Do You Overcome?

In sitting down and trying to write a new story, I realize, and am told by others, that I don't really write stories about hope and triumph; winning out in the end. No, instead I like to relay stories about people; little slices of life, a moment to peer inside a character's life for a pre-determined amount of time before inevitably returning to your own.

In my shorts, thus far, my characters don't overcome anything. To do so seems artificial. Do we live our lives overcoming our challenges or do we simply live within them? Or worse, destroyed by them?

I think I was told in screenwriting that audiences want to see characters that are often better than themselves which would mean, yes, characters that do fight against and typically beat out their struggles. But this, to me, isn't reality.

Reality is the sad, real world we live in. Yet, films that just want to explore this narratively don't seem to fall into the 'correct' guidelines for writing a story and certainly most people, wanting to escape reality, won't see it.

I want to do what feels right to me, the stories that flow out of my head about people struggling; struggling to feel normal, struggling to be accepted. People that seemingly missed the memo on what normal, socially healthy people do and how to do that.

But not being socially healthy isn't an easy thing to triumph over and I think most people don't; they live with it.

Maybe my thinking is incorrect. Perhaps it's all something I need to overcome.