Try This: Beat Yourself Up Or Write Yourself Upbeat

A worthwhile experiment

First, a tale of two methods…

For my teacher, Tom Spanbauer, writing a novel meant “going down into the mines.” The first draft was “shitting out the lump of coal.” The process was painful and dark, and every narrator spoke from his or her “broken heart,” an open wound that colored their view on life. To write the novel was to discover the actual events that had broken the narrator’s heart, and subsequent drafts had to make sure that pain was subtly present in every sentence. It typically took Tom six to eight years to write a novel.

As I understand Tom’s process in Dangerous Writing, the writer finds a story that explores some topic too threatening and personal to deal with directly. And by unpacking that issue over the course of a novel, the writer resolves his or her reactivity to it. Once the novel is done, the issue seems to vanish. And it works. I’ve seen it work. Even if you never sell your manuscript to a publisher, you can evaporate some unresolved fear or rage. Not as memoir, mind you, but through a metaphor that allows you to exaggerate the danger and lets you explore and exhaust your fear from every angle. You can tell the story bigger and bigger. You control the story instead of it controlling you. You resolve it.

I have no quibbles with Tom’s method in Dangerous Writing, I only balked at how he went about the writing.

The coal mine versus the party…

Every writer has to find their own motivation. The coal mine just didn’t sing to me. A heart can be just as easily broken at a party, and I went to Tom’s as much for the post-workshop party as for the workshop advice. You’re never without your secret terrors, right? Why not find the monster at a party and slay it there?

Nevertheless, writing is about cultivating disaster. You’re always on the lookout for a new problem you can recast in fiction. What if you got impregnated by the devil? Or, What if zombies overran the world?

Years back I sat around with Max Brooks. I’d read World War Z and noticed that he dedicates the book to his mother, Anne Bancroft, with a note in the very back of the book. The years of her dying corresponded with the time during which he’d have written the novel, so I asked if the story was actually about his mom’s cancer. It was. As Brooks explained it, he’d taken her to specialist after specialist, all of whom assured them that a specific treatment would work. That’s why every organization in the book has a sure-fire way to defeat the zombies. Eventually Bancroft died, despite all the various miracle treatments, and that’s why the zombies win.

The novel is Max’s personal record of that long year of hope and defeat and ultimate loss. His next book, The Zombie Survival Guide, was his memorial to his mother, because it gave him a showcase for all the cooking, gardening, survival skills she’d taught him. During the Rodney King riots of 1992, as smoke hung over Los Angeles, she’d calculated how long their family could survive on the koi fish in their pond, and the preserved fruit and vegetables she’d stocked in the pantry. She saved seeds and replanted. She’d even discussed butchering the family pit bull, if need be.

So even the most raucous novel can depict an intense secret pain. The broken heart can be there, not openly pinned to your sleeve, but still there.

So, back to the party…

Frankly, I already had an iffy job. I didn’t need to moonlight in a coal mine. No offense to Tom, but if writing had to be a grind, I wouldn’t write. Perhaps that’s why so many people have personal trauma they want to write about — but never do. What’s the point? Maybe they can exhaust the past, or surmount it and sell it. But in the meantime you spend your free time, your leisure time in a dark pit.

For a couple years, I tried it. To write from the deep pit of a broken heart, but it weren’t much fun. Golly. Not compared with — well, everything else I could be doing.

Again with the Rodney King riots!

On April 29, 1992 I began to write the novel Invisible Monsters. Friends and I were in Seattle to attend a self-improvement seminar. As the day’s session closed we rushed to get to the Space Needle before it closed. At the top, we stood overlooking the city. The sound of glass breaking drifted up. Car alarms. Police sirens. A Space Needle staff member explained that we couldn’t return to the ground until it was safe. The Rodney King verdict had come in, and mobs were rioting in downtown Seattle. To kill time I bought a stack of retro-looking postcards for the Seattle Worlds Fair, themed “Living in the Space Age,” circa 1962. I wrote cryptic koan-y messages on them and dropped them from the observation decks. Some snagged in the suicide nets. Others drifted on the wind, toward the smoke and noise of general mayhem. I wrote the first chunks of Invisible Monsters while stranded up in the sky that night.

Which brings us to this past weekend…

Beginning with that night I’ve sworn off writing from despair. If writing isn’t the most-fun thing I can be doing at the moment, I should be doing that other thing. I began to write at parties. Never in my life have I attended as many parties as I did while writing Fight Club. Angry writing. Absurd writing. Profane stuff, Tom saw this breakout, and at times he was thrilled, but at times he was offended. He’d look around the workshop to see if other writers had taken offense. I’d found my motivation.

But it’s always evaded me: How do you write a happy character?

My characters weren’t Tom’s tormented ones, but mine had their share of upset. Bleeding knuckles instead of bleeding hearts. But what’s to be gained from writing a character who’s genuinely happy and upbeat?

First, remember that when you fail to engage with drama you create comedy. For example:

Last week, I tapped a guy and he and I got on the list for a fight. This guy must’ve had a bad week, got both my arms behind my head in a full nelson and rammed my face into the concrete floor until my teeth bit open the inside of my cheek and my eye was swollen shut and was bleeding, and after I said, stop, I could look down and there was a print of half my face in blood on the floor.

Tyler stood next to me, both of us looking down at the big O of my mouth with blood all around it and the little slit of my eye staring up at us from the floor, and Tyler says, “Cool.”

That long gruesome passage is completely negated by “cool,” and it always got a laugh. You see this same deadpan comedy as Mr. Magoo ambles through a world of dangers, completely oblivious to the constant threat of death. When a character fails to engage with drama or pathos, the moment gets a laugh. You’ve negated death, and the reader feels joyous relief.

Here’s another benefit to not embracing the drama: You force your audience to carry the full weight of the story. In Rosemary’s Baby we know what’s taking place, but Rosemary does not. We’re forced to carry the tension and fear because she’s unaware. In a similar way, in the Amy Hempel story In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried, the narrator simply recounts events without reacting to them. That way, the reader is forced to have the eventual emotional breakdown.

Lately I’ve been planning a novel, a horror novel, in which the narrator is a bubbly optimist. He’s Mr. Sunshine. Mr. Happy Meal. As chirpy as a bird, and cheerful as the posters in the office of your high school guidance counselor. The glass is always half full for him. Life is a banquet, not a dress rehearsal. He’s the opposite of Tom’s deeply wounded heroes, my Mr. Rainbow will be the narrator set against a background of escalating horrors. He’s NOT Forrest Gump. Geez, I hated that movie. But my brainchild is that ever-hopeful young go-getter so many of us used to be. Me included.

Here’s the unexpected perk. All weekend as I did slog jobs — fixing the irrigation, fixing the wheelbarrow, hauling rocks, weeding, filing papers — my head was full of this happy guy. I’m trying to see the world as he would, in trite, sugary memes, and doing so made me really happy. Maybe this is finally the secret to happiness. Just adopt a cheerful persona and craft a worldview around it. Put on a happy-face mask and wear it everywhere. My happy fella found nothing boring or tedious. He laughs so easily. Already I’ve got pages of notes, the silly stuff he says and thinks.

And I’m giddy because he’s giddy. I’ve cracked the code for creating happiness out of nothing. I invite you to try it. Create a happy character and see your world as she or he would.

My guy? Mr. Happy Pants? Mr. Go-Getter? I can’t wait to pull off his fingernails.