Scheiner is a professional writer with a doctorate in law. In this essay, she considers Atwood's story in relation to the impact of a writer's plot development on the reader's satisfaction.

In her short story "Happy Endings," Margaret Atwood challenges the authors that seem to believe that a simple unexplained but happy conclusion is all the reader needs. Her various tales within this short story show how totally different stories can be made similar by ending in the same way. In her short story, Atwood is exposing a problem common to many short stories that are based solely upon plot without character development.

The author continues to enforce the need for a reader to find justice in a story when she relies upon the element of shock in version C. In this situation, the audience is first given the dilemma of trying to decide whether John is...