Writers Tricks of the Trade Volume 6 Issue 4 | Page 25

THE HAPPY ART OF SADNESS
A WRITERS GUIDE TO HEALTHY MALADJUSTMENT

GREG BLAKE MILLER
If you are a writer, or a person who thinks in sentences—which is to say, if you are
a person—you know that a scar long healed is nonetheless a scar, and you find
yourself occasionally summoning old pain. Why is this? Is life not interesting enough
for you? Happiness got you down? Ah, what’s the use of asking why: The creative
writer calls upon pain, and pain is always pleased to answer.

GREG BLAKE MILLER
AUTHOR

So the new question arises: If we are bound to interrogate ourselves in this
apparently unenjoyable and, let’s face it, unattractive way, how are we to produce
something enjoyable and attractive? Does the metabolizing of grief have nontoxic
byproducts?
Let’s pause to reflect on how sadness—once considered a veritable badge of honor
among creative types—fell into such disfavor in the past decade. Maybe it was the
millennial boomlet in woe-is-me victim memoirs; maybe it was the Oprah
confessional; maybe it was that time Oprah unmasked a victim-memoirist as a big
fake. Maybe it was the publication of Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class,
which defined creativity away from suffering artists and toward clever lawyers and
playful Web titans who seemed to be demonstrably not suffering. Maybe it was the
rise of Happiness Studies, an effort to scientifically examine a thing most of us can’t
even define. The latest word is that social interaction makes us happy, that happiness
makes us creative, and that our creativity is made solid in this world only through
more social interaction. It’s quite easy to look upon the Happy Creative wave and
conclude that solitude is the enemy and sadness is the devil.
But people are unruly creatures, and for each of us happiness is a byproduct of
different combinations of different things in different proportions at different times.
Fortunately, we know a few constants: physical activity, meaningful work, love … To
these I would add that happiness is, in part, a byproduct of the artful use of our
sadness.
So, how does one artfully use one’s sadness? Tough question, and, appropriately
enough, it took me some suffering to arrive at anything resembling answers:

Master the three aspects of the past . Acknowledge the “pastness” of the past
(it happened), the “presentness” of the past (what happened then helped create now)
and the past’s empowering “futureness” (like a detective with a collared perp, you get
to unmask the past, interrogate it and put it to work for you as you solve the next
mystery).

WRITERS’ TRICKS OF THE TRADE

PAGE
17

JULY-AUGUST 2016