How do I go about writing a tragic ending in a story while making it overall satisfying to the reader?

Question

I am working on a horror-ish novel in my spare time and want to end it by killing off the protagonist or her failing somehow. For a bit of background, here are the basic plot points of my story, Under the Crow's Song:

Alice (Protag) is struggling to move on after the disappearance of her father and cannot shake the feeling that he is still alive somewhere. Upon investigating, she discovers a more paranormal cause for his disappearance. The paranormal being is a sort of puppet-master entity who will do anything to achieve his goals. Recently, he has "employed" the skills of a few human candidates he has deemed worthy to assist his cause. This being is very cruel and strict with his group of workers, and I want to incorporate that into the death/failure of the protagonist. Perhaps she nearly succeeded in her efforts to defeat the creature but was caught and punished. Overall, I'm unsure how to go about this, and I am open to new ideas/constructive criticism.

Answer 1

Theme (and Tone)

Theme is a creative tool during the creation process, plotting and first draft.

Tone is a creative tool in the refining process, second and final drafts.

Horror and Comedy are about Theme and Tone – more than other genres because they can't rely on tropes. (They have tropes, but as they become familiar they stop having the intended effect.)

Instead Comedy needs to be funny, Horror needs to be scary – both need to hit visceral, primal emotions that (at times) supersede logic. It's more involved than just 'Hero Has a Bad Day'. Comedy and Horror go by their own story rules.

Character and Plot – the most important parts of other genres – are derailed, pushed to breaking limits, and beyond. Extra suspension of disbelief will be allowed in service to the theme. In fact the great moments are probably when they 'transcend' reality, that is when they seem to hit it.

My suggestion is that you brainstorm on your Theme as this is going to answer some of your big story questions.

Tone is... an ongoing exploration of the writer's craft. Mostly you just need to get out of the way and let the story happen, especially at this early phase.

How to Theme for Horror

You need a big arc that drives smaller story beats that reveal a pattern. For Horror it's aways a negative arc.

In general, Horror is about reducing the MC's agency and options. Mistakes are made, equipment is damaged, territory is lost, safety nets are removed, valuable people are injured and die... Reduce, reduce, reduce.

Each story beat is a loss and this starts right away, but typically the protagonist does not see these early beats as losses, rather these are 'challenges' which are 'solved' (badly). The cost is high, the compromise is more than planned. Every situation has a negative spin. Other characters become uneasy. This will generate unbalanced tension in your story, readers know this can't end well.

The MC actively makes choices (or compromises) which lead to them being increasingly isolated, trapped, un-helped, or disbelieved. Red flags are ignored, repairs are postponed. When these decisions come back to bite the MC later at a crucial moment, it feels like a payoff and inevitable.

Meanwhile, your horror-premise is chiseling away at the edges of the narrative. The influence is plausibly deniable at first, but will rise (or be uncovered) in stages, eventually overtaking the story. Protag is coping with a downward arc and losing agency while the horror-element is unfairly altering the landscape – it doesn't need to be supernatural, but is probably always exaggerated.

The tipping point will act as a plot twist that wipes out entire story goals. Characters will completely change under unnatural circumstances (maybe not all at once). An MC who has been established as 'coping' may have less to lose, be more adaptable to loss and sudden change, straddle parts of society, and find a new zeal for life – whereas a more comfortable character might stay in denial longer and be slower to react.

Compare to:

Tragedy where the hero creates his own undoing, making several wrong moral decisions away from the 'good' path.

Melodrama where the MC endures injustice, power-imbalance, and abuse to generate sympathy.

Dark Fantasy Heroic fantasy with horror tropes.

Horror vs Terror

According to a 200 year old writer's debate, the principle elements of Horror genre are subdivided into 2 emotional states: horror and terror.

• Terror is about anticipation, suspense, adrenaline, thriller, the fear of what will happen.

• Horror is about what has happened. It's more cerebral, gothic, revulsive, un-reconcilable, look at the ugly consequences.

They can be reduced to primary survival instincts. Terror is an instinct to flee from immediate threat, while horror is more the awful awareness of an abnormality or corruption: OMG, something is wrong!

Adjacent negative primal emotions that could be woven into your theme might be disgust, vengeance, shame, or morbid grief. Leaning heavily on another brutal emotion can enrich the tone, add layered motives, and justify obsessive sabotaging behavior that will defy common sense but progress the arc.

I think if you are clear on what is driving your MC, you can see their motivations and write their choices. If you have an ensemble cast each might have their own negative motivation and fate.

