When I was a youngster, I liked stories that ended all neat and tidy. The hero always crushed the villain. The good guy always got the girl. Justice always triumphed over evil.

I first realized just how much I craved these conclusions when my mom suggested I read Bernard Malamud's classic "The Natural." The movie starring Robert Redford and Kim Bassinger was enormously more popular than the book ever was -- and likely for the dramatic and highly stylized ending. Rob Hobbs, who refused to accept payoff money from a bookie to strike out and throw the game, literally knocks the cover off the ball and the lights explode in a dazzling display of pyrotechnics. He circles the bases to claim his glory to the infamous sound track. But in the book, Hobbs takes the money and strike out ... and I threw the book across the room as a 13-year-old boy when I read that. It wasn't supposed to happen that way.

Fast-forward 25 years and my taste in fictional endings have changed. My real life experiences have taught me that the good guy doesn't always win or get the girl. And sometimes evil people get away with atrocities -- even if only for a time to do more harm. That's not how I wish things went, but it's real life.

So, does fiction need to mirror real life? Or would readers prefer an escape where the wheels of justice run like a finely-tuned vehicle free from corruption or any evil too big?

I still like Hollywood endings ... in my movies. But in my fiction where the characters are flawed and the stories dance around the bounds of believability, I don't like tidy endings all the time. I like it more like real life ... where some things just never seem to get fully resolved and we must co-exist with such tension.

The Natural