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Today’s Write Thought T writing affirmation is one you might like to hope is true for you too. No, I won’t be encouraging you to affirm “my name is J.K. Rowling” (and “it says so on my bank statement”), this screensaver-friendly suggestable-writer-type reminder is more along the lines of “do you know what’s really important in life, Forrest?”
Being happy. Hence:
“My writing brings happiness to others.”
“Aww shucks. If only that was true, Ben.”
Maybe it is?
Many years ago, when I started writing, as a songwriter I didn’t think much about why I was writing: I loved music and I wanted to make my own. Lyrics had always caught my imagination as much as melodies and rhythms so as a sensitive teenage boy with a lot of romantic notions to express, I jumped right in to waving my chosen magical wand (a pen, Potter mouths) to make cool stuff happen.
It wasn’t just the odd monstrous erupting pimple that sort to leave its mark on the world through me. From a young age I wanted to do it with words too.
After breaking up with my first girlfriend I wrote a song you’ll be forgiven for never having heard (or heard of) called ‘Loved and Lost’. Brilliant. Shakespeare would have loved it. Hang on, maybe that’s where I ripped that clichéd title off in the first place. Oh well. I was only a beginner then.
Now I’m still a beginner—but a beginner with twenty-five plus years experience of writing across many forms. But the sophistication of form is not the only thing for me which has evolved, these days I do think a little bit more about my motivation for writing. And it’s simple: I want to make people happy.
Of course some writers (and people in general) don’t care at all about increasing another’s happiness (how else could you account for the nightly news) but many of us are focussed on accentuating the positive in life—not the negative.
Having said that, I have never shied away from contentious subject matter—which might run the risk of offending some people, and therefore, upsetting them—either. Though my goal is not to piss anyone off, I have to accept that sometimes what I write will.
And I’m happy with that.
Many years ago I wrote a song called ‘Hold Me’, about a teenage boy who had become overwhelmed by guilt about his girlfriend’s abortion. At first ‘abortion guilt’ might not sound like a ‘happy’ topic but my motivation in writing such a song was to explore the possibility of how important it would be for that boy to release debilitating guilt; of forgiving himself for his part in what is not an uncommon teenage experience.
Releasing guilt=more happy.
It’s the same for rest of my writing too. When I wrote my first novel, THE LAST GREAT DAY, I wanted to draw from real and tragic events to create a piece of literature (also known as a book) which would give any reader who could appreciate (understand?) it a sense of catharsis and liberation—not unlike that which the family in the story experience at the end.
Tragedy transcended=more happy.
Maybe without consciously setting out to do so I was writing The Last Great Day mainly for myself, but I always hoped other’s would ‘get’ where I was coming from. If they were moved in anyway I hoped they would find the humor on the other side of the tragedy; I hoped The Last Great Day would bring them ‘more happy’.
And judging from the reviews, emails and messages readers have sent me so far, for some, it has. Which, as a writer, is all I can hope for. (Well, that and being a freshly pressed blogger on WordPress!)
Sure, my writing can’t, won’t and doesn’t make everybody happy but I know…
“My writing brings happiness to others.”
And I bet yours does too.
Or maybe you don’t write? Do you do something else to make people happy? Love to get your comment.
N.B. If you enjoyed this post you might also enjoy these other Write Thought Tees:
No. 1 - A Writing Affirmation for everyone
No. 2 - Brevity is the soul of Twit
No. 3 - How to write for one person
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