It’s probably safe to say that anyone who writes literary fiction and had their work published, or shared it with others, has at one time or another been faced with these or similar questions:
• Why are your stories so depressing?
• Why does nothing good ever happen to your characters?
• Why can’t you write a happy story?

All of which are legitimate and reasonable questions to ask. Often, when I’m considering story ideas, I wonder what draws me to dark and painful subject matter. It could be that I’m attracted to characters approaching a crossroads or facing a moral quandary. Their lives already have or are about to change, and not necessarily for the better. There is a looming threat of some kind, or they make a poor decision, or they are simply unlucky, and they spend the rest of the story digging themselves out of a situation that could have disastrous or even deadly consequences. Sometimes they make it. Occasionally they don’t.

This is nothing new. Much of our literature tells stories of suffering and endurance. It seems unavoidable. We are captivated by tragedy, by stories in which a character’s striving comes to nothing, by stories that depict the worst that human nature has to offer, by stories in which honest and decent people through no fault of their own must struggle against adversity. Look at any literary prize shortlist. Maybe we don’t think of it in these terms, but it’s worth asking why grim or shocking or disturbing fiction is valued so highly. Or, to turn the question around, we could ask why fiction that is lighthearted or comforting or written with no purpose other than to entertain is considered inferior to so-called “serious” fiction and swiftly dismissed.

This gets somewhere close to the point. Whether reading or writing, what I’m looking for is a story that is dramatically compelling. When I write, I want the story I’m working on to hold the reader’s attention, and to do that it first has to hold my attention. So if my fiction is depressing, if none of my characters ever have anything good happen to them, if none of my stories are happy stories, it comes down to what I find interesting as a reader, which are the same things I find interesting as a writer. Obviously the fault here is mine and nobody else’s (including the university professors who put all those depressing plays and novels on their reading lists).

What does this mean? In practical terms it means that any story I willingly spend time and energy on will include a character the reader cares about suffering some kind of setback. This does not necessarily mean physical suffering. It can also mean the character discovers his goal is harder to reach than he’d expected, or he is forced by circumstance to make a difficult decision or recognize a painful truth or commit an act that has morally questionable or hurtful consequences. In order to be meaningful, however, the reader must care what happens. As a writer, the response I want is visceral. The character’s struggle has no meaning if the reader doesn’t care. The character’s fate has to matter.

This is, of course, a principle that goes back to ancient times.

I once criticized a book for having a soft ending that is “content to provide everyone with exactly what his or her heart desires.” Some might ask, what’s wrong with that? The only justification I can offer is to say that the most satisfying art is art that imitates life, and in the 21st century we know that it’s rare for anyone to get exactly what their heart desires. My feeling was that the author had let the characters off easy and left several dramatic possibilities unexplored. 200 years ago Jane Austen could close her novels with happy marriages because aesthetic tastes and reader expectations were different (and we still read her because her exceptional genius allowed her to avoid sentiment). But a succession of traumatic events including two world wars have altered the world we live in, and these days happy endings in fiction carry a whiff of wish fulfillment and in literary terms are unconvincing.

Still, there’s no formula for writing good fiction. The writer’s relationship with the blank page is exclusive and personal. There’s no room for anyone else. I don’t write fiction to confirm things I already know or to give people an excuse to feel good about themselves. I write to understand what it means to be human. And if nothing else, events from the recent and distant past have taught that the experience of being human exposes us to beauty and ugliness in equal measure.

In a letter to his friend Oskar Pollak, Franz Kafka wrote that the books we read should “bite and sting us.” “A book,” he says, “must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” In other words, a book should shock us into new ways of thinking and change the way we see the world. The prose, the ideas, the twists in plot: these should take our breath away and make us grateful that of all the books out there, this book has found its way into our hands. A book should carry the justification for its existence on every page. And it doesn’t have to be pretty to do this.

Ultimately, though, the author’s commitment to the reader is to write a story that is so fascinating and beguiling the reader has no choice but to keep turning the pages. Even at their most gruesome and pessimistic, Kafka’s stories honour this commitment. Ninety years after his death readers all over the world continue to be mesmerized by the works of an obscure Czech insurance adjuster. And no one ever read Kafka for the happy endings.

So when people ask me these questions:
• Why are your stories so depressing?
• Why does nothing good ever happen to your characters?
• Why can’t you write a happy story?
my answer—that I write fiction I would want to read myself, that I’m searching for a new angle on the human condition, that the struggles I envision for my characters are ones I find dramatically interesting—may be a simplification but it at least gets us somewhere near the truth. Anyone looking for a happy story won’t be picking up one of my books anytime soon. But I can live with that, not that I have any choice.