Everyday Canvas

Happiness and Creative Writing Process

Prompt: Happiness is our birthright. It is a sacred gift. What are your thoughts on this?

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I don’t think happiness is a birthright or else we would all be born with silver spoons in our mouths and to perfect parents and environments. I also don’t think there is anything sacred about it. Although sects and certain belief systems adhere to the sacred birthright idea, they cannot effectively explain why some children are born with birth defects, into drug addicted parents, or inside war zones.

What is our birthright is our ability and efforts to search for and earn happiness; most of the time, happiness is sown and cultivated by the person because authentic happiness comes from inner peace, wisdom, and experience. This is never an immediate process.

Authentic happiness can be knowing or learning that the potential for happiness is not based on outer things, but what the inner workings of one’s psyche may prescribe. Sometimes, happiness comes from minute things and other times from larger ones. Sometimes, it comes from what happens to a person, and other times, it comes from helping and healing others or rejoicing with them for their successes.

Not everyone is born with a happy disposition, but it is my understanding that we can all be trained to be happy or at least happier than the way we feel when faced with stressful events. Working toward happiness is a never-ending process; still, as in most things, the process means more than the result.

Prompt: “Permission to Begin. Courage to Continue. Forgiveness to Try Again.” In your opinion, how do these phrases relate to the creative writing process?

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I believe creative writing is a private affair and it should be kept private, at least not before coming up with a first draft and a simple edit, no matter how long or short the piece is supposed to be.

Giving oneself the permission to begin means looking at a blank page or screen and finding in oneself the courage to think of an idea and to put down the first word, first sentence, or first paragraph. Most of the time, for most of us, this is all it takes to continue.

Yet, continuing is a bit more complicated than the initial attempt. This is when the arranging of ideas and analytical activity are in motion. This is where the writer needs to keep the work private until the finish line. Asking someone else to review or look at the work in the middle of it usually ends in writer’s losing the enthusiasm or, worse yet, discouragement. At this stage, dark and personal subjects and specific ideas will come into play and they will twist, change shape, and insert surprises into the work until the end of it. To do this, a writer needs to be alone with his thoughts and creativity.

Imagine doing all that and ending up with something that one is sure is not good or not good enough. Here enters the forgiveness for one’s earlier failed efforts that may result in editing, rewriting, or beginning again from scratch.

Only after all this, the feedback on one’s work from a community of other writers will help the writer to perfect his or her work.