The flight of hope and joy

This has been a tough year for me in real life.  Politically, we still have Trump around, and Brexit has dominated English lives all year.  I've also had a fair bit of personal hassle to deal with during this last twelve months.  2018 in real life has not been one of my best years.

I, like many other people, read to lose myself in another world.  And this year more than ever, I've needed those worlds to feel uplifting in some way.  I've needed a sense of hope and joy in my stories.  Yes, the old saying that fiction runs on conflict still applies, but we have a great deal of choice as writers in choosing what that conflict should be.

The conflict we choose for our stories can be uplifing if the tale is one of a character we love successfully overcoming the awful obstacles in their life.  But the tests some writers put their characters through can also be a real downer, and lead to the flight of all joy and hope in the story.

One book I read this year had a main character with obsessive-compulsive disorder.  She wasn't particularly sympathetically portrayed, and at the end of the book she effectively killed herself, by entering an alien city.  I felt totally dissatisfied with the ending.  I was giving that author a second chance as I hadn't fallen in love with her first book, but I'll be reading no more of her joyless stories.

Another book I struggled with involved a bunch of characters signing up for the military.  The premise was that every alien in the galaxy was just out to kill them.  I found this too depressing for words, and abandoned the book half-way through when the author started killing off characters in great detail.  The thing is, in real life, that author is wonderfully supportive of other people and other writers, so I really wanted to like his work.  This too was the second book of his I've read.  I did get through the first one, but not this second time.  

Then there was the fantasy book with a male prostitute character whose work was described in great detail.  It also had a bloodbath of gratuitous violence in the last chapter.  It was a world without any sense of hope or joy, where everyone was hustling for something.  I won't be seeking out that author's work again.

In these tough times I need a ray of hope in my reading, someone to show me that humans can do better.  And those are the books I'll be looking out for next year.