Ever written something that turned out depressing?

I started writing something that sounded good but once I got to writing it seemed really sad. Has this happened to anyone else?

You mean where something turns out depressing when it wasn't supposed to be? No, can't say that I have - I tend to keep an eye on where I'm going with things, and I don't like writing depressing works much at all. For one thing, I don't really care for the True Art Is Angsty mentality, and I wouldn't want to support it in any way.

I once started writing a little vignette once about a couple slowly realizing that they are, somehow, immortal. It was intended to be a fun little writing exercise in Magical Realism for me. It ended up being perhaps the most depressing Who Wants to Live Forever? piece I've ever encountered, let alone written. I got to a scene where, far into the integalactic age, they come back to the ruins of the place where their house once stood, and it ended up being too depressing for me to finish.

The zombie intermission. omg.

The idea was pretty uniformly fun at first—being about fighting a zombified '30s gangster with a laser and sewing implements, where is the room for anything serious at all? But then the dream sequence happened, and I ultimately stayed up all night to finish it because inside of a glass phone booth during a horrible tornado, with no phone book and no numbers on him except for that of the mom who disowned him, is a really mean place to strand someone overnight, even for the sake of a cliffhanger.

Well...my concept was still funny to me, it was about a Butt-Monkey student who always tries his best, but he invariably fails to accomplish anything due to being in the worst moment and place every time. So it ended up becoming a Kafka Komedy, my like for this trope may have influenced the story a bit. (It still had a happy ending, though.)

Where do I even start? When I'm not writing comedy, it usually ends up in suicide, murder, lost love and broken hearts...

...or all of the above

Good god yes. Anytime I try and write storiy bits with members of a particular family interacting with each other the story ends up being dramatic and depressing as opposed to humorous like I originally intended. The fact that they're a Big, Screwed-Up Family might have something to do with this though.

This is the best example I can think of at the top of my head.

This is the story of my life.

• Started writing a story about an isolated giantess who meets a human young man —> she accidentally kills the young man in her grip because he is struggling, and the expedition that came with him track her down and kill her.
• Started a story about a clone-servant who escaped the facility and took on his own name and identity —> Unable to participate in legal economy with no vital records, and his captors catch up to him and capture him, accidentally killing a little girl that was his adopted niece and his heroic girlfriend in the process. Strip him of his possessions and stick him in a small dark space for several months. They use a mind-rape variation on operant conditioning to get him to think like a clone-servant again (uses direct pain and pleasure stimulation as reward and punishment), which Jack only resists because he inflicts pain on himself by biting his tongue so they take out his teeth, but in the end they can't conquer him so they just kill him.
• Started a story about a Valkyrja who returned to the time when she was alive and escaped with a young man she loved to several hundred years in the future —> Young man is unhappy about what she did to him (murdered him, actually, so that she could intercept his soul and seize it), so he is forced to kill an Odin-worshipper in battle and summon a Valkyrja. He is taken to Hel because as he is dead he can never go back home, and the protagonist is left in exile in the future earth forever.

My one happy story is probably Beowulf, and that's probably because the source material ends well after grendel's mother, which is where I end the story. There are deaths and scary parts, but most of the story has kind of a Disney vibe to it.

Unfortunatley, yes. I don't even know why, I just seem to have a tendancy of accidentally killing people off when I don't want to.

my Troper Work about a mystery saga with a Fish out of Water premise was funny at first until the Wham episode and then it turned downright sad

yeah...one story was supposed to go from bad to great, only it went from bad to much much much worse with not a single character in the same, or a better place. one was sold overseas, one was going to prison for multiple counts of murder, the main character went and had a psychotic break, her father (who is responsible for all her problems) is out of a coma and beat her cousin (the one person looking out for her) to near death, couples broke up, the hikkikomori commited suicide, rapists got away scotfree ect.

honestly, i have no idea how it turned out that way. it just sorta...did.

thankfully, i reworked it into a much happier series which go from "cynical" to "still cynical but everythings all right".

I'll just say I CONSTANTLY write things that turn out depressing, even when I don't intend on it.

