The Happy Writing Book
“I feel unmoored when I’m not writing. Incomplete. Not quite myself.” Those are the words of Elise Valmorbida, author of The Happy Writing Book: Discovering the Positive Power of Creative Writing (Laurence King, 2021).
I definitely relate to what Valmorbida says above, included in her book that is the result of “decades of deliberation and discovery about the art, craft and positive experience of creative writing.”
Valmorbida, who grew up Italian in Australia and lives in London, has been a designer and creative director as well as the author of several books. She continues to teach Creative Writing through various organizations, at literary festivals and community-building organizations.
The Happy Writing Book (not designed by Valmorbida) has a very cheerful design with its orange cover and the large orange numbers that introduce each chapter.
In “Write What You Know?” Valmorbida says “your own experience will inform your work” but points out that authors do research. In the case of Annie Proulx, she “writes what she knows, but she didn’t know it before she started delving.” That delving sounds fun as Proulx “takes herself to new places, haunts little stores and buys heaps of second-hand books about farming, local history, auction records, hunting tackle, whatever. She transcribes wording from street signs and menus and advertising. She hangs about and absorbs conversations, noting the speech patterns, the vernacular, topics of concern.”
“Write to discover what you want to know, Valmorbida says. I like that approach and find it much more fascinating to learn as you go rather than to describe something you already know. Of course, you can write what you remember and approach it in an inventive way. There are many fine examples of doing that including a couple of memoirs […]