Where it all comes from
I’m sure there will be a lot of commentary about how All the Way Happy got started - and fair enough. But in writing Jack and Theo’s story, especially Jack’s origins… that came directly from inside of me. From my life. From my deeply challenging childhood and my journey to move forward. So if I have any writing advice, it’s this -
When you write?
Write down your life.
I can’t tell you what a weird, awkward, painful DELIGHT it is to re-read old journals. Yeah, there’s that embarrassing little smutty story about a boy I had a crush on. And there’s the description of my first girlfriend and how scared I was. There are my strange, immature hopes, the things which I abandoned and the things I’m still working towards.
Life is our material, it’s where we come from as artists, and even the most dull days can be a microcosm of the richness of life which we may depend on when we write. There are places and people and times we will never, ever get back - and yeah, some of them are pretty rough, but they are a part of us. I have pages and pages of heartbreak and heck, I’m a romance writer, and it’s helpful to know that that capacity for heartbreak is in me. I will never be able to go back and sit in the back garden behind my childhood apartment, and THANK GOD because my childhood was not great (to say the very least), but those were some beautiful days with gorgeous weather and music and smoke and pain and pleasure. I’m never, ever going to have a drink again, and I wish I never had, but I do have a record of how I felt as an active alcoholic, and that’s so important. It keeps me sober. It helps me keep going.
Truly, we forget so much. So much of who we are passes from experience to instinct - we are no longer conscious of those memories but they affect us just the same. Looking at my own words, I have the key to my identity, and that helps in therapy, in relationships, and in the act of creation. I wrote it down; I can see it; I can know that I lived it.
I have my first journal from kindergarten where I wrote about feeding ducks; I have my ripped up purple notebook from sophomore year when I had my head full of drama and untreated bipolar disorder, when I studied abroad for the first time, when I started to find myself. I have the first notebook I bought at my university with its naïve ramblings and first attempts at erotic romance. I have my journal entry from not so long ago where I talked about falling in love and how terrifying it is to change every damn thing I took for granted. All of this is my life, and all of it is material, and all of it is worth remembering.
Write your life, because no one is living it except for you. It’s your story.
Jack Gardner, the horrible apartment with the window stuck open and the rain sliding down the glass, the adulthood spent running from that past and burying his true identity - that’s me. That’s where I began and what I have to learn to accept.
So my advice? Write down your story, no matter where it starts.
It’s worth telling.
