Happy Place

channeling your past, Stanislavski style

Associations are powerful things, capable of bringing about dramatic shifts in mood, triggering stress reactions, or, in the best instances, bringing us back to a place and time where we felt safety or even joy.

In my attempts to create an authentic and complex personality for a character in my current novel-in-progress, a girl born in 1900, I recently plumbed my memory for some books and songs that defined my own early childhood. I came up with “Señor Don Gato,” a song about a lovelorn cat who dies in an accident but is resurrected from the dead by the delicious stink of a fish market, and was transported back to the sense of wild abandon I once felt as I hurled myself off a Formica-topped school table along with my classmates and rolled around on the floor, clutching at my broken solar plexus. Then there was the album I listened to obsessively when I was seven, Free to Be You and Me, to which I give considerable credit for forming my present social and political views and which, for me largely redeems my otherwise least-favorite color, hot pink. The hardest to find, because I only recalled the storyline and the characters, not the title or author, took a while to find, using online searches: The Court of the Stone Children, a 1973 middle-grade coming-of-age fantasy novel by