Some suggestions

Your broad strokes include a Father character who took this journey before her, and failed. This gives a lot of opportunity for foreshadowing her fate, but also the chance to walk in his shoes and examine any gruesome choices he made, seeing them now in a new light as she faces them too.

She might perceive her downward arc as a mystery to be solved, or an obligation to un-shame her father, or to redeem herself (proven better than her father).... She will understand this goal early on in a naively positive way, but part of her downward arc will also be the corruption of her original goal.

She will be unpacking her feelings about her father along the way, somehow this is not possible if she just stayed home and had therapy. I said horror is not character-driven, but the MC doesn't know they are in a horror story. She will think as a literary or genre protagonist until the horror robs her of her last illusions.

Needless to say, she should make discoveries about her father that don't match her image of him, and her feelings will evolve as she gets closer to the truth.

Happy ending or not?

Every story starts and ends on a status quo. Horror does not need a solid (reliable) status quo at the end, but it does need a resolution.

The Theme can end, even if the horror-premise is left unresolved.

The Thing (1982), original story by John W. Campbell Jr

The plot is a shape-shifting monster from outer space, but the theme is suspicion and distrust between the men.... The story ends not when there is 1 man left and the monster defeated, but with the last 2 men freezing to death locked in a faceoff.

In Rosemary's Baby, Ira Levin

after uncovering the conspiracy of her pregnancy, she stays to nurture the baby.

The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin (again)

the protag suspects local women are being replaced with compliant facsimiles. She is ultimately replaced, as a new woman moves to town. The cycle continues.

Plot and character resolution are superseded by a pure-theme ending. The story ends when your MC reaches the ultimate conclusion of the story's theme, the abnormal or corruption to the nth power, no longer an uncertain fear but pushed past the limits of reality.

Answer 2

I know there is a whole genre of literature called tragedy where the protagonist largely fails or is defeated at the end. And apparently some people consider some tragedies to be great works of literature and find it more or less satisfying to read or watch.

So possibly you might want to research tragedies to find out why they have the degree of popularity they do.

Possibly a story can actually be about a character's struggle to be as good a person as they can be, with a more specific goal in the forefront and seeming to be the main conflict in the story, and in the end they give up on trying to achieve what seems their main goal in order not to violate their ethics and the readers realize the protagonist's ethical struggle was actually the main conflict in the story.

You might want to think about various works of fiction where the hero triumphs at the end and maybe can be expected to "live happily ever after". But what about all the other characters in a specific short story, novel, play, movie, or tv episode? Do all those other characters triumph at the end? Are all of the other characters in the story expected to "live happily ever after"? In many stories one or more characters are antagonists opposing the protagonist(s), so the success of the protagonist(s) means failure for the antagonist(s), failure ranging in impact on the antagonist(s) from a minor irritation to a horrible agonizing death.

And in many stories good characters, including those on the side of the protagonist(s) suffer failures, ranging in their impact on those characters from a minor irritation to a horrible agonizing death.

So possibly you imagine rewriting a story with a different character as the protagonist, one who is not as successful in the story as the original protagonist.

Can you make the story of the new protagonist a sort of partial or total tragedy and yet still make it satisfying to the readers or viewers? And if so, can you do so by changing few or none of the major plot elements?

Take for example, the exercise of rewriting Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe with Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert as the protagonist without changing the plot much. Can you make it at least partially tragic? Can you make it at least partially satisfying to the readers?

You might be interested in this dialog from the movie She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) set in the southern plains near the fictional Fort Starke in 1876 after Custer's Last Stand and after a bloody failure of Captain Nathan Brittles's mission.

Olivia Dandridge: [after the massacre at Sudrow's Wells] You don't have to say it, Captain. I know all this is because of me; because I wanted to see the West; because I wasn't - I wasn't "Army" enough to stay the winter.

Captain Nathan Brittles: You're not quite "Army" yet, miss... or you'd know never to apologize... it's a sign of weakness.

Olivia Dandridge: Yes, but this was your last patrol and I'm to blame for it.

Captain Nathan Brittles: Only the man who commands can be blamed. It rests on me... mission failure!

And later Captain Brittles achieves a success that he can feel proud of. But I suspect that he sometimes still feels guilty about the failure of his last mission, ashamed about the people he didn't save.

A good and noble character in a story might feel like a failure at the end instead of a success because they feel they didn't save as many people as they should have.

