This piece begins…Let me tell you how I overcame a monster. A writer gets few a-ha! moments because the process of story-creating can be a murky thing. Sometimes you get a little niggle of where a scene or a character came from. An example of a little bite of understanding for me, was when I wrote and later re-read “Wekka’s Gold”. The last scene has someone reveal Wekka’s terrible fate. My subconscious had cribbed it from the ending of Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” (movie version). You know, where Michael Caine reveals Sean Connery’s severed head. I wasn’t thinking about Kipling or that movie. My brain just felt that the story ended on such a reveal.
If you’d like to read the rest, please check out Monster: From the Pages of Dark Worlds Quarterly.
Comedy is not defined as a story with a happy ending. No, comedy is a story that makes you laugh (or is intended to do so). A story can have a happy ending (for example, two people marry and live happily ever after) and not be comedy.
By a modern definition you are correct but in the ancient plays Comedy and Tragedy were as simple as that ending. We expect a comedy today to be a humor story or filled with jokes. What about plays like The Tempest, which seem a bit of both?
The tragi-comedy of The Tempest works for me; it’s one of my favorite works by Shakespeare. The play’s exotic locale and strong magical element recommend it to Dark Worlds fans.
By the way, I love your blog. You produce so much great content on the kind of fiction I love.
Great article…I love all your influences.