I am not in a hurry to read Neville Shute’s ON THE BEACH again. Suicide pills are not my idea of a good ending. There are of course, many great books that don’t end ‘happily ever after’. Good for them. For me, I like at least a satisfactory end to a book. Real life is too full of unsatisfactory inconclusive messes, or situations where the bad guys win, for me to relish reliving them in my entertainment.
I don’t think I am alone in this. It depends, I suppose, on why you choose to read a book. Whether it is entertainment or escapism or… well, something else. The first two require, if not a happy ending at least a satisfactory end – even if the hero dies, they die having succeeded in attaining their goal. But what actually makes a happy ending?
I suppose that once again depends on the reader, and is often genre specific. In a romance one expects the couple to finally be rewarded with twoo lurve, and a blissful life together promised. The requirements for murder-mystery would be… a solution and the murderer getting their comeuppance. A post-apocalyptic tale might have the rebuilding of a new society or start to it. A high-fantasy quest might have the quest completed successfully.
Of course, all of those exist. But, well, so often a book mingles elements of those genres. The happy ending then starts to become… well, all of the above. Then it takes quite a masterful and soft touch NOT to make it into saccharine. And if you do it all… there goes the sequel (unless of course you break what you have so carefully made).
So the answer is to, well, balance these. The requirements for the principal category of the novel need to be fulfilled. The rest… well, I find tying SOME knots, and hinting that others are capale of being tied… if not immediately in that next book. That way you have happy readers, and future ones.
So what is your idea of a happy ending?
Mad Genius Club 
13 responses to “Happy endings”
The short version: the good guys win, the bad guys get what’s coming to them, and the good people get a happily-at-least-for-a-while (if series).
Longer version: Justice is done, perhaps tempered with mercy where mercy is merited. The good guys might not come through unscathed, even if they just learn a lesson about balancing ego and ability, but they come through. Any sacrifice is not made in vain, and is later recognized and respected. The love interest stays faithful, the romantic couple get to spend a little time without potential in-laws or oh-so-helpful friends hanging around (depending on genre and time period), and nobody from the city/state/county shows up with a repair bill unless it is presented to the bad guys.
In a rare mood, I read tragedy in the classical sense, because watching a person’s flaws lead them to perdition is sometimes cathartic. But that is very rare. Reality has too much of that where the MC is also the villain, and he/she drags too many of the rest of us along with them.
What she said…
Thing is if, even if you do wrap up everything, you don’t have to break the ending to make a sequel, you just have to introduce something else–see, for example, the original Star Wars EU, whose most well-received parts didn’t override the ending of ROTJ, but just complicated it. Han and Leia have to deal with a whole bunch of nonsense before they finally get hitched; Luke goes through a lot of stuff as he tries to rebuild the Jedi order; the Rebellion, now the Republic, has to deal with those elements of the Empire that weren’t destroyed at the Battle of Endor, etc.
The Happy Ending Override is either a sign of laziness on the part of the writer or executive meddling.
Unfortunately it is very rare. I have seen a meme raving over how Tolkien pulled it off: the event of *The Hobbit* mean that *The Lord of the Rings* went better.
On the obvious level, if Bilbo had stayed home, Frodo’s joke about how “an orc would have suited [the ring] better” would have come to pass/ Said orc would have either marched it directly to Sauron or tried to use it for himself, done great evil, and ended up delivering it to Sauron in the end when it destroyed him. But even beyond that, the thirteen dwarves and one hobbit did quite a lot.
One of Tolkien’s writing’s described The Hobbit from Gandalf’s perspective. Gandalf was always worried about a potential alliance between Smaug and Sauron. He thought that, with Smaug’s help, Sauron might have been able to attack Lorien or even Rivendell. Thorin’s company made sure that didn’t happen.
Even without Smaug, Sauron tried to attack to the north–and the reason that he failed was that there were dwarves in the Lonely Mountain, as well as humans in the restored kingdom of Dale, to oppose him. Again, without what Bilbo and the dwarves did, that opposition wouldn’t have been there. And even though Sauron would have fallen in the end with the destruction of the ring, he’d have done a lot more damage to the west.
