Sometimes victory comes at a harsh price.
Nearly 10 years ago, I was part of a cohort of professionals learning systems-based thinking and systems integration techniques as part of my corporate leadership training. I’d gone from an entry-level service employee to someone who presented to C-Suite executives basically overnight, and I was missing several of the proverbial corporate ladder rungs between the two roles. To fill that knowledge and experience gap, I was recommended for an intense, multifaceted leadership training program, which was a lot of fun . . . until it wasn’t.
Near the end of the nine-month program, as my cohort was winding down after an especially intense few days, there was a moment of collective reflection, professional share time. When it was my turn to speak, to share how the lessons learned over those past months would shape my present and future, I opened my mouth prepared to offer some generic platitude. Instead, what I shared surprised me:
“I have to quit my job.”
There I was, in a leadership program sponsored by the corporation for which I worked, and I told everyone in my cohort that I needed to leave said job.
For all the good the corporate life and subsequent training had done for me — bringing financial stability to my life, expanding my way of thinking, opening up creative pathways to solve problems, and more — the good was balanced against the bad feelings of working for a corporation outside my values system, a values system I had just recently connected with because of the leadership program.
To wit, I was in a professional pickle.
While I wasn’t brave enough to quit said job immediately, I did eventually quit, accepting a life of financial instability against my better judgements because I needed work that aligned with my values and principles. While pursuing my book-sized dreams felt like such a blessing, that career pivot was, and still is, rough.
It is bittersweet.
Recently, I asked folks on Substack what question they would ask if they had only five minutes with a developmental editor. Today, I’m going to unpack one such question:
How do you balance bitterness and sweetness for the perfect bittersweet ending?
Crafting balanced bittersweet endings means offering the reader something good and something bad, so the ending is neither totally happy nor totally tragic. Like changing jobs to pursue your dreams and gaining financial instability and imposter syndrome for the effort. Or waiting all day to eat that last piece of cake only to find a fuzzy blue spot of mold when you open the container. Or finally making it to the top of the tower to save the princess, only to find that the princess saved herself and left you to face the still-salty dragon, with terrible consequences.
Bittersweetness is a common human outcome, and most of you will have heard the phrase: When one door closes, another one opens. But that doesn’t mean closing the one door is easy or without its challenges, and it doesn’t mean the door that opens will open up to sunshine and rainbows. In fact, many of the most rewarding learning experiences are borne of loss, grief, even tragedy.
Here are four different methods to balance your sweet ending with the bitter reality of what that ending means for your hero and their world.
The hero wins by failing.
In some stories, the hero can only win by failing in a big way. Think Austin Powers stopping Dr. Evil from destroying the world but failing to save his girlfriend. To build up to this kind of bittersweet ending, you’ll need to carefully weave two distinct plot lines: 1) The hero must save the world; 2) The hero seeks romantic love.
For one plot line, the hero is on an upward trajectory. They’re racing against the world-ending clock of some great supervillain, human or otherwise. The tension mounts as time runs out. And just when the reader believes the hero could lose, the hero reaches deep down into their bag of tricks and finds the one lever left unpulled that ultimately defeats the villain and saves the world.
But for the second plot line, well . . . readers will become invested in the developing interpersonal relationship between the hero and their love interest. But for a bittersweet ending, that sweetness of saving the world must be balanced against the failure of the death — literal or figurative — of the love interest. The hero does not get to have their cake and eat it too. And the choice of which thing to save becomes an internal struggle that tests the moral fortitude of our intrepid hero.
The hero becomes corrupted.
If you watched Daenerys Targaryen burn King’s Landing in rapt horror, you know what I mean when I refer to a corrupt hero. For many, Daenarys had all the ingredients of a visionary, a hero. And she was poised to become respected by the people of Westeros because of her role in defeating Cersei Lannister. A young woman stepping into her own after leaving the shadow of her violent husband can be a triumphant story, one of second chances and new leases and happy growth opportunities.
Since we’re discussing bittersweet endings, though, we know that wasn’t the case for good ole Dany. She became corrupted, so hell-bent in her quest to do good that she made the tragic mistake of assuming only she knew what “good” was.
When writing your corrupted hero story, consider documenting all the reasons why the hero could — or should — become corrupted. Who wronged them? What generational or historical trauma do they carry which needs rectifying? How could the hero win so hard they become that which they said they hate?
The hero succeeds through sacrifice.
Sacrifice is something all readers of heroic fiction are familiar with. Jay must sacrifice his identity to become a man in black. Boromir sacrifices himself to protect the fellowship. You get the idea. The hero who sacrifices themselves, or who is sacrificed, for the greater good must have a clear do-good trajectory, even if their personality suggests some other kind of motive for their behavior. I mean, Tony Stark comes off as a textbook narcissist, but, as it turns out, he’s a pretty clear example of an altruist.
When crafting the sacrificial hero, take care not to make the hero too good. A hero who is strictly good and who is also sacrificed may leave readers feeling bitter, and not the good kind, because a person who is too good is, frankly, unbelievable.
Humans are flawed creatures, and not a single one of us is perfect. So when you need your hero to be perfect in the moment of their sacrifice, give them plenty of imperfections with which to grapple as they journey along their quest path: The narcissist-turned-altriust; the executioner-turned-savior; the hitman-turned-protector. Consider what not-so-good traits your hero may have and punch up the drama as you race toward the end.
The hero acknowledges life’s unfairness.
I saw The Desolation of Smaug in theaters opening weekend some years ago, and the ending punched me in the blood-pumper. Sure, Bilbo and the dwarves defeat the dragon, but Laketown is destroyed just the same. For all who worked tirelessly to defeat a common enemy, the outcome of their trials seemed unfair.
If you’re human, and I’m going to go ahead and assume you are, you know life is anything but fair. It’s frustrating, unbalanced, and downright cruel at times, and even those who win often find they’ve lost something in the process, whether the loss be a fallen friend, an environmental calamity, or something else. Sometimes, despite the hero’s best efforts, the bad guys will win anyway. Like the end of House of A Thousand Corpses, wherein Captain Spaulding abducts the would-be heroine and delivers her back to Dr. Satan.
When life is unfair, it seems to be really unfair. Beligerently unfair, nearly to the point of apathy. So leading up to that unfair ending, make sure you give your reader some silver lining to chew on so they don’t spend the rest of their day depressed.
Read-search for writing your bittersweet ending.
If you’re like me, you know how important it is to read up on the type of story you want to tell so you can intuit all the storytelling techniques that make it work. Check out these Goodreads listopias (here and here) if you need some help finding books with bittersweet endings for your own research.
Happy writing (and reading)!
♥ Fal
P.S. Want me to cover a specific topic? Tell me about it in the comments.
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Fallon Clark is the book pal who helps you tell your story in your words and voice using editorial, coaching, writing, and project management expertise for revision assistance, one-on-one guidance, and ghostwriting for development. Her writing has been published in Flash Fiction Magazine. Check out her website, FallonClark.com, or connect with her on LinkedIn or Substack.