How I Write About Hope Without Writing Happy Things

My mother doesn’t understand why I write the way I do.

She loves her Hallmark movies tidy: neat endings, soft-focus kisses, and dialogue free from the f-word. She has asked me, “Why do your characters have to swear so much? And do you really need to include the sex scenes? People know what’s happening. You don’t have to describe it in infinite detail.”

She’s not wrong—for her. There’s a huge audience for sweet romance, closed-door scenes, and heartwarming stories that give readers a soft place to land. Honestly, I enjoy those stories too. Sometimes the only thing I want at the end of a long day is a rom-com with a pun in the title and a heroine who falls down a lot but still gets the guy.

But that’s not what I write. I can't. My creative instincts lean toward grit.

What Counts as a Romance Novel?

According to the Romance Writers of America, romance novels end in either a “happily ever after” (HEA) or a “happy for now” (HFN). That means the central relationship is not only emotionally satisfying, but clearly resolved. The couple is together. The story has delivered on its emotional promise. That’s the framework. But what lives inside that framework can look wildly different depending on the author.

Some romance stories are light-hearted. Some are dreamy. Some are gutting. Some are all three. But there’s a particular kind of love story that doesn’t lean on ease or perfection to make its case. These are stories where the happy ending is earned, not inevitable. Where joy shows up late, limping, covered in dirt—and still dazzling.

That’s the kind of romance that sticks with me.

Glossy vs. Gritty: What Makes a Romance Feel Real

Some romances are described as uplifting but avoid the hard parts altogether. They skip over the worst of the trauma or smooth it down until it’s almost decorative. It’s not that they’re badly written—they’re often charming and smart and well-structured. They just don’t dwell in the grit.

And that’s fine. Not everyone wants to dwell there.

But for me, the stories that land are the ones where the grief isn’t minimized, where the pain isn’t edited out for the sake of tone. I want endings that are happy and honest.

Not perfect. Not pain-free. Just true.

One of the least satisfying things in a story is watching a character go through hell only to snap into wellness for the sake of pacing or word count. There’s a type of “hopeful” storytelling that skips the grit. It feels clean. Efficient. Shiny, even.

But it doesn’t feel real to me.

The best emotionally satisfying endings still carry weight. They don’t rush past the struggle or ignore the wounds. They say: healing is possible—but not painless. Love is powerful—but not perfect. And some days, the best kind of progress is just continuing to show up.

My stories deliver emotional satisfaction. The relationship is resolved, the arc is complete, and the final pages close on connection. But getting there? That’s where I veer from the lighthearted aisle.

I write dystopian and emotionally intense romance—stories where characters carry trauma, guilt, complicated backstories, and often a streak of self-sabotage. Some flirt with morally gray areas. One of my heroes straight-up crosses the line, and the fallout becomes the heart of his arc.

The profanity, the wide-open bedroom doors, the emotional volatility—they’re not there to shock. They’re there because I want the story to feel lived in. My characters don’t speak like they’re auditioning for broadcast TV. When someone spirals, I don’t cut away. When they break, I don’t tidy it up in a paragraph. I write the mess. The intimacy. The shame. The rebuilding. Not to wallow in it, but to show the full arc of what it takes to come back from it.

My Mom Thinks That’s a Problem

To her, it’s just too much—too much swearing, too much sex, too depressing. “Why would people want to read something that reminds them of everything awful in the world?” she asked me once. “People read to escape.”

They do. She’s right. Many readers don’t want to crack open a book that mirrors what they’re trying to outrun. But for me, escape has never been the goal. Not entirely.

I don’t write stories to avoid the world. I write them to survive it. To make sense of it. To pull meaning out of the rubble and hand it to someone who needs to hear: You’re not the only one crawling through the dark right now. But also—look, there’s a glimmer.

A story can leave readers with a sense of resolution and still acknowledge everything that was lost along the way. That’s what bittersweetness allows: joy that coexists with sorrow. Endings that bring peace, not perfection.

These are the kinds of love stories where characters find each other in spite of the world—not because it makes things easy. Where the act of holding someone’s hand means something because of what it took to get there.

They don’t pretend every wound is closed. They just remind you it’s possible to move forward even when you’re still carrying some of the ache.

I’ve come to realize my mother and I just define escape differently. For her, it’s simplicity—stories where nothing hurts too much, and everything turns out okay. For me, escape means finding meaning in the mess. It’s watching someone crawl out of the dark and realizing I’m not the only one who’s ever been there. I don’t want to disappear into a story. I want to come out the other side of it feeling more human.

Cozy Romance Has Its Place—But I Choose Grit

I love the vastness of the romance genre. There’s room for lighthearted stories with cinnamon roll heroes and meet-cutes involving baked goods. And not all love stories sparkle. There’s also room for books that claw their way to the surface, scraped raw and dragging everything they’ve survived behind them.

Those are the stories I gravitate toward, both as a reader and a writer. The ones where characters don’t get to laugh off their wounds. They have to live with them.

Sometimes they stumble, even when they know better. They feel shame. They wrestle with morality. They want to be good people and fall short, then spend the next fifty pages trying to crawl back to themselves. It’s forged in the hard conversations, the failures, the relentless choosing of love when it would be easier to shut down. It’s not about smoothing over the pain. It’s about transforming it. So, when they get there—when they find safety, or peace, or forgiveness—it hits hard. It lingers because it wasn’t inevitable, and because they fought for it, sometimes against themselves.

The most powerful moments in a romance often come quietly, after the storm, when the wreckage is still visible but someone reaches for someone else anyway. That kind of moment doesn’t require sweeping speeches. It just needs to feel real.

What Are “Glimmers”? How Trauma-Informed Moments Shape Hope in Romance

There’s a term that comes from trauma psychology: glimmers. It’s the opposite of a trigger. A glimmer is a small moment when your body remembers safety—of peace, wholeness. It can be a scent. A song. A word. A familiar voice. A moment when something in you says, Yes. I remember this feeling. I’m still here.

In emotionally layered romance, glimmers matter. They’re the spaces between the storms. The flickers that remind both the characters and the reader that beauty hasn’t left the building, it’s just been hiding.

I like to think of hope in fiction that way. Not as a sledgehammer of inspiration, but as something more vulnerable. Fragile. A laugh in a dark room. A hand on your back when you didn’t realize you were shaking.

I think that’s why those moments matter even more in dystopian settings. A single kind gesture, a moment of laughter, or a flicker of connection feels louder in a world bent on breaking people. In fiction, and sometimes in life, offering softness in a hard place is its own form of defiance.

Writing glimmers into my stories isn’t just about character development. It’s also about me refusing to let bleakness have the final word. Especially now, when cruelty is often mistaken for strength, and power gets away with rewriting reality in broad daylight. These quiet moments of hope are my resistance.

Why I Write Gritty Romance (and Why It’s Not for Everyone)

The truth is, I want to believe in happy endings, but I can’t believe in them unless they feel honest.

I’ve lived through enough to know that life rarely ties itself up neatly. And yet I’ve also seen people survive what should have broken them. I’ve seen love that doesn’t erase the pain but learns how to hold it. I’ve seen healing that doesn’t mean returning to what you were, but becoming something stronger, weirder, truer.

That’s what I write toward.

Not perfection. Not ease. Not saccharine.

But connection. Redemption. Grace.

I’m not here to escape the hard parts. I’m here to transform them into something worth holding onto.

The Kind of Love That Survives the Fire

Yes, I write stories where love wins. Always. But love doesn’t arrive clean and untangled. It arrives cracked open, breathless, battle-worn, and radiant.

Because some of us need to believe not just that love exists,
but that it survives the fire.