And the mountain, instead of being the launching place of an enemy attack, was where the Dalesfolk hid out for the duration of the War of the Ring.
The good guys win because they are good. And the ending does not get undermined by the sequel.
My happy ending has a tinge of sadness.
Because even if all the threads are tied up, and the characters are all headed for happily ever after, the reader has to say goodbye.
Neville Shute’s Trustee from the Toolroom.
“If you happen to be in the tram from Southall or from Hanwell at about nine o’clock on a Friday morning, you may see a little man get in at West Ealing, dressed in a shabby raincoat over a blue suit. He is one of hundreds of thousands like him in industrial England, pale faced, running to fat a little, rather hard up. His hands show evidence of manual work, his eyes and forehead evidence of intellect. A fitter or a machinist probably, you think, perhaps out of the toolroom. If you follow him, you will find that he gets out at Ealing Broadway and takes the Underground to Victoria Station. He comes up to the surface and walks along Victoria Street a little way to an office block, where he climbs four flights of stone stairs to the dingy old-fashioned office of the Miniature Mechanic to deliver his copy.
He will come out presently and take a bus to Chancery Lane, to spend the remainder of the day in the Library of the Patent Office. He will be home at Somerset Road, Ealing, in time for tea. He will spend the evening in the workshop, working on the current model.
He has achieved the type of life that he desires; he wants no other. He is perfectly, supremely happy.”
That’s a happy ending.
My ending for The Ways of Winter, book 2 of The Hounds of Annwn. The hero went through a lot in this story, and wasn’t expected to live, until a god of justice intervened.
Here he is, at night, lying beside his wife Angharad…
—–
George dozed lightly next to her, lying face down to spare his tender back. The room was warm enough that he’d pulled the covers down to his waist to cool off, intending to raise them later.
She put her book down and caressed his back with its scars. They were livid with newness, but the skin was welted and thickened as if they’d been there for a decade. She traced the thick lines with her fingertips, remembering what his back had felt like, that last night in this room before he’d left for Edgewood.
It’s a very small price to pay to get him back, she thought, a very fair trade. The real honeymoon is getting to keep him.
She made an involuntary noise at the thought of how close he had come to not returning.
George opened his eyes and smiled up at her, not changing his position. “I remember the last time you did that,” he said.
“So do I.”
“Do you mind it, very much?”
“Everyone has scars.” She leaned down to kiss the back of his neck. “It’s the price we pay for life.”
I like to have the various story ends wrapped up to an extent. If it leaves room for a sequel that’s fine, a couple of minor plot points that don’t get fully resolved is a good setup. But I do agree that in the end, I want the good guys to have triumphed over the bad guys.
There are a couple of stories, even from quite good writers (like Crichton), where liberties were taken with how a previous book ended in order to bring back a series that I have taken exception to. And the world building in several was poor enough (looking at you, Lois Lowry) in the first installment that I didn’t bother coming back to the rest.
The best happy ending is a party. ~:D I have a tradition in my series where all the characters get together and have a party in the last chapter. Sometimes a Mario Kart tournament, sometimes a birthday party, sometimes they rent the Royal York and have Emperors and Monarchs in attendance.
In this way, even though there may still be Problems hanging fire, they get to enjoy the peace they worked so hard to get.
Also, I do not dwell on the much-deserved fate of the Bad Guys, whoever they might be. IMHO, the -very- best happy ending is one where the former Bad Guy is a guest of honor at the party.
Sometimes the point of a story is not to kick the schlitz out of some cretin who’s been begging for it. Occasionally, wouldn’t it be better to nip something evil in the bud and turn it around before the Point of No Return is reached?
My endings are going to be bittersweet. I know this because life is never perfectly happy or perfectly sad. There’s always a little bit of one in the other and knowing how to endure each is a part of how life is.
I know how The Last Solist is going to end, and there is a lot of bitter in the sweet. Winning costs, but it beats losing by a great deal. People get married, but the parents can’t be there for one reason or another. You ascend the throne, but you’ve married the land and there is no easy way to divorce yourself from that. You realize what the purpose of your life is-and that purpose always hurts.
(The Summervale series afterwards…slightly more sweet than the bitter. Having a home, a proper home, helps.)