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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27949
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27949
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

You are writing a story, not a psychology textbook. Stories appeal to our hopes and to our sense that the world is (or our wish that it should be) a fundamentally orderly place, by which I mean a place with a fundamental moral order. Virtue is rewarded. Vice is punished. Love conquers all.

Whether you believe that the world actually has a fundamental moral order or not is a religious and philosophical question. But in story terms, people very much crave that sense of moral order. A fundamentally unjust universe is a little more frightening of a place than most of us are willing to live in day by day.

Stories provide a reassurance of the fundamental orderliness and justice of the universe that we need to get through our days. After all, how else could we have such strong feelings about endings. So much of our enjoyment of a story depends on whether we feel it has a good ending of a bad ending. Yet unless there is an order to the universe, how could one ending be good and another bad? Whether the real universe had a moral order or not, therefore, the story universe does.

So, if you want to write Beauty and the Beast (which is what your story is) you can write it because Beauty and the Beast is good story, whether or not it is good psychology. It is a story that has been written thousands of times, and it is a story that will be written thousands of time more.

Original score: 1