Can short stories have happy endings?

Modern short stories rarely have happy endings. More often than not, the protagonist is thwarted in getting what they want. Why?

Henry is a freshman English major in his first creative writing class. He has loved reading from a young age, and his literature teacher encouraged him to pursue an English major. Still, the thought of writing his own stories seemed as far-fetched as designing a building just because he’s spent his life inside buildings. But now, he needs to write a short story for a class assignment, and he needs to get up to speed, quickly.

The week before the first draft is due, he spends every day thumbing through their syllabus, full of stories by Raymond Carver and Alice Munro and George Saunders. Like a police artist, he forms a composite sketch of a short story. He writes about a bartender who observes a couple on a glowing first date, but is still bitter over his own breakup. He underpours their drinks and warns the woman that the man was just in last week with someone else. When they go home together anyway, he closes up the bar alone and cries.

After submitting their first draft, students are paired up for peer feedback. Henry’s partner is a computer science major named Esme, the only engineer in the class. They meet in a campus diner to discuss their stories. While sipping on soda, she says that his story has some interesting bones, but it’s mostly inert. He is writing about a generic situation (first date) that recalls another generic situation (a relationship ending), without enough specificity to make the involved parties feel like real people. She asks him if he has been in a relationship before. He has not.

I wonder if you registered Esme’s introduction. Maybe when she appeared, you saw the shape of the future: exchanged phone numbers, late-night arguments about fiction, escalating into an inevitable kiss. After all, you’ve seen that countless times. But good writing requires managing the reader’s imagination, and if I followed your expectations too closely, you would be disappointed. So having introduced Esme, and triggered your prediction that Henry and Esme might have a spark, I must complicate their relationship in some way, rather than giving them a straightforward happiness. This is one possible explanation for why short stories can’t have happy endings: subverting expectations requires avoiding straightforward paths to happiness. But this is a partial explanation, because it doesn’t rule out characters finding their way back to happiness.

Esme’s own story features a sentient planet as its narrator. Its first civilization was erased by a natural disaster, so when space-faring humans arrive, the planet tries to make itself hospitable out of guilt. Henry finds the premise fascinating, but he tells her that he can’t see the action driving the story. At a high level, all that happens is that some humans arrive on a planet and terraform it with some helping hands. He argues that it would be way more interesting if the humans initiated some kind of resource conflict against their new planetary host.

Esme agrees that she needs a source of action, but she also points out that their assignment has a tight word limit. If she adds a war against the planet, she doesn’t have the headroom to also include a resolution. If the humans are wiped out or the planet is cracked open like an egg, that can end the story in a paragraph. But making peace is different. For the war to be deescalated, both parties have to back down, for well-motivated reasons, and the rapprochement has to be drawn out logically. So introducing the conflict that Henry asks for would require her to make the story radically longer, or she would have to change the ending.

This is a second reason why short stories rarely have happy endings: it’s hard to resolve conflict neatly in the span of a short story.

Henry and Esme don’t keep in touch after the class ends. Henry thinks about her sometimes when he writes a new story, but he suspects that she does not think about him at all, and that is enough to quell any instinct to reach out to her.

A year later, Henry sees a short story on Substack. It takes thirty seconds of reading for him to feel the recognition in his bones. He clicks through to the pseudonymous author’s profile. A story from six months ago called Terra Firma confirms his suspicions.

He isn’t surprised that Esme has been posting stories for years. Nor is he surprised that she has built up an unusually large following for a Substack fiction writer. It occurs to him that he knows something about her that the thousands of people following her pseudonym don’t. Perhaps her friends don’t know about her blog, either. The possibility of being the only one in the world who knows her secret thrills him.

It’s 6 am when Henry finishes her catalog. Sprawled in bed, his thoughts circle one particular story. It is about two intelligent rats raised in a lab to solve increasingly elaborate mazes. One of them embraces the challenge, but the other one wants to escape the lab. She tries to enlist her cellmate in a prison break, but he tells her that he’s having fun, that the maze is clean, the cheese is real and he doesn’t see a reason to leave.

Eventually, she tells him that she knows of a bigger maze on the outside, more challenging and intricate than any that the scientists could put them through in ten lifetimes. Intrigued, he agrees to come with her. After they escape, he asks for the maze that she promised him. She points to the trees, the sky, the cracked concrete and says “solve this.”

I now have the opportunity to give Henry a happy ending. Reading Esme’s stories could help his own imaginative potential break out of its cage, and he could start to write more interesting and less formulaic stories. Alternatively, it could prompt him to reconnect with her. We’ve subverted the most basic expectations already, and we’ve established a path to happiness – so both of these options would be reasonable endings to the story.

But a part of me resists, for reasons that have nothing to do with narrative craft. I resist the idea that a character grown from a part of me could change his life with an epiphany, as simply as walking through a door. His continued struggle justifies my own continued struggle. Look, it tells me, you are who you are, and there’s no cure for that.

This is the final and most important reason why I think happy endings are rare: we don’t believe in happy endings. Relationships are fragile, jobs are disappointing, communities are transitory, and all of these apply doubly for people possessed by a neurosis that leads them to spend their adult life constructing elaborate fictions for strangers. There’s a reason why we associate a belief in happy endings with children’s stories.

To write a happy ending, you must believe that you can have a happy ending.

Henry goes for a walk to clear his mind, the pastel pink hues of the rising sun welcoming him to a new day. He sits on a bench outside his dorm, watching the squirrels scamper beneath the trees. He fancies that he can see his own reflection in the bulging eyes of the nearest squirrel, an enormous specimen with a black stripe like a racecar. The silent morning carries the sound of loud laughter from beyond a nearby building, as a group of students return from a party. He pictures six girls in six differently-colored dresses holding hands in a circle and whirling so enthusiastically that they lift off the ground and float away. He considers that this would be a convenient form of fast transportation across their sprawling campus.

There among the trees, the sky, and the cracked concrete, Henry decides that he can solve this after all.