Posted: March 6, 2025

Happily Ever After

I'm a sucker for happy endings.

I've written before, though, that a lot of writers tend to shy away from them because they can easily degenerate into cliches. When the guys in the white hats always win and the guys in the black hats routinely go down in flames, endings start to get shallow and predictable. To avoid this, we get stories in which either nothing happens -- stories that are more about creating character than watching character develop toward a climax -- or where what happens to the characters is just the result of random, generally cruel fate.

I don't buy that your only choice is between shallow, black-and-white morality and a descent into ennui and meaninglessness. Instead, I think we need to take a deeper look at where happy endings come from and what they actually mean. And the way to do that lies (like so many things) in the Middle Ages.

Happy endings, at their heart, are about justice. Good characters end well and evil ones end badly. But the medieval sense of what justice is runs deeper that the modern understanding of obeying the rules and making sure people who don't obey the rules suffer accordingly. Instead, the idea was that any system -- a person, a family, a community, a society, a nation -- had a built-in structure to it, a way that it was supposed to work. Some characters helped support that structure, making choices -- letting go of a grudge to make way for forgiveness, supporting laws that protected vulnerable people from exploitation -- that helped the systems around them to work more the way they were intended. Others made decisions that broke those structures down. So according to medieval justice, stopping to let someone make a left turn to untie a knot in traffic is a just act. Picking up a shopping cart from the middle of the parking lot and returning it to the trolly is a just act. You've made a system, however small, work more the way it was intended.

The choices you make to support or break systems have consequences. Good people generally tend to do well because they are part of a healthier system. When evil people end badly, it's not because some punishment's been imposed from outside. Systems that break down tend to hurt the people that break them. To use a mechanical analogy (because, yes, I am a car geek), when you never change the oil in your engine, the engine doesn't punish you by throwing a rod. There's just a natural connection between clean oil and engine health.

You can see this same sort of connection in Dante's Divine Comedy -- or if you don't have patience for medieval Italian poetry, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle did a modern adaptation. The Inferno, the most read of the three books, is renowned for the often gruesome punishments meted out to various types of sinners. But those punishments are always the direct (if graphic) result of the choices those sinners made in life.

In the circle of the betrayers, for instance, we meet Ugolino della Gherardesca and Archbishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini. The real life Ugolio had been the leader of Pisa but betrayed the city to its enemies more than once. In one of the betrayals, Archbishop Ruggieri's nephew was killed. So when the Archbishop captured Ugolino, he locked him in a tower with his family and literally threw away the keys, leaving Ugolino to starve. According to Dante, Ugolino's children died first, but before they did, they begged their father to eat them to keep himself alive. Which he did.

Yes, ew.

It get ewier, I'm afraid. Dante has both Ugolino and Ruggieri locked in the ice of the circle of betrayers, with Ugolino spending eternity gnawing on Ruggieri's brains. But note that both punishments are directly related to how the choices they made in life broke down the systems around them. It's inherent in leadership that you not betray the people you're leading. It' also inherent in the spiritual leadership a bishopric represents that you not force others to commit unspeakable sins.

You see this connection throughout the Inferno. People who surrendered to lust spend eternity being blown around by whirlwinds. Clergy who sold positions within the church to the highest bidder spend eternity trudging around in church robes made of lead. These punishments aren't just macabre jokes on God's part -- the eternal Mikkado making the punishment fit the crime. These people broke their own humanity and the systems around them in specific ways. They chose to become broken people. And now, that's who they are. As C. S. Lewis put in in The Great Divorce, the gates of hell are locked from the inside.

You also see this in Dante's Purgatorio, which doesn't get read quite as often as the Inferno. It's nothing like the purgatory James Joyce railed against in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man -- the same punishments as in hell, just not for eternity. In Dante, the residents of purgatory spend their time, not suffering, but contemplating the meaning of various sins. The point is that their humanity is damaged but not as irreparably broken as with the inhabitants of the Inferno. They're there to heal. Not to pay a price to get into heaven, but to become the kind of people who would be comfortable living there.

So, how do we bring all this medieval metaphysics back to writing? Well, the first step toward finding happy endings is to delve deeply into your characters' choices, to understand who the are and why they choose to do what they do. Then ask yourself, what about those choices has broken or healed something, either within your character, your character's family, your character's business, your character's world. Follow that brokenness or healing through to its natural conclusion, and you will have found your ending.

Note that, while this approach does let you find natural, organic happy endings that arise out of your characters, it also leaves room for unhappy endings that don't depend on life being inherently meaningless. Remember that systems that either break down or heal exist on a lot of different levels. So in the classic tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, the star-crossed lovers are not themselves broken, but their society at large is. It's ancient grudges and stubborn pride that keep the Capulets and Montagues at each others' throats. When the two innocent lovers get caught up in that larger brokenness, things don't end well.

Understand, I'm not advocating one way or another for the theology or metaphysics behind heaven and hell. But the insights that Dante -- or C. S. Lewis -- provide into how characters and societies work apply whether or not you agree with them. They also force you to think about how people, families, and societies are intended to work and how they can be made to work better. And that can make you not only a stronger writer, but a better person.