Admit it. It's something all of you do. Why you became a writer in the first place. Oh, sure, you say it's because you have a natural creative imagination or you enjoy inventing exciting new places, but deep down, you know the truth.

It's because you love torturing your characters.

You think of me as a strange old man with nothing better to do than play with people's lives. A sad and twisted person.

Is it my fault that the characters in my story turned out to have a life of their own?

You could have stopped reading. Skipped right to the happy ending, their happy ending. But you kept on, through the pain, the sacrifices, the tears.

You could have stopped writing. Wrote only about happy things. Wrote only endings. But that would have been boring, right?

A happy ending is an end. The real story, right from the beginning, is the unhappiness.

All children who love stories, come over here!