I'm about 50/50 I reckon, although my most performed play is a happy ending. My darker plays seem to scare people off. Frankly I think the ending will define itself based on where the play has taken you.
I don't think that either is easier or harder to write, whichever is correct for the play will be the easier to write.

Is that all there is? Well if that's all there is my friend, then let's keep dancing.
www.tonymoore.id.au

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Something worthy of intellectual postulating.

I think that firstly you need to clarify that there are two type of endings; good and bad ones. Even before we get to Happy or "Sad", I think looking at how easy it is to write a good or bad ending period is just as interesting.

The type of happy endings you argue against (the simple and trite ones) I would classify as mostly BAD, unless the simplicity or triteness is actually functional in some way to the purpose of the play. So it would be quite easy (IMHO) to write a simple a trite ending, but more often than not, it would be a bad ending.

Moving up the track a bit, we come to depressing or "Sad" endings. My feeling is that it would rather hard to write a bad "sad" ending, fairly easy to have a generally down ending that was good, and rather difficult to write a really hard-hitting, heart wrenching (in the completely honest form) ending that left the audience gutted.

Finally you have the really good happy ending, that is not simplistic, trite or contrived in any way. Personally, I think this would be the hardest of all.

Human nature is far to familiar with misery and depression. We are constantly surrounded by it in one form or another, and most of us are dealing with some form of sadness at odd moments in our lives. Additionally, as I myself and many others have admitted to me also, it seems we can remember the harder, "sadder" moments of our lives far more easily than the happier and simpler times. Unless it is something very specific or significant, we tend to gloss over the happy times in our memories.

Notice how the above description dover-tails nicely with the intent of my argument? What we gloss over it the easiest to write - the simple trite things - where as we tend to remember many of the bad times with uncomfortable clarity that makes them a little hard to confront and therefore a challenge to write. Then the really special moments in our lives seem to stand out singularly and be rather rare and hard to find making them perhaps the most difficult of outcomes to relate to and thus making them hard to write.

Yet after all this, I have missed another type of ending which is in class all of it's own, the one that is neither "sad" nor happy. Hopeful maybe, and for this purpose I wish to use the example of the show I am directing (how convenient) - "The Admirable Crichton." Certain rumours state that when J M Barrie initially wrote the play, he had the lead characters run off together despite the repercussions of this on their family. He (Barrie) was strongly advised by friends that this would be absolutely scandalous and lose him far too many loyal fans after his success with "Quality Street" and potentially ruin the release of "Peter Pan."

So he re-wrote the ending. It now reads rather flat and has often been played exactly like that, but that misses the significant end line which I have seen picked up only a few times. The last line is Barrie's tip-of-the-hat to his initial intentions.

The original ending would have been so trite and stereotypical yet highly controversial for the time. Wrong in so many ways. The re-write has been mis-interpreted (I believe) into a very sad and depressing ending. However, I honestly believe that taking into account who Barrie was, he wanted to play to end on a note of hope, that while things are bad there is hope for something better, and this something better is something that comes from human nature and our tenacity to push on while things may crumble around us.

This type of ending, out of all of them is something that I believe is somewhat easier to write and very hard to get wrong or do badly because it is something that we are all so very familiar with, yet it can often be hard to see it through all the mess and confusion that surrounds it. It's like the glimmering light at the end of a very long tunnel leading us on.

We've just been to a very dark place, but we don't have to stay there.

...

Right, soap box put away again. Thank you all.

Absit invidia (and DFT )

Jeff Watkins
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I don't think one is harder than the other.

At uni, we were writing a script about depression. (A comedy actually) My fellow students in the group, with a better sense of comedy than I, disagreed with me on how to finish the show. I didn't mind ending on a sad note, personally I thought it would make the audience walk away with something to think about. My friends however, thought that an audience should never walk away feeling sad from a performance, but rather entertained. Their theory was that it was better to hae an audience walk away feeling as though it was a good night out rather than have them feel sad themselves from the content of the show.

On the one hand, I could see where they were coming from. But I still maintain the view that an audience can and should be left with food for thought.

For me, it's as Hitchcock said: it's not necessarily about the content, but about whether or not you've made the audience feel a certain way about something. I say, go with whatever you feel is right. You're not going to please everyone, so you may as well please yourself first.

Personally, I also don't react the way normal people do - I like not seeing the ending coming, I like being challenged or made to think about something, I like laughing at the end of a show as well as feeling sad about it. If it's done well, then it doesn't matter whether it's happy or sad. (I agree with what Jeff says about 'simple and trite' too)

Finally, as a writer, I find it incredibly difficult to write comedy, but easy to write more dramatic (serious) plays. Like other writers, each one of us has areas that are easier than others to work with - it doesn't mean one way of writing, or one way of ending a script, is better or worse than the other. It just means we all have different ways of approaching a subject matter, and is why we should enjoy diversity in scriptwriting.
Puppets and patterns at
Puppets in Melbourne

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For my part, I think less in terms of happy or sad endings than satisfying resolutions. This is an abstract way of looking at a script - almost as though thinking of it as a piece of music - but I find that the story itself knows how it wants to end and that this is usually to do with how the images and sub-plots have been deployed. No one objects to a catastrophic ending if it feels right, nor to a charming ending.

Ideally, I want neither a happy nor a sad - or for that matter a good or a bad - ending. I want a true ending. Even if the story is utter fantasy or oblique and surreal, the ending must be true.

A good director is capable of finding the true ending that is already in the script (the story above about The Admirable Crichton is a good case in point). This may be the best way we have to tell if a director is or is not really good.

A bad writer couldn't find a true ending if it crawled inside his colon and took out a franchise for Donut King. 

However we may consider the case, the true ending is the one that makes the story feel ended. That is the closest I have ever come to understanding this part of the craft.

Noel 

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Speaking as a director and an actor I always find happy endings much harder to pull off convincingly. We live in the shadowey cliche of "And they lived happily ever after" which is a hard pill to swallow in a cynical society.

I think for happy endings to really work there needs to be a touch of melancholia in the resolution of the plot, this is something shakespeare does beautifully (most of the time). What I mean is that in order for things to resolve happily the audience and characters need to have experienced a great deal of unhappiness first, happy endings come as more of a welcome relief from strife than a simplistic "And they lived happily ever after". I think that is the type of happy ending an audience can swallow.

So, I agree with your friend Grant, it is harder to write a convincing happy ending than it is to write a depressing one. I guess you could say it almost manifests itself in the age old quote "It is always harder to perform Comedy than it is Tragedy"

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I agree with Jeff, on the bad and good endings. Ultimately some endings are unsatisfactory, whether they are happy or sad, because they just don't feel right. If the ending is logical, or makes sense, or sums up the play then even if it is depressing it is still satisfying. American Beauty is a good example of a depressing ending that manages to be uplifting, because it is right. For an example of a tragic ending that is trite, watch the directors cut of Butterfly Effect. The screen version did leave a few loose ends (what happened to his brain damage? for example) but it was satisfying. The 'hard hitting' directors cut, was trite, over simple and dare I say mushy. It was also a bit much too take in, after so much by the book trauma.

I've always thought writers should stay away from rules like 'unsatisfying, or ambiguous, or tragic endings are better, more challenging, more intellextual.'

A good story knows where it is supposed to end, whether it is predictable or unexpected, and when revisit the story, you realise the ending was there right from the beginning. (But then I like a good forbode).

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"Whats in the box?" against the ending of Usual Suspects? I love Fincher and "Seven" but Usual Suspects beats it hands down for mine.

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Talking Fincher, how about Fight Club? Great climax to a great film. Also, a friend of mine said his best happy ending was on holiday in Bali (what ever that means!)

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Grant, Woody Allen deals with this question in Melinda/Melinda. It wasn't a great film, but it did provoke some interesting comments about comedy/drama. It also had Will Ferrell in it.

However Grant, I find the comment made by your writing peer strange. You should write for yourself, not try and cater for other people's taste and opinions. When you stop enjoying writing, it becomes a chore. The only reason you wrote Havok over 3 years is because you were passionate in that story. So, just write whatever the hell you want you and let directors/producers/audiences decide if it's any good.

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