on sad stories

Some friends and I went to see the movie Twilight last night. The theater was packed, mostly with preteen girls who kept clapping and cheering whenever handsome guys appeared on screen (so annoying). The movie was all right: it was a romance story about a human girl falling in love with a vampire boy, and the vampire boy must overcome his thirst for her blood in order to be with her. I told my friend Jessica, “Five years ago I had a romance story nearly identical to that one. I guess I should have written and published it.” She said, “Definitely.” I then proceeded to tell her, “My version didn’t have a happy ending. It was a romance story, but it turned out that the girl fell in love with the vampire boy, but the boy was actually deceiving her so that he and his family could torture and then consume her as dietary sustenance.” She told me that I need to start writing stories with happy endings. The thing is, that’s quite difficult for me. A week ago, Jessica and I were swapping stories made-up on the spot. Her story was quite romantic with a fantastic happy ending. Mine was a tragedy with a happy ending. She said, “Your happy ending sucked. But the sad part was amazing.” For some reason, and I’m not quite sure why, sad and depressing and tragic stories are much easier for me to write. Perhaps it’s because sadness, depression, and tragedy—with quite the speckling of irony—has been the definition of my life thus far. “Maybe one day,” I told Jessica, “if my dreams become reality, then my stories will have happy endings.” My two favorite authors—Cormac McCarthy and Ernest Hemmingway—are quite nihilistic or at the least naturalistic in their writing; while my worldview does not align with any of those, my writing reflects those worldviews. Perhaps there is a hint of truth to Hemmingway’s statement: “Every true story ends in death.”