Feeling So Wrong, Doing the Write Thing

First, my apologies for mangling the OneRepublic lyric.  I really do like that song, but that is not what this post is about.  As I have mentioned before, I am currently taking some online graduate school classes.  One of my classes this semester is an advanced fiction writing workshop.  Part of the class is to upload a new work of fiction and have the others in. the class help evaluate it, both in terms of plot/story and in basic grammar.  Last week, I went over the first batch of stories, and they were overall fairly depressing.  Four of the five stories had death as a major theme.  In some strange coincidence, I read the stories in an order of increasing depressing traits.  The first story dealt with a single father losing his job.  They got more morbid after that.  A woman dealing with the death of her dog form her teenage years.  A woman thinking about her missing abusive former boyfriend.  An officer informing families about their deceased members in the military.  Finally, the story that ends with a woman shot by her ex, in a bungled murder-suicide attempt.  She survived, but her didn't.  Oh, and it is told from the point of view of the woman's pet dog.  I felt down the entire week after reading these stories.  Fortunately, I read one per day, to space them out and make sure I had time for other things. I am not sure I could have handled reading all of them in one day, as well as critiquing them.  Yesterday, I started the second batch of stories.  I have barely given them the once-over, but I noticed that one might have to deal with the aftermath of a school shooting.  Okay, this will be happy.  My story will be in the final batch.  On the plus side, that means I will only have to go over three stories instead of five that week.  It also means I will have to wait another week before my relatively less dramatic story gets a going over.  By comparison, it isn't that bad.  Although I haven't mentioned it yet, it is the planned first chapter of a longer work.  It is different from the one I am currently writing in my literary blog.  In this story, a teenage boy has just found out that he will be spending a few weeks with his mother at her parents' house to help out the boy's grandmother recover from a fall.  He doesn't want to go, as it will spoil the plans he and his mother had already laid out for him.  He is blaming his father, although he really isn't the one causing the problem.  In the rest of the book, the boy will find out about many things that he has been wrong about, not the least is himself. I might post that chapter sometime, possibly after its first workshop.  I just hope I get to read some more uplifting works. While fiction needs some sort of conflict to work, it doesn't have to be so morbid.