Writing Happiness: Why It’s Worth It to Look on the Bright Side of Stories

Seven years ago, I was sitting in a writing workshop getting the kind of feedback I dreaded…The workshop leader spoke of how every novel she’d written had come from her obsessions. Something slipped in me when she said this. It was what I most feared: my novel wasn’t working, my writing wasn’t working, because it didn’t stem from the grief and despair that had fueled my first two novels. I’d written a third book, but when an agent I respected rejected it, saying, “I just don’t care enough about the main character” my first reaction was, I don’t either. I suspected I needed to delve deeper into her trauma, but I couldn’t. I was tired of writing about grief.

*

The workshop leader began asking questions about my personal life in an attempt, she explained, to get to the heart of my story. But I don’t want to write about my life, I thought helplessly, even as she was asking, “Do you have children?” and I was shaking my head no, and she was asking why not. I mentioned my nephews who had both died of a genetic disease. The writer asked their names, how old they’d been when they died—seven, fifteen. “It’s just…I’ve written about them,” I said meekly. “Numerous essays, my second novel.”

The writer moved on. Digging, excavating, plundering. How many times had I been married? Shame rippled through me. “Four times,” I whispered. The writer sat back, eyebrow raised. The clink of a shovel hitting something solid. Why had I gotten divorced? Who initiated the divorces? My shirt was sticking to my back, my throat dry. The questions kept coming. “This is all material,” the writer reminded us. “We’re looking for the story.” I stared at pages of the novel I’d expected to workshop, and felt like a fool.

An hour passed. By this time, I was crying. One of the women, eyes welling—with sympathy maybe, or pity—handed me a roll of toilet paper to use for Kleenex. I couldn’t stop hiccupping. I felt blindsided and humiliated and furious. What was this? Because it certainly wasn’t about my novel and it wasn’t about writing, though the “critique” would continue for another hour.

*

“Shattered” was the word I used later to describe the experience. I’d come to this workshop hoping to jumpstart what felt like a failed career. It had been a decade since I’d published my second novel. Instead, I’d been put on display, pinioned in place, my life exposed and made ugly, every flaw and mistake zoomed in on and magnified.

But just as bewildering as the writer’s interrogation, as the writer’s belief that that it was okay to so publicly bore into, dissect, dismantle—I cannot find the right verb—violate, rob—my life for the sake of story, was the equally bewildering fact that I had allowed it. I had let her, and the other women had silently watched.

The truth is that we allowed the interrogation—and I would watch it happen to others in the days to come—because at some level we believed that good writing, good art, art that mattered, art that could make a difference in the world—and why else bother?—stemmed from our deepest pain, sorrow, and loss.

Was this why I’d been struggling to write a novel I cared about? Had I used up all my grief?

The thought unsettled me. I didn’t want to believe that the best writing had to come from what was darkest in us, even though my own writing always had. And I’d been “rewarded” for writing about grief—my first published essay about the stillborn child my mother bore won a Pushcart. And then there were my divorces, depression—my nephews. Even in that workshop, I felt how the room shifted when I mentioned them. But I didn’t want to write about grief anymore, not because I didn’t feel it, but because to continue doing so felt wrong, as if I were using my grief for the sake of story. And because there seemed to be something fundamentally fucked up with this notion that our sorrows were more worthy of attention than our joys; that our grief was more authentic than our happiness, that was truest in us—and about us—were our wounds.

And yet, when I tried to imagine how I would have responded had someone—anyone—shown up in one of my own writing workshops and announced that she wanted to write about something happy, I would have dissuaded her. “There’s no story without conflict,” I would have said, “and conflict isn’t by nature very happy.” I might have quoted essayist Meghan Daum who once said, “Here’s the thing about safe, unprovocative material that you’re not afraid of anyone reading: quite often, no wants to read it anyway.”

And really, could anything be safer, more unprovocative than happiness? What risk was there in describing joy?

In other words, though my methods and approach to teaching might have been different from that of the writer’s, we shared the same aesthetic: Show us your pain. Your pain is what matters.

*

I left that workshop angry, the novel I’d hoped to revise forgotten. Instead I gave myself a challenge, a dare: I would write an essay about happiness. A beautiful literary essay that people wanted to read. I wasn’t sure what’d I’d write about, if I’d have enough to say. Five pages, I told myself. Just five pages.

But the five pages turned into ten, then twenty, then fifty. I knew the essay wasn’t publishable—fifty-pages about happiness? But I didn’t care. I was writing again, and for the first time in ten years, I again felt joy in my writing, sentences tumbling forward, hours whirling by. Winter lifted into spring and spring into summer. I devoured piles of library books, poetry collections, biographies of artists—Georgia O’Keefe, Henri Matisse; Darren McMahon’s Happiness: A History. Colored Post-its marked names, quotes, passages I’d copy into a notebook. I read of O’Keefe spending an entire summer painting green apples—a single apple on a black plate, apples in pairs, in groups of three. “Certainly, these quieter studies resulted in part from O’Keefe’s sense of domestic comfort and possibly from her desire to paint for pure pleasure,” the biographer wrote. I wanted to do something similar with my writing, and the wanting itself felt like a gift. How long it had been since I wanted to write!

Sixty pages. Seventy.

I created a class called “Writing the Ordinary,” where we focused on describing small moments of extraordinary joy. The class filled. I taught it again. And again.

By then it had been two years since that workshop, two years since I’d challenged myself to write about happiness. I was happy. And yet, when I ran into a writer friend I hadn’t seen in years, I told her, over coffee, how much I still longed to write a novel. I mentioned the last one I’d completed, the one where the agent said he didn’t care about my character. I described the plot, surprised at how present it still felt. “What’s the title?” my friend asked.

I felt myself go still.

“A Season of Perfect Happiness,” I said quietly, stunned that I could have forgotten this. Over a year of writing an essay about this very subject, and I’d never thought of this novel? It seemed impossible—and incredible!—to realize that long before I’d challenged myself to write about happiness, I’d already begun—even if I didn’t yet know it.

Still, it took me weeks to unearth that manuscript I’d given up on all those years ago. I wanted so much to like it, but what if I didn’t? What if I still couldn’t care about Claire, my main character?

Then I read the first sentence: If you could live an entire season of your life in perfect happiness, knowing that once the season ended, you’d remember nothing of that time, would you still take the chance?

I read the next sentence and the next and I kept reading and I loved what I read. The story had heart and energy and while I could see why Claire had been difficult to care about, she was so fixable! I would have to start over, but it was clear to me why the book had failed before. Not because I hadn’t delved into Claire’s trauma enough, but because I hadn’t delved into her happiness. Like me, she was more than her grief. Which meant that instead of writing about a woman defined by her losses I would write about a woman fighting to hold onto her happiness—even when others said she didn’t deserve it, even when she herself wasn’t sure. This raised all kinds of question—do any of us deserve happiness? Do some deserve it more than others? And in the end, isn’t happiness, at least as much as our grief, capable of shaping our lives?

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A Season of Perfect Happiness by Maribeth Fischer is available from Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Books, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.