There’s a saying something along the lines of, “The first key to being a good writer is having an unhappy childhood.”
Just as many insist you can’t be a phenomenal writer until you’re older, wiser, and have had more experiences, many believe that an unhappy childhood is the key to successful reflecting and therefore narrative.
I’m here to refute that fact.
In her most recent memoir, Unlearning to Fly, Jennifer Brice–a wonderful non-fiction creative writing Professor at Colgate University–writes:
I had a happy childhood. My parents loved me, and they loved each other. My two brothers and two sisters and I wore hand-me-downs or clothes manufactured on my mother’s treadle Singer, but there were graham crackers in the cupboard at snack time and goulash on the stove for dinner; there was oil in the tank; and, occasionally, when my mother’s godfather, John Zantginger, sent a check from New York City, enough money for us to spend a week in the tropics or on the ski slopes.
Brice seems to be commenting that her childhood, whether or not average, was motivated and moved by the small stuff: fulfilling moments and food on the table. A few paragraphs later, she explains:
Now that I think about it, my childhood was better than happy. It was close to idyllic.
Which is why, when I was eight or nine, I lay on my belly and slithered over the edge of a cliff that dropped 200 feet to a slavering creek that ended in Liberty Falls near Chitina, Alaska–the place for which the dog was named.
Brice blames her consistent desire to put herself in fearful or challenging situations on the same happy childhood that apparently makes it impossible to write well–hence proving this claim’s falseness.
Writing well about your youth is based around perceptiveness: drawing connections between your past and future self; finding depth and character building in the little moments that shaped those years; and recreating them with words in a both vivid and prophetic sense. You don’t have to have been unhappy, you just have to have been something interesting–obsessive, oblivious, passive, even human.
The saying about unhappy children growing into writers may be in a sense true. Many writers are loners, or have suffered through tragedy. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t have a perfectly happy life. I think what unites us as writers is more a drivenness towards perfection–and don’t perfectionists typically knit-pick the small?
In my first post, I quoted my 17-year-old self (…how vain am I?) saying that for me, writing is a coping mechanism, a way of writing all the shit in your life into goodness–elegant strings of words. To a writer, nothing is better than those sentences. And to a writer, childhood only must be interesting not unhappy, in order to poke and prod it into a provocative memoir.
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