Happy or Sad Ending? Comedy or Tragedy? Or both?

Old Plots Authors often update or draw inspiration from the bible, The Old Testament, The New Testament, Folk Tales and news stories. The Bible My favourite biblical (Old Testament) story is Joseph. Sibling rivalry. The older brother saves his younger brother from death by offering them instead of revenge, financial reward. The sell the brother. The happy end is when he becomes a rich man in his new environment. He also gets revenge. From the New Testament, feminists are please by the Jesus story about cast the first stone which is extremely clever. It seemed to be so out of date when I heard it as a child. We now see in news videos that it is still relevant today. Revenge Plots Many stories are written as wishful thinking revenge. A title such as Revenge is sometimes given in competitions. Many authors feel uneasy with their first draft. Or the reader feels uneasy. I often abandon projects like this, filled with unkind acts, plots without any ray of joy. Injecting Joy And Happiness What can you do as an author to turn an unmitigated tragedy and revenge into something sweeter, happier, less sour and angry? Make a happy ending? Comedy Can you introduce humour into a tragedy? How is that possible? Shakespeare Shakespeare did it. He has comic characters in MacBeth, romance in Romeo and Juliet. Shalom Aleichem Shalom Aleichem keep up humour writing about poverty and tragedy. His most famous story about 1880 programs and emigration in stories was later made into the musical Fiddler On The Roof. Life Is Beautiful A reverse of this is how a WWII holocaust concentration camp was made into a tragic-comedy in the film Life Is Beautiful. Throughout the film, a half-witted joker Dad makes believe to his child in hiding, that hiding from the Nazis in a Concentration camp is just a game. If the father and son succeed, win, the little boy will ride on a tank. Spoiler alert: the seeming happy end is the end of the war when they are rescued. At the last moment the father running beside the tank is shot dead by a Nazi sniper and the joyful crowd and little boy riding the tank carry on in the victory parade, leaving behind the body, unaware of the tragedy. Catherine Lim's Teacher Catherine Lim's story about the teacher, shows the death of one person (a pupil) whilst everybody is shocked but the teacher carries on, the one person who seems almost untouched, phlegmatic. The teacher in that story shows one of the three ways of coping: 1 Life goes on. 2 I didn’t know. 3 It wasn’t my fault. Abandoned and Censored Stories The stories I abandon are mainly short stories on themes set for competitions. I postponed writing my own life story, which is still private only, and heavily censored. Destroyed Manuscripts, Paper, Letters A good friend of mine in London, an author and member of my writing group, who has gone blind, destroyed all her life story and love letters in order to protect her sons and daughters and stepsons and stepdaughters and grandchildren from distress. I wish she had saved everything in a box deposited at the local library, only to be opened 100 years after her death. Censoring Regarding content, I am not keen on violence and torture. I don't like to put unpleasant images into the reader's mind, nor my own. I don't like reading about people spoiling other’s food. I fear it puts bad ideas into the heads of restaurant staff. As a consumer, such stories make me suspicious and nervous about eating out. Revenge I think ‘the best revenge is living well’. So the revenge or death of the villain must be an accident. Politically Correct Characters My favourite example of a politically correct novel is George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. (Written to undo the furore over the Dickens’s character Fagin.) She cleverly attracts the reader, who would mostly have been Victorian Christian readers when the novel was published. She panders to their prejudice that Christians are good and that Jews are wily, thieving old men, by starting her book with a virtuous hero adopted son of a Christian family, trying to outwit a racially old Jewish man. Then along comes the Jewish man’s innocent daughter, a beautiful, talented pianist, tormented by her father. The novel ends happily (after the death of the young couple’s mentor and helper) with the hero adopted son turning out to be of Jewish origin. The plot is the proverbial Cinderella story ending of the poor girl (Jewish) winning the handsome Prince. *** The moral for the authors of today, is that you can get around the publisher and public objecting to the portrayal of a villain of a particular area or religion, by ensuring that another member of their family, or another character, has the opposite characteristics and is a hero. This is handy for the novelist. However, it also reflects real life. Whilst it is often true that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree (bad parents may have bad children) in large families, as well as small families, often siblings are on different sides, one a villain, another a hero (depending on which side you are on!) Happy Endings I tend to write happy endings, not just for the benefit of the reader but because I find that writing sad endings, whilst it might be true to life, does not right the wrongs, and depresses me. I write to get over the hurt, and restore happiness. Revenge might restore justice, or equality of the victim and assailant. But they don’t increase the amount of happiness in the world. Just the amount of destruction. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Crying and Catharsis Last night I went to a Toastmasters meeting and heard a speech about Crying. The popular view has it that crying about the suffering of others is cathartic. It enables you to cry without actually enduring any real life suffering. I have never found that crying over real or imaginary matters helped - I just end up more depressed and with a blocked nose and a bad cold. Shakespeare achieves what we are often told not to do, alternating comedy and tragedy. Category And Comedy However, modern bookshops like books which they can categorise as comedy or documentary. Publishers like books which can be promoted in a niche. Life Story My bedtime reading is a book called Your Life as Story by Tristine Rainier. She describes her workshop classes at American unversities where students are encouraged to tell their life stories including the bad bits. A Teacher's Story My favourite story by Catherine Lim is the short story of the teacher who criticises the pupil’s grammar, ignoring the content of her essays. Spoiler alert: The plot is about the suicide of a pupil. The author, Catherine Lime, manages the amazing feat of turning a tragedy into a near comedy with the ironic ending. How did it go - my copy of the book is in Singapore and I’m writing from London. It ended, “if only we’d known” or If only she’d told us”. Content and Style At the extreme ends of the content versus style divide, one extreme end of content hammered home, you have message only, when it comes from the government called propaganda. Style only, called poetry, or ‘literary novel. Angela Lansbury, author of The Tailor and The Spy.

Authors' Dilemmas On Death

Proust began his book Time Remembered with a moment in the present leading to recalling the past. His work of fiction is interspersed with factual events of his day. Historical novels do this matching of fiction with real events. So do modern novels. Authors sometimes start with one incident, and move onto an all-encompassing book, covering centuries (like A Brief History of Time) but with a happy end. A novel often starts with birth and ends with death. You can start with the funeral and do a whole book as a flashback, ending the funeral as a frame at the end, now the reader knows so much more. An author has to have some light moments, alternating mood and pace, despite some dips into the despair of death. One way is to show two characters with different, contrasting reactions to death or terminal illness. Two ladies, men, people in adjoining hospital beds, a sister and sister-in-law, or father and son, can ‘rage' against death in different ways. Raging against death refers to Dylan Thomas’s poem, best remembered by one of its lines, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. As authors, hoping to write immortal books, we have a different worry, not just the vivid colour of chairs at our funeral, and suitable quotations from our own poems and books, but not to leave the unfinished novel. Instead of worrying about practical things, we abandon all hope of washing up, and race to finish the novel. I think authors, to guard against loss, should always write the synopsis, chapter headings and first and last lines before when over the age of 70 and embarking on a year long project.) I do not want my last words to be unfinished, “The last line of my novel is - ah - ah - ah ….!”. Angela Lansbury, author and speaker. Author of The Tailor and The Spy.