It's one of the reasons I haven't gotten past the first chapters of Jykku Jetty and Cherry Kiss, as well as my Mega Man ZX fanfic, because I'm actually worried about taking them into the dark territories my other stories seem to be setting up camp in (I'm not a fan of heavy single-part revisions unless I'm rewriting the ENTIRE thing, you know?).

For instance, one of my Whateley Universe fanfics involves an Author Avatar of myself, who basically STARTS OUT in a depressing situation and is trying to pull themselves up and out of it, with moderate enough success...then they end up getting mind-raped and almost Driven to Suicide for the second time, and this is AFTER miraculously managing to get a girlfriend.

D'OH! >_<

edited 7th May '11 12:34:28 AM by Metalitia

You know, I'm surprised at all the affirmative responses in this thread. Even though I both practice Writing by the Seat of Your Pants and subscribe to I Just Write the Thing, I've never had anything like this happen - mainly because I plan out the setting in massive detail, so I always know where my story is going.

Reminds me a little of the "My god what did I just write" thread (or whatever it was called) - both indicate that a surprising amount of writers on here seem to have no control over their story.

Well, for kicks I once rewrote Taylor Swift's song Love Story from the guy's perspective, which ended up about him realising he wasn't strong enough to keep their secret relationship going and ultimately walking away from her. I Made Myself Sad.

I spent the past semester taking a concept I've been mulling over and turning it into a story for one of my classes. In a nutshell, it's about gangs of psychic children deported to a secluded island fighting back against the soldiers that interfere with their day-to-day lives. The plan was to make it have some serious elements, but also be unafraid to throw in some good humor to keep things from getting too heavy.

By semester's end, however, it had mutated into some writhing mass of despair. The Kid Hero is an emotionally-repressed atoner and former disaster-in-the-works; his crush — supposedly a cheerful young lady — is actually an Ax-Crazy Death Seeker; the second-in-command is a traitor looking to kill all the psychics in the world; The Empire is a few hours away from leveling the island and everyone on it with warheads from their gigantic battleship; the hero's best friends are not only dead, but he discovers that one of them has been used as fuel for flowers that give non-psychics' machines energy...by feasting on the corpses of children.

All of this, as you can imagine, came right the hell out of nowhere.

The story was supposed to be a practice run — a prologue of sorts — for when I started the story in earnest. Now I have an idea of where it'll all go. And now I'm scared out of my wits. And...kinda bummed out.

I have a tendency to write stories by thinking "What would the characters do now, and what effect would that have?" This gets problematic whenever I realize that a character would fail a What You Are in the Dark situation I've set up for them, and has variously led to machine-gunned children, a decapitated love interest, and multiple incidents of genocide. (Mind you, in each case I think the story turned out the stronger for it, in part because I shifted which characters functioned as protagonists and which functioned as antagonists or other sorts of character entirely.)

edited 1st Jun '11 10:56:25 PM by feotakahari

One year for Na No Wri Mo I started out writing a light Affectionate Parody of Trapped in Another World heroic-quest-type fantasy which got less and less silly as things went on and ended up somewhere in the realm of Darker and Edgier deconstruction. It was a pretty awful mess and I've never been able to bring myself to look at it again.

I had, actually, had a fairly clear idea of where I'd wanted the story to go (as much as one can with NaNo, anyway); it was more that I wad having problems at the time and was stuck in a mindset where I had a hard time making myself do "light and funny".

In my high school years, I couldn't be more liught hearted but nowadays I find looking for creative and inventive ways to kill my characters in my mind or other people's characters just to see what would happen. I am no Joss Whedon but I often picture myself being a cruel bastard just because I want to see my characters go some hell before I give them the prize. I even attack myself sometimes for enjoying this stuff. I hope to use this in a positive manner as real life is a wide array of perspectives and colors.

Lately, I feel deconstructive or at least I want to analyze the characters. I just cannot make a 'happy' story without some angst hence why avoid idealistic works that don't feature said tropes.

edited 2nd Jun '11 8:49:54 AM by GAP