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In Defense of the HFN Ending,
or
Why Some Characters Simply Can’t Ride Off into the Sunset
By
Margaret Carroll
My first two novels were tender romantic comedies (The Write Match and The True Match, both from Avalon Books). The characters remind me of people I knew in my youth: they were wholesome and fun, ready to set the world on fire with a Bachelor’s degree, strong work ethic and a rent-stabilized apartment in Manhattan.
The heroines in those books were easy to like and better still, from a writer’s perspective, easy to work with.
When I began writing thrillers, the gloves came off. Avon/HarperCollins released my two debut novels of suspense back-to-back this fall. I showed an early draft of Riptide to my good friend Rubin Carson, a playwright who lives in L.A.
“I hate her,” Rubin said of the main character, Christina. “She’s a victim and she’s dreary and no fun.”
How do you make a cheating alcoholic wife seem fun?
My Riptide heroine actually has a lot in common with the heroines of my earlier romantic comedies. She’s smart, still in the prime of her life, and pretty. She wants a good life, a devoted husband and beautiful home. However, she lacks any sense of adventure (this is where backstory comes into play, but I’ll get to that later) and this in turn prevents her from having much of a work ethic.
In my real life, I don’t like victims. I roll my eyes when I see a news story about a morbidly obese person suing McDonald’s for luring them to buy unhealthy food. My blood boils every time CNN interviews a homeowner who blames the bank for the fact that he is defaulting on a mortgage he had no busy taking out in the first place.
I want to call CNN and ask what about the rest of us working schlubs? The ones who tighten our belts, drive beater cars and never take our kids to Disney World, all so we can pay our bills on time each month, and still have enough left over to pay taxes to bail out those Wall Street bankers who got rich pushing junk mortgages on any idiot who walked through their door?
But I digress.
That’s me the Working Schlub talking. Me the Author has trained herself to listen up when the T.V. news comes on with a shot of someone doing a ‘perp walk’ with a voiceover explaining that he/she has been caught fill-in-the-blank (running a Ponzi scheme, taking time away from their elected position to sleep with prostitutes, refusing to talk to investigators after plowing their Escalade into a tree, or talking their way past the Secret Service into a White House state dinner, and so on).
I pay close attention and read all I can about them because if you’re going to write suspense, troubled people are all you’ve got to work with. You need to be able to write about people who haven’t seen the inside of a place of worship or a therapist’s office or the working end of a food drive kitchen in their adult lives. The ones who would make you plant a wall of Arbor Vitae if they moved in next door. The weirdos, fanatics, drunks, junkies, perverts who need props for an orgasm, bullies whose biggest asset is their ability to pick a lock or test the quality of cocaine simply by dabbing some with his/her pinkie finger, and . . . you get the picture.
These are the people who mess up their lives badly enough to warrant a starring role in one of my thrillers.
So that I, the writer, can give them personal growth and a character arc of which they should be proud, or kill them off as I see fit.
How do you make them likeable?
To some readers, they never will be likeable. There are plenty of readers who only read books with HEA endings. I can relate. I’m like that when it comes to movies. I go to a movie theater maybe once every three years. When I do, it needs to be good and fun, not too deep, not too sappy and not too dark. Tom Cruise, vintage Arnold Schwarzenegger or Will Farrell work just fine.
But there are lots of readers with varying interests. Lots of them want a story featuring a main character with many facets and who is going through tough times. I think of the artist Toulouse Lautrec, who painted prostitutes and shed a beautiful light on them through his medium, even though they were people most of us would have rushed past on a street.
For me as a writer of suspense, the most interesting characters are the ones with the biggest problems. Life and death can hang in the balance. Suspense is built right in. They have the longest distance to go in terms of character development. They can do a complete 180-degree turnaround inside 400 pages in a way that someone whose life is already on track can’t. It’s rich fodder for a writer.
The challenge is, how do you make them likeable? You find common ground. Everyone wants to live the best life possible. They want their needs to be met. Even people on Death Row don’t give up on this. It is why, in my opinion, almost all of them make a statement during their final moments of life. They can’t fulfill any need at that point other than to try once more to be understood.
So, if you’re me and you’ve set out to tell the tale of a scheming, ambitious, alcoholic, two-timing wife who may have hired someone to kill her husband, how do you make her worth reading about?
Start by showing the reader that all she really wants is the same things they want: love, respect, honor and security.
She just goes about it the wrong way.
Why?
This is where backstory enters into it. I really love using backstory. I agree with popular wisdom that backstory does not belong early in the novel, nor should it take up page after page of the book. Of course you can name a number of awesome writers who break the rules (Anita Shreve comes to mind, mostly because I’m a rabid fan who has read just about everything she has published and she is always top of mind when I think about the craft of writing suspense). Used judiciously (for those of us who are not Anita Shreve), backstory clarifies motive for your main characters.
Which in turn should give a voice even to hard-drinking alcoholics (Christina Cardiff in Riptide) or wife-beating neurotics with bad skin (Dr. Porter Moross in A Dark Love).
Which begs the question, where is the rainbow at the end in a book with characters like these? Do they ride off into the sunset? Fall in love with somebody who is going to drop to one knee and whip out a two-carat diamond solitaire engagement ring to replace the one they’re about to hock to pay their legal bills?
Um, I don’t think so.
The story has to be true to its main characters. The ending has to be organic to the plot (sheesh, did I just say that?). If you’re going to write about troubled people (and again, these are the ones who give you a suspenseful ride along the way), then HEA for them is probably going to be HFN.
A heroine who is shopping around for caskets and dealing with an inquest into the death of her (very recently) departed husband, is not likely to have a good old-fashioned rompin’ stompin’ lovefest in the arms of Bachelor Number Two.
At least not in my books. A happy future for one of my girls is pretty much in keeping with the advice Oprah gave Rihanna: take some time on your own and get to know yourself. My heroines are likely to be brushing themselves off at the end of the book, ready to take a good hard look at themselves and start over. Maybe, for the first time, grow up.
And did I mention the one element that makes HFN so much fun? The heroine is my books always has a handsome new man in her life, some great guy who can handle a strong woman and he’s just waiting and hoping she’ll find some time in her schedule one day soon to explore the possibilities with him.
Next time around, her love interest will enhance her life, not detract from it.
Call it what you want. That kind of ending, for me, is better than a rainbow.
# # #
Margaret Carroll’s debut thriller, A Dark Love (Avon) has just been named one of the top five mass fiction titles of 2009……”Carroll develops what could be a stock story of an abusive marriage into a pulse-pounding romantic thriller with a strong, inspiring heroine determined to save herself."
An out-of-breath woman cried, “We need the cops. My three brothers are fighting over the wishbone.” Not quite sure I had heard her correctly, I repeated, “They’re fighting over the wishbone?” There was a loud crash and the woman shrieked, “Omigod! There went the tree, please hurry.” I quickly typed the information in. “Ma’am does any of your brothers have a weapon?” The woman shouted, “What kind of stupid question is that?” One I need answered, dearie. “Ma’am, I need to know if any of your brothers are armed with a weapon.” She huffed, “Just get someone out here before Rex gets his chain saw started.” “Chain saw? Hello?” The line was dead. The moral to this story is; the family that fights together gets to go to jail together. Ho. Ho. Ho. Merry Christmas. 
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