Achieving Happiness

I minored in creative writing in college, and in all the workshop classes i attended, i’ve heard the same problem echoed over and over again: what if the readers think the story is about me?!

It’s funny, but a decade later, now that I’ve had the benefit of hindsight and the lessons of years of  new experiences (some ecstatic, others steeped in misery - the memory of these experiences all bring melancholia as it it always the case for all things remembered - the gray area between forgetting and recollection, the silver-fine line between happiness and the blues), i realize, heck, who gives a damn if the reader does think the story is about me?!

When I first started writing short fiction I was in highschool (legitimate stories, ha — not short essay-y pieces about a fictional dog that chased a star up a tree or a fictional girl who wanted to be a mermaid) i suppose most of the stories I wrote were essentially eased out from some fragment of myself. How I breathe and how I feel, my reactions to the world and how I react when the world speaks back to me.

Or I wrote how I felt about people who entered (and then left, or left then came back, but I was already a different person when they returned) my life and what traces of themselves I kept with me.

Now that I’m pushing 30 (alas yes, but the essential me is stuck at 21 — like that song by the cranberries, a torch song to my youth and the fireceness of my interior musings), i have stories within me, and some, when they get written at last, will still echo some of what i’ve gone through or felt; but most will be imagined and dreamed.

On this rainy day, when the weather is disagreeable to most but is most pleasurable to one such as myself, I am grateful for everything that has happened to me, despite the pain, despite the anguish some of these experiences have brought. I guess this is something i can be thankful for, than i am capable of remembering  and still feeling even ghosts of emotions pasts, but be intellectually detached. I can describe and weave and paint the images and reflections of these ideas and feelings, and while they are still mine, my own,  i can transform them into fiction.

My take on the world as i know it.

The other night I was listening to a sad song - a ballad of regret and wistfulness, and suddenly a story came to me, eager to be written. I knew it was a story that was also going to be sad, just like the song that inspired it; and I knew that it would be, inevitably, about love (it’s always, always about love, isn’t it? Love for someone, something, the unreachable, the unknowable, the brilliant blazing ambition to be better and to be part of something greater than one’s self).

I told my husband this, that i was going to write a love story; and not surprisingly, he asked, teasingly, whether it was going to be about him.

No, I told him, i can’t write happy love stories, and ours is one - so I can’t write it (so far i’ve written 4 love stories, and all of them had conclusions that did not include bliss or fulfillment). I told him, when you read it, don’t think it’s about you or that it has anything do with us.

He laughed, "Tignan na lang natin pag tapos na.’

One of the lessons I learned from my creative writing classes (and the two national workshops I’ve gone to — Sillliman, and the UP National) is that it’s inevitable writers will dip into their own store of experiences when they begin the process of creation. The shape, texture and color of the stories will always bear the imprint of something important (at differing degrees, whether mental or emotional, visceral or mere fascination) to the writer.

I like learning about myself through fiction — mine and others’ infinitely better writers than myself. Fear not the views of the reader. Dare to bear your soul and to lay open your heart and guts. All the pain and sorrow, the suffering experienced directly or vicariously, on one’s own or by the hand and cruelty of thers, they’re all fuel for the fire.
The reader, well, he or she can dream and think and feel on his or her own. #

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