"No news is good news" may be true…

"No news is good news" may be true for most of us most of the time - after all, we don't look forward to unpleasant things happening to us - but "Bad news is good news" is true for those who work in the news media, and, I suspect, for the rest of us, at least some of the time. It is tied up with stories and our seemingly unsatisfied need for stories. Have you ever been grasped by a story where nothing goes wrong for the characters? There's an accident incident in a Kingsley Amis novel that nicely illuminates this: the math character Jake comes home to find his wife chatting to a friend about a hairdresser both women know who has moved with his family to somewhere in Africa. Jake listens in, expecting tales of cannibalism and such like, but no, the friend has just received a letter saying they love the place and are settling in nicely. Jake leaves the room in disgrace . We demand to be entertained, and while we don't object to a happy ending, the characters have to have experienced loss, pain and hardship in one form or another along the way to have earned it.