Life is a bowl of cherries, friends, and according to self-help literature cover art, you and I are the cherries.
Never one to shy away from literary trends, I took a break from fiction-writing this month and pounded out not one, but three self-help books about finding happiness, complete with cherry-donning cover art:
In my first ever self-help book, I propose that you don’t really need to be happy to feel happy. The human body is full of all sorts of chemicals that, when mixed with other chemicals, can make you feel like totally all right, man.
With chapters like, “Scoring a Bag of Happiness,” “Boredom Without Boredom,” and “Cereal is Awesome,” along with twenty blank pages in the back for “when you’re in a pinch,” this book will have you on the right path to literally forgetting your troubles in no time.
In my controversial follow-up to High and Happy, I suggest you are just not made to be happy, and the sooner that you acknowledge your inescapable misery, the fewer remaining years of your pathetic life will you needlessly waste trying to be something you are incapable of being: happy.
In Chapter 7, “You’re the Only One Who Wasn’t Invited to the Sex Orgy,” I list 3 new Nick’s Tips™ for taking your mind off of how much fun your friends, family and co-workers are having without you. Tip 1: “Look in the mirror and repeat the three P’s: Poor, Pathetic, and Pitiful. Then go rub one out.”
The final installment of my Happiness Trilogy, also known as “The Last Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need,” I teach you how to eliminate the cause of your misery: yourself.
We were driving from Maine to Brooklyn, playing a game called “Find the NPR Station.” It was a Saturday, after all, and even the smaller markets have Weekend Edition. Somewhere in Massachusetts or Connecticut, we found This American Life and stayed tuned in for as long as we could. New York Times book critic James Wood came on Weekend All Things Considered to announce a fiction writing contest and my ears perked up. I know who this guy is, I thought, I’m reading his book (more on that in a second)! It turned out that this was Round 2 of NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction contest, to which they invite listeners to submit their own works of flash fiction.
Wood talked about the power of specifics in a first sentence. You know, the hook. He gave some example that he also references in his book about a marquis eating lunch, but I’ve already forgotten. And, oh yeah, I only ended up reading half of the book, so…
So the rule for Round 2 was that all stories should begin with the bland, generic sentence, “The nurse left work at five o’clock.” The trick would be to write a killer second line.
I wrote a little story in the next week or so and sent it off a day early. I’d been checking back at the site every few days to see if I was a contender or not, but alas, today I saw that a winner was chosen, and it was not I.
One of my favorite contemporary writers is a guy from Tennessee named Kevin Wilson. I admire his ability to make the surreal feel so familiar. I saw on his web site that he wrote a tiny story for a web site called “Seventy Two Words,” so I thought I might try and write my own 72-word story. I realized too late that the site may not be publishing new work anymore. I liked my story enough to share it, so here you go:
My Tiny Family
We come across a miniature village, set up on the lot between the antiques store and the used bookstore. Tyler, running around the model village, looks so gigantic and surprised that I have to laugh. My wife touches my back and I tense up again. “I’m big!” Tyler says, bending over to peer into the miniature ice cream shop. He is big. I wonder if the tiny villagers ever feel so bored.
After a quick Twitter search for “nanowrimo,” you’ll see that I’m not the only one talking about November’s write-a-thon, even though we’re almost three months out. You’ll also see that I’m not the only one wondering if it’s too soon to be thinking, planning, or talking about NaNoWriMo.
Well, to that question, I say “No!” Or “Yes!” Actually, the only thing I can say with certainty is “That depends!”
Here are a couple of planning pitfalls I’ve experienced in the two and a half years I’ve been participating in NaNoWriMo. (Continued)
