Raaarrrgh he lives etc.

I have been frantically editing for the past several days, to prepare We Three for a reading this Thursday (AAGH), and now that I've finally turned the thing in (basically at gunpoint), I don't know what to do with myself. I have a bunch of stupid fears about the play I'm trying to ignore. It'll be read by excellent actors, and that's really all I could ask for.

So, to change the subject, I've been thinking about the newest play (half-play, little stump of a play, whatever), and for a while now it's been clear that the thing needs a happy ending. Not a really happy ending, but definitely one where Shit is Looking Up. This is not something I do very often, but if the play works the way I want it to, it's going to be very tough to watch, and it's not fair to the audience to pummel them for two hours and then leave them even more depressed at the end. (Not that great plays don't do that, but I don't think it's gonna work here.)

And so. I've been wondering: how the fuck am I going to get to a happy ending with this thing? What does a non-sappy happy ending even look like? How is it going to feel genuine? This might be a very basic thing for a lot of writers, but it's not my area of experience at all. I was trying to come up with some kind of formula, basically, and to introduce my problem I will give you a vague chart thing:

- CHARACTER WITH A FUCKED-UP PAST
- MAKES A TERRIBLE DECISION
- IT TOTALLY SUCKS
- WHAT IS WRONG WITH HIM

(I know, what a great plot! I'm a friggin genius.)

So then I felt like a happy ending would require

- CHARACTER TO GET OVER HIS SHIT
- ENOUGH TO TAKE MASSIVE ACTION AGAINST SOMEONE
- WITHOUT IT BEING MELODRAMATIC

Which was not working in my head. And it felt like it was going to require a ton of exposition, and that is my least favorite thing.

But, like so many annoying writing problems, the real way to figure this out was to determine the right question to ask. So I said to myself: what is one problem this character has that I can fix? And it was: he is terrible at connecting with people. And I realized that, okay, it would be enough for him to make a friend. That's happy enough. There's hope.