But when are you going to write something happy? Also, what's up with the love triangles?

note: this post has some specifics about my books. I tried to mark them as spoilers, but just be aware.

I was just reading Beth Revis's blog about writing dystopias and I think she does a great job of explaining why dystopian literature isn't always depressing and I thought I might piggy-back off of her discussion here.

This is a question I got asked at almost every tour stop: when are you going to write something happy -- your books are SO DEPRESSING!  And here's my answer: my characters live in a pretty brutal world, there's just no way around that so yeah, some bad things happen in my books.

But here's the thing (and I hope this isn't a spoiler but just in case you're extremely spoiler averse, stop reading now): when all is said and done, at the end of my books my characters know who they are.  They know the core of their strength and they survive.  They go up against some pretty difficult odds where daily existence isn't a given and they make it through -- they push themselves farther than I think many people could.

To me, that's a happy ending: knowing who you are, knowing you can survive, knowing what you want in life and how to go after it and not settling.  These are good things.

**and here's where I do actually get spoilery and explainery**

If a happy ending for Mary were just about ending up with a man and a dog, she'd have stayed in the village and married Harry.  That's what her mom did and though it didn't work out terribly well in the very end, she seemed to live a fine life up until her husband got infected.

I meant for Harry to be a viable choice for Mary.  And I meant for Travis to be a viable choice for Mary.  To me, that's the essence of a love triangle -- each man is a viable choice for the heroine but each speaks to a different part of who she is.  The heroine isn't choosing between two men, she's choosing who SHE wants to be and that will dictate who the right match is.

If Mary chose to be content and not seek answers to her questions -- to let the status stay quo -- then Harry was the right match.  If she chose to ask questions and seek out answers and push past the fence, then Travis was the right match.  Mary wasn't choosing between them -- she was figuring out who *she* wanted to be.

**and here's where I get general again**

To me, a love triangle done right isn't about a female* character's affections bouncing back and forth between two men, it's about her internal struggle within herself as she figures out who *she* wants to be and what's important to her.  This internal struggle then gets reflected externally as she wars within herself and grows.  And that's the heart of any book -- a character's growth from first page to the last.  Generally, even as a character grows and changes she backslides (what sometimes looks like a flip-flop in affections) and sometimes a character will cling to their old way of being even as the struggle to adopt a new way.

Growth isn't easy.  Figuring out who you are isn't easy.  That's why I think that a book that ends with a character who knows who they are and what they want is a good thing.

I think Beth makes an excellent point when she says:  "That's why dystopic literature isn't really depressing. Because it's about the strength of humanity beyond the cruelty of the world."  Someone once said that happy people make for short books.  I tend to agree with that.

* I'm talking about a love triangle between one woman and two men, I'm sure the same applies to one man and two women or three women or three men or what have you.