I guess everybody who writes narrative, from the Pulitzer Prize-winner to the hack, has a niche. Granted, some writers demonstrate a wide range of narrative interests and can treat a lot of themes, but there are also very very fine writers who spend most of their literary careers exploring a fairly clearly circumscribed plot of land, so to speak.

I've been tremendously fortunate in my life. I grew up in a great family, I have a decent set of personal resources and abilities, I always had a lot of friends and I always fit in well with my peer group, in school and professionally. I made good grades; I have my own family now, a wife, a kid, people who love me, a good job, and my health. I can't think of a thing I want, or at least a thing that I need, that I don't already have, although there are many things I'd still like to do.

But all they way back since I was a grade-school kid, right up to this last year, I've seen tragedy and loss pass right nearby. And it's always struck me, even when I was a little kid, that things don't always work out for many, many people. In fact, it seems to me that more often than not they don't. Little things, of course, don't always work out. But all too often even the big things, the really important things, don't. I've seen people who deserve love miss out on it; I've seen families break up and I've heard the heart of a kid howl with loss and the pain of abandonment over his daddy bailing on him. I've seen people die young and their loved ones driven to the edge with grief.

And I've never had it happen to me. That makes me react in this oddly torn way: I'm grateful beyond measure; but I wonder from time to time when or if the hammer's gonna fall, and how I'd respond if it did.

I've had a near-miss or two. The life I have now I nearly missed out on because of some fear, some stubbornness, and some stupidity. Fortunately for me, the difficulties that might have led to me missing out were resolved. But it could have gone another way. Easily. And I can't experience the blessings of my current life without shuddering over how close I came to f**king it all up.

This haunts me for some reason, the radical, frightening contingency of good fortune during our threescore-and-ten. And I find myself pulled toward stories--as a reader and as a writer--where things don't always quite work out. Because what we invariably discover is that, yeah, things often don't work out, but we go on anyway. And somehow it has seemed important for me to hear and to say that again and again. I guess, then, to return to what I was talking about in my opening paragraph, that's my niche. Stories that deal with loss and with things not-working-out. At least until I can get that theme to leave me alone. That doesn't mean that in treating that theme I'll never write a happy ending. Sometimes explorations like that damn well need happy endings.

I can only hope that as I treat that theme as a writer, I can manage it with some dignity and some sense of understatement. It's pretty easy to get mawkish with that kind of stuff, and I sure as hell don't want that.

In my largest story in progress, Crosscurrents, you can see elements of the things-don't-always-work-out theme in there. Given that I done already admitted that it's about my life, a person could infer that it's those experiences that have cooked up in me this interest in things that don't work out. In fact, I guess I pretty much said as much above. Which is not to suggest--or deny--that things are not gonna "work out" for Andy in Crosscurrents, lol. And, coincidentally or not, my work on Sam's It Started With Brian deals with many of the same elements. These two stories narrate real lives, so I guess one thing that could be inferred from that is that themes of loss, longing, unfulfilled love, desires that never went fulfilled, tragedies sustained, those things aren't just the elements of weepy (and not-so-weepy) pieces of fiction. They probably make it into fiction because we experience them in our real lives. If we're lucky, we get at least elements of a happily-ever-after, or at least elements of a happily-until-some-undetermined-future-point. I don't think I could handle never reading about good stuff happening; but I never resent it when an author takes me to a sorrowful place, at least if it's not a gratuitous trip. Usually those visits seem more real than the ones that end us up in Happyland.

On a related subject, I was looking for some photos on some old DVD-Rs today when I came across a video of an episode of Cold Case from December of 2006 called "Forever Blue." Many of you have seen it, I'm sure. The case being worked on was that of the murder of a young cop in 1968. The story was told through a series of black-and-white flashbacks focusing on two young police officers, Jimmy Bruno and Sean Cooper ("Coop"). Partners at work and best friends, they come, through a situation of conflict with each other, into confrontation with the fact that they love each other. You know, like that. After a period of, I don't know, days? weeks? where the guys allow themselves to experience this love, Jimmy ultimately can't handle it, and pushes Coop away, not realizing that that moment will be the last time he'll see his partner alive. Coop's death turns out to be a homophobia-fueled hate crime, and the story closes with the solving of the case and with the now-elderly Jimmy returning to the scene of his partner's murder, where he experiences...what? A ghost? A memory? The healing of a decades-long sense of guilt? The story doesn't make that clear, but I defy you to watch the closing scene without reaching for the box of Kleenex. Trust me, there won't be a dry eye in the house. Shane Johnson, the actor who plays Coop, is a young married straight guy with a child of his own; he said in an interview at AfterElton that seeing the episode made even him cry, and he knew how it was going to turn out!

Anyway, as I said, I just stumbled onto that video again while looking for something else, and I've had trouble shaking it all day, both it and the final song from the soundtrack as an elderly Jimmy Bruno stares back into his own history: The Byrds' "My Back Pages." It's made me think again about how many people there are out there who have huge hurts and tremendous regrets. Especially those of us who have been wired to love in ways that society still doesn't completely condone. And it makes me come back again to the conviction that whatever our own struggles, we just gotta be kind to each other. I really suck at that sometimes. I have a good friend who's a total role model to me in this matter, and years ago he said to me that there was enough hurt in the world already, and we didn't need to add to it. He would have known, because he'd sure had a boatload of his own. But I've never seen him add an ounce more of it to the world. It's my goal to be like him in that regard when I grow up, lol.

Just curious: Do any of you share a similar attraction to stories, songs, screenplays, etc., with bittersweet themes? Or is that my own unique psychopathological quirk?