What Makes a Writer Happy?

It’s Not What You Think It Is

Writers live an unusual life.

From the unusual things they think about to the unusual things they do to make themselves happy, everything about writers is unusual.

Normal people may call them weird, but it is those eccentricities that make them special.

Agatha Christie, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf and William Shakespeare are four of the world’s most celebrated writers who did strange things to make themselves happy.

• Agatha Christie ate apples in the bathtub to envision murder mysteries.
• Charles Dickens slept facing north to improve his creativity and writing.
• Virginia Woolf wrote at a standing desk to occasionally step away from her writing to get a different view.
• William Shakespeare included suicide 13 times in his plays to make his plays more lively

Normal people don’t do such things because they think it is impractical.

But that is the very essence of being a writer.

A writer is an impractical creature trying to find his place in a practical world.

Writers are day dreamers. They dream about all possible emotions known to mankind and all different angles to an unborn story.

While normal people are running after money to fulfil their materialistic desire, writers are chasing their own thoughts to materialise them into words.

Don’t get me wrong. Writers love money too.

But once they commit themselves to the art of writing, they are pretty much stuck in that rabbit hole for the rest of their lives. Every day is spent trying to write something that makes sense to them.

And they do strange things to make themselves happy in the process.

I dare say I have the audacity to compare myself with the likes of Agatha Christie, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf or even William Shakespeare. But, I do confess I too have my own strange secrets that make me happy.

And, when I say happy, I mean not just happy. I mean super happy.

That’s why when I say appreciation, I don’t just mean appreciation. I mean appreciation at a deeper level.

When someone reads my writing and leaves a thoughtful comment, that appreciation makes me happy, no doubt.

But, when a fellow writer spends considerable time reading my writing, and commenting on it, I genuinely feel that appreciation at a deeper level.

Today I felt such appreciation at a deeper level when I opened my Medium account and saw 21 notifications.

I must have read one notification before taking the screenshot. Hence, 20 notifications.

I wondered how many writers engaged with my content.But, to my surprise, it was just one writer- John Ramos.

This gentleman dropped 21 notifications on my account. It looked something like this.

I know some of the notifications were from his replies to my comments on his articles.

But still, to see such a beautiful sight one fine morning on a seemingly sunny day was all I needed to make me happy.

Dear John, thinking of you spending a considerable amount of your time engaging with my content just made me smile. And, that’s when I thought I needed to do something to make you smile.

And smiling you are! says my telepathic power.

Thank you John. Thank you for being a good friend.

And, for everyone reading this right now, I have three words for you.

Always be kind.

I stole these words from John’s recent article. The link is below. I hope you will enjoy it. I did.

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