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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/36695
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/36695
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The specific problem you're trying to avoid is called "Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy". If you feel like destroying your productivity for the next week, you can look it up on TV Tropes. People can (and do) get turned off a story if it's too dark for too much of the time. There are shows I've dropped in the past, and shows I plan never to watch, for that exact reason.

In your case, I think the issue is that your antagonist - fate - is too powerful. It's _constantly_ beating your characters, time after time, for the entire length of your novel. As other answers have mentioned, that's just as boring and tedious as if the protagonist is all-powerful and wins all the time.

What you need to do is **give the protagonists small victories that end up being entirely inconsequential**. They succeed at something, or have something good happen to them, but it's quickly cancelled out by something else, or has no effect on how terrible their situation is, or in fact, they realise too late that it's actually made things _worse_.

_Halo Reach_ is an excellent example of this. You know ahead of time that the protagonists will fail, and Reach will fall to the Covenant, but the game still gives you missions at which you succeed, because a game where you always lose is no fun to play. It's just that those victories don't matter. Most famously, one of your squadmates sacrifices himself to destroy a Covenant battleship... and then six more jump out of hyperspace. You win, but you still lose.

Original score: 4