Where are the happy stories?
So even just mentioning the way that stories speak differently to people has made me think about one of the things I was pondering last week. Someone said to me recently that I should think about writing some happier stories.
It's certainly not the first time someone has said this. (My mother has long been a champion of the idea that I should write things that end happily.) And for the most part it has always made me protest, because I generally try to make the final note of the story ... well, not joyful, but at least positive. An upturn. Everything goes to hell, but then the protagonist finds a cookie.
Anyway, I mentioned this to my friend Dave Nickle at lunch last week, and we sort of talked it out. Dave was of the opinion that it probably has something to do with my age and experience, and while I will generally smack anyone who tries to suggest that I'm too young to write [insert topic of conversation here] -- and have for the past ten years -- this time I actually agreed with him.
Its not, I said, that I've never been happy -- in fact, the opposite is true. I've had a lot of joy and contentment in my life. It's just that my transformative experiences thus far have been the shocks, the twists and accidents and unfortunate realizations. The important changes in my life -- the things that have pushed me out of my routine -- the things that have made me learn something important about myself and the experience of living -- have never been the happy experiences.
And yet it's the things that push me in some direction that I want to write about and explore, the things that give me something to say. And if I'm not trying to say something, then the story just never gets finished; I have a lot of abandoned fragments in my "Unfinished" folder that can attest to that.
Happy? Happy is wonderful. I'm just left thinking that I don't yet have anything interesting to say about the experience.
It's certainly not the first time someone has said this. (My mother has long been a champion of the idea that I should write things that end happily.) And for the most part it has always made me protest, because I generally try to make the final note of the story ... well, not joyful, but at least positive. An upturn. Everything goes to hell, but then the protagonist finds a cookie.
Anyway, I mentioned this to my friend Dave Nickle at lunch last week, and we sort of talked it out. Dave was of the opinion that it probably has something to do with my age and experience, and while I will generally smack anyone who tries to suggest that I'm too young to write [insert topic of conversation here] -- and have for the past ten years -- this time I actually agreed with him.
Its not, I said, that I've never been happy -- in fact, the opposite is true. I've had a lot of joy and contentment in my life. It's just that my transformative experiences thus far have been the shocks, the twists and accidents and unfortunate realizations. The important changes in my life -- the things that have pushed me out of my routine -- the things that have made me learn something important about myself and the experience of living -- have never been the happy experiences.
And yet it's the things that push me in some direction that I want to write about and explore, the things that give me something to say. And if I'm not trying to say something, then the story just never gets finished; I have a lot of abandoned fragments in my "Unfinished" folder that can attest to that.
Happy? Happy is wonderful. I'm just left thinking that I don't yet have anything interesting to say about the experience.