flowers.

Deena, as Amy says, the simplicity of the language is what makes your piece so devastating, what gives it the ring of truth. (((Deena)))

I like drabbling things I wouldn't or couldn't do. I don't think I have the chutzpah to sustain it over more than a hundred or so words, but the places I absolutely will not tread in life are ... well, why be off limits in fiction? What is the mind for, then?

It's of the frame of mind that people with rape fantasies want to rape/be raped -- which I thought was pretty poorly regarded. But I've heard "how can you think those things?" as if the crime lay in the mind.

As a writer, I constantly have to guard against a tendency to be too nice to my characters.

Go nonfiction. Real people are so much easier to be mean to. They give you so much cause.

Go nonfiction. Real people are so much easier to be mean to. They give you so much cause.

Eh, I'm a fiction writer. It's the only way to have a head full of imaginary personalities and still be sane.

Go nonfiction. Real people are so much easier to be mean to.

Yes, but unlike fictional characters, real people can hunt you down and sic dogs or lawyers on you.