Hey Jude: Happiness as a Writer's Greatest Tool

Nothing starts the morning quite like turning on the radio and hearing the Beatles sing “Hey Jude.” 

Especially after you’ve been fasting twelve hours in preparation for an early morning blood test. 

Especially after you’ve spent a fitful night, writhing from the agony of a mid-sleep charley horse.

First, you roll out of bed a mite miffed. Your leg still throbs. Your stomach rumbles. You can’t find a book to read in the lab waiting room. Your wife sends you a text reminding you there’s a chocolate donut in the refrigerator you can’t eat.

Muttering vague sounds resembling profanity, you limp to the car, dump your laptop and thesaurus into the back seat, sit behind the wheel, and then, surrounded by dark, remember it might be a good idea to open the garage door before backing out.

Safely outside on the driveway, you turn on the radio and navigate Sirius XM away from the frothing news stations, the all-too-important sports channels, and the worthless-to-Minnesotans traffic reports from Pittsburgh to the 60s music just in time to hear Paul McCartney exhorting someone to “take a sad song and make it better.” 

It's impossible NOT to be happy.

You crank the volume knob to "STUN." You start waving your head forward, backward, side to side. You wail like a water buffalo in heat, trying to duplicate McCartney’s unintelligible, yet mega-cool screaming.

The steering wheel magically transforms into a black-and-white pearl-finished drum set and you are no longer Joe Schmoe quietly driving his way to the clinic. You morph into a young Ringo Starr, pounding out the infectious beat to the best song ever!

Music transfigures the entire universe.

Leg? What leg? Donut? Schmoe-nut. You drive to the clinic and actually smile at the lab tech as she rams the needle into your arm. As your arm hangs limply at your side, the smile grows into a full-fledged giggle. The new you drives off to breakfast.

The difference between the new you and the one you were an hour ago? You actually look forward to what lies in store. 

A full day of writing? So what? 

Sixty short minutes ago–before getting in the car, before turning on your radio, before your musical tirade–the “real world” threatened to write you. The insignificant and the mundane jeopardized your attitude, your vision, even your ability to construct a coherent sentence 

However, after joining the greatest rock band of all time, if only vicariously, after wolfing down a heaping bowl of oatmeal, and after slurping the obligatory morning caffeine, the day belongs to you, not you to the day.

You are in control of not only the real world, but the fictional world only you can create. The world you get to build and determine who inhabits it, where they live, what happens to them, and how they react. YOU ARE A GOD!!!

"So, what if the fictional world I want to produce is anything but happy?"

You mean like a world where a crotchety old patient exacts his revenge against every sadistic lab tech he ever had, stab for stab, by attacking an unsuspecting garbage worker in the middle of a dark Manhattan alley on a rainy night?

Well, that could be fun. The important thing to remember, however, is that world will be more alive, more engaging, more affecting to the reader if you are in control of, not controlled by, your emotions. 

Instead of wallowing in the muck and mire of your real life, let it simply serve as background for your fictional world. Rather than allowing your attitude to hinder your construction, use your mood to color your characters, to enhance the plot, to infuse your story with reality. In other words, let your daily travails stir your imagination, not clog it.

How? By taking Paul McCartney’s advice: Take a sad song and make it better. 

Advice much easier followed with a happy mind.