Which reminds me of that little known novel The Lord of the Rings (1954,1955).

----------------Spoilers follow-----------------------------------

The protagonist, Frodo Baggins, agrees to try the impossible, to carry the One Ring to Mount Doom and throw it into the lava in the Cracks of Doom, thus defeating the dark Lord Sauron forever.

Even worse than the dangers of trying to get into Mordor is he power of the One Ring to tempt all its possessors with delusions of gaining unlimited power by using it. No mortal can resist the temptation to use the One Ring, and any mortal would eventually be controlled by the Ring and return it to Sauron. And that includes Hobbits. But Hobbits are the least ambitious mortals, and Frodo probably one of the least ambitious Hobbits ever, and so the best possible, or least bad, choice to try the impossible quest.

And so Frodo does the impossible for anyone else, taking the One Ring all the way to Mount Doom and inside to where it was forged. And there, where the corrupting power of the Ring is greatest and impossible to resist, Frodo gives in and claims the Ring for himself.

But because Frodo had earlier done what was possible for himself, and repeatedly gave mercy to Gollum, Gollum follows Frodo in, takes the Ring from Frodo, and then falls into the Cracks of Doom, destroying himself and the Ring.

-------------------End Spoiler-------------------------------------

So Frodo might sometimes feel like he is the greatest hero ever, and the savior of the world. And at other times Frodo might feel like an utter failure and an evil traitor to everyone, because he failed to do what was literally impossible for any living creature to do and which no other living being could have come as close to achieving.

And Frodo's feelings of failure and betrayal are no doubt a part in his failure to find happiness in mortal lands afterwards.

So The Lord of the Rings (1954,1955) can be read as a story with a happy ending for the world, or as Frodo's tragedy, or as both, and maybe other things as well.

To be continued.

Continued Sept. 12 2024.

In the discussion of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) I mentioned that it was set soon after Custer's Last Stand in 1876. Custer has been portrayed many different ways in novels and movies.

Custer is portrayed at his most villainous in Sitting Bull (1954) and Little Big Man (1970) - though in the novel Little Big Man Custer is a more complex character. In The Great Sioux Massacre (1965) Custer starts out good and becomes corrupted by the prospect of political power.

And the most noble Custer is Errol Flynn in They Died With Their Books On (1941). And since everyone knew vaguely how it would end, the writers Wally Kline, Aeneas Mackenzie, and Lenore J. Coffee had a big problem with making Custer somehow win while losing.

They created a fictional plot by William Sharp, his son Ned Sharp, and Romulus Taipes to bring in more customers for their company by spreading a false report of gold being discovered in the Black Hills, which would cause a gold rush of customers for them.

Because the Sioux & allies would fight, the gold rushers would have to be protected, and the armies of Generals Crook and Terry, 3,000 men would be sent to protect the settlers. Custer considers 3,000 infantry to be helpless against Indians and they and the settlers would be slaughtered by the Sioux. So Custer rides with his 600 men of the 7th Cavalry to beat the other armies to the scene and fight the Sioux, hoping to delay the Sioux until massive reinforcements can arrive.

So Custer deliberately sacrifices the 7th Cavalry to save thousands of other soldiers and civilians.

And in the last scene the truth about the plot is revealed and the government will now protect the Black hills from the gold rushers, due to Custer's last message.

So General Sheridan says to Libby Custer at the end:

COME, MY DEAR.

YOUR SOLDIER WON HIS LAST FIGHT, AFTER ALL.

Of course in the movie Custer, who naturally is the last to die, must feel rather guilty seeing hundreds of men under his command dying because he chose to sacrifice them for the greater good. Three of the dying men are people who Custer and the audience know from previous scenes; Lt. Butler, California Joe, and Ned Sharp.

And if the movie was more of a tragedy it could have shown Custer feeling more guilty when they died, and depicted even more named characters dying in the last stand to make Custer feel even more guilty.

So a variation on the plot in They Died With Their Books On (1941) can make the victory of the protagonist in some sort of conflict seem both a partial tragic failure and and also a partial glorious success.

Answer 3

In every story the protagonist has the task of overcoming some inner obstacle that keeps him or her from achieving the story goal. That is, he or she must change. If the protagonist succeeds at that personal change, he or she will be rewarded by achiving their goal, that is, the story has a happy end. If the protagonist fails at becoming a "better" person, he or she is punished by a tragic end.

The reader will feel satisfied if the protagonist "gets what they deserve".

But reader satisfaction is not the same as enjoyment. A reader might feel satisfied by a story's end but not like that kind of story. Some readers only read stories that end happily. Other readers are bored if every story ends well. You cannot make every reader like your story. So don't worry about that.

Answer 4

The typical story of a hero is best exemplified by Bruce Willis in "Die Hard".

For a story to be deemed "good", the hero must try and fail, try harder and fail harder, they must be beat up, cut, burned, broken (metaphorically or literally) and in the end, still get up and try again.

Like in "Die Hard", Bruce would literally rather die than fail to achieve his goal, of saving his wife from the terrorists holding her hostage.

About the only way I have seen a satisfying story, when the hero dies, is if the hero dies while succeeding in their goal. They would rather die than fail -- and in dying, they succeed.

You can see this is Titanic, Jack Dawson intentionally dies so the girl he loves will survive. In Star Wars, Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader (the bad guy) redeems himself by intentionally dying to save his son, Luke Skywalker.

Heroes dying and bad guys winning are very poor sellers, readers are consistently disappointed in such stories. If you are intent on your hero dying, I would strongly recommend you find a way to make it clear that they chose death as the only certain way to defeat the evil villain.

Like, intentionally drag the villain with them into the bubbling lava of an active volcano.

Intentionally blow up the spaceship with both of them on it.

Suicide as the last choice they can make to complete their mission.

That can be a satisfying ending. It might make some readers cry, but they will see it as heroic, and in keeping with the hero's journey, she has proven time and again she would rather die than fail; and she finally proved it one last time.

Be sure, in the story, to demonstrate this hero's journey, an escalating series of getting the crap knocked out of them (again, literally or metaphorically), of losing, but getting back up and trying again.

Good luck.

Answer 5

Excellent ideas and validity with all the comments posted so far; and great question. Hopefully, their ideas and suggestons will foster novel inspiration.

I'm offering something in a slightly different direction from their points of view.

YOU are the story teller. You have the ideas, the plot, the characters, their strategies, their goals, dreams and perspectives (among so many other things). You have the insight as to the story you are telling. Tell that story.

One thing I've done when I've written stories before, and I've learned quite a few other authors do their own variations on the same concept....... write your own 'journal' of sorts. In your own freeform methodology, stipulate in writing what the location(s) are, what is their purpose in carrying the story along. Same concept applies to the generation of characters, and other plot devices. Why (for your benefit) do they exist, what is their purpose in carrying the story along. Flesh out these and other nuances of your entire story, as they inform you (sort of as reference material to you, for your benefit) for any given point in your writing, but also provide far more information and details that you might actually include in the story. This can also be a vehicle to include the 'air' of mystery in your story, since not everything might get 'answered' or explained fully in your story. And, leaving things out (of your final story) gives the readers something to think about and ponder.

To some extent, I get the intent of crafting a story that is 'satisfying' to the readers. Yet, there is still the 'story' you are telling. It has meat, perspective and your goals being met by the end of the story. That won't always 'satisfy' any given reader. Nor do they 'have' to be satisfied with the ending you crafted and presented to them, much less the 'essence' of your story leading to that tragic ending. It is your ending.

In other words, I believe some of the most satisfying stories created, have been ones that had a point. The author met the goals of telling 'that' story so the 'point' was realized. Because the author could successfully blend excitement, suspense, with his creative story-telling, they end justified the means to get there. This is what I believe you are looking to gain insight into how to do.

Also, you cannot please everyone. Yet, you can craft and tell your story so that it exemplifies your point. Go tell a great story that way. Let the reader(s) worry about if they liked it, if it was 'great', etc...

In part I said all I did as food for thought as you continue to write. I also believe that some of this methodology can benefit you by freeing you from the 'traps' of what other 'good' writers do, or the 'requirements' for 'good' storytelling. Not that those things don't have merit, but by the same token, don't limit yourself, and your storytelling. Go for the gusto, go for broke.

Wish you the best of success!!

Answer 6

I am working on a horror-ish novel in my spare time and want to end it by killing off the protagonist or her failing somehow.

I would suggest you don't let the protagonist both fail in her mission and also die at the end as that would just leave the reader with a feeling of dissatisfaction and disappointment. I would suggest there should be some sort of redemption if the protagonist dies, such as destroying the entity at the cost of sacrificing her own life and preventing the entity harming others and perhaps saving her father in the process. A novel that is 100% negative and failing is just depressing for the reader and they will probably never want to read anything written by you ever again as it would just leave a bad taste in their mouth.