Friday, October 22, 2010

Depressing stories are -so- depressing

                Reading The Swimmer was really saddening. I thought it was just really funny at first, since I heard about it from Inx and M- before I ever read it myself. They made it sound so amusing, emphasizing the “we drank too much”, and making it seem extremely comical. But when I read it, I was just confused from the beginning, and I became more and more depressed as I read it. At first, I thought he was just a drunk man who was a socialite and therefore no one cared that he was crazy, but the more I read the more I realized that he was actually a social outcast who had both a drinking and a financial problem. The storm and the dry pool was a really nice foreshadowing touch to the humiliation and realization that what he remembers isn’t complete and isn’t true anymore.
                Honestly, I realized that I really dislike these stores. I like “happily ever after”s, stories that are fun and frivolous and don’t contain much conflict if any. Of course, I realize that conflict is a fundamental part of a good story, but… well actually, I just like stories where the conflict is resolved, in an extremely clichéd manner. Such as, the prince saves the princess and then they get married and live happily ever after. It makes me feel content on the inside. Of course, but that’s not good literature. I feel like things that are classified literature are stories that end very realistically, aka there is no happy ending, no prince charming, and if you don’t die or your close family/friends don’t die then you’re lucky. How depressing.
                I think I will write my story to have a vague “happily ever after”. But I’ll qualify it so that people aren’t angry at my lack of originality and insistence on writing happy chick flick-y stories. Just because I can’t really face conflict very well doesn’t mean that I can’t write good stories. I just write clichéd ones. Get over it.

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