Ernest Hemingway on Writing and Having Had an Unhappy Childhood

I recently saw on Twitter that Ernest Hemingway said that an unhappy childhood is great training for a writer.

See AdviceToWriters.

I've been thinking about what this statement might mean.

Children are born learners; from both their experiences and formal education, they gradually, over a fairly long period of time, develop into who they will be as adults. I think that for the most part our experiences in childhood come to us uninvited. Whether a person has a happy childhood is out of his control; he has no control over the family and environment he was born into and whether it is poor, rich, abusive, or kind. Most families are comprised of a mixture of those things. I do agree with Hemingway in that an unhappy childhood is great training for a writer, especially for a literary one. It's also great training for criminals and psychopaths and generally unhappy adults in all walks of life.

Of course, 'happiness' is a difficult concept to define. Philosophers have given it various definitions. But, for this statement, I think that what we're talking about is, besides having the basics of food, clothing, and shelter, we have both the absence of abuse and the presence of  loving kindness toward us in childhood, the combination of which tips the balance of experience in childhood, maybe in adulthood too, in favor of a feeling of well being and happiness.

To some degree, whether your childhood was happy or unhappy is a matter of perspective. We can certainly have selective memory. Also, people with similar childhood experiences can have different opinions about their childhood, some saying it was happy and others saying it was unhappy.

There's always the possibility that Hemingway was being facetious. Nevertheless, this statement of his begs the question: which is better  for a person wanting to be a writer, to be most anything for that matter, to have had, an unhappy childhood or a happy one?

Which kind of childhood did you have, happy or unhappy?

If you had an unhappy childhood, have you managed to overcome the pain and find happiness?

Which would you rather have if you could do it over again?

Which would you rather your own child or children have?

Happiness and Optimism

I won't hide it. I've been fairly happy this year. And I have also, at times, been optimistic. This has led me to wonder, which comes first, happiness or optimism. Is it being happy that leads you to being optimistic, or is it being optimistic that leads you to being happy? I've never been able to force myself to be happy, and I've never been able to force myself to be optimistic. Both seem to arise from a source separate from me (certainly separate from my ego).

Is being happy simply the absence of being unhappy, or is happiness some kind of force that pushes unhappiness out of the way, and vice versa? Is our mental state dependent on our thinking, or is our thinking dependent on our mental state? Can we think ourselves into a state of depression and think ourselves out of it? How powerful are our thoughts?

I'm of the opinion that we cannot think our way into and out of these states. If it were that simple, I think most of us would choose constant happiness. So, if thinking is not the source of either happiness or unhappiness, what is? Where do they come from? Are they part of some kind of teeter-totter within our psyches that tips to one side or the other? A pool of positive and negative emotions that bubble up and down, one or the other influencing us, depending on other factors within our lives at the time? Are they parts of our neurons firing and misfiring? Are they some kind of chemicals in our brains that organize and re-organize haphazardly or by some influence, such as thinking?

This is all so puzzling. I just know that when I feel unhappy, that's the way I feel, and it just goes away on its own, and when I'm happy, I'm happy until I feel unhappy. And I don't know why.

Genre Fiction: Is this the way to success?

I have to be honest. I've been toying off and on for years with trying to find a genre that I like enough to want to write for it. I started a P.I. type novel that I grew bored with after a few chapters. I've wondered if Westerns would be something I'd like. No. I like Western movies, but not books. The Thriller is big today. The novel of suspense, I think. Some of these are so closely related and overlap that they could fall into more than one genre. But, whatever the genre--vampires, paranormal, sci-fi/dystopian--that's what sells today (that makes the NY Times bestseller list). Sure you have the occasional The Help. But they are really far and few between.

So, I ask myself over and over again: am I missing the boat? The only thing I write that even hints of genre is Historical Fiction. And I don't consider myself a Historical Fiction writer. I just happened to write a contemporary novel back in the 1970s that, by its evolving offshoot stories, moved back in time to WWI, The Great Depression, and WWII. And because it was never published until I self-pubbed one of the offshoots (Only The Lonely) until 2011, my 'contemporary' novel by default became an Historical novel, I guess. I don't think I've seen a true Historical novel on the best-seller list in a very long time. It's almost all genre fiction.

So, again, I ask myself: am I missing the boat? I majored in English in college. I grew to love Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Melville, Hemingway, Joyce, Yeats, Keats, Shelley, Thomas, and so on. I love great writing. I just came to realize one day quite a few years ago that I'm not a great writer. If I were, I'm sure I would have been published a long time ago. So, I'm just an average Joe of a writer. So why can't I find a genre to write in? Why is it so difficult? It's enough to make me want to scream sometimes. I guess I'll just continue on with what I've been doing. My books will never show up on the best seller list, assuming I can get published by one of the big six anyway (and being that I don't write for one of the well-known genres, that's not likely to happen either).

Do I care? Obviously, I do care. I wouldn't be writing this and pouring out my heart and soul like this if I didn't. The problem is how to find happiness in an unhappy world. The happiness comes in doing what you love irregardless of the outcome. If you love a certain genre and write in it, then you have a better chance of reaching the heights. Otherwise, you just have to be happy being yourself. And that isn't so bad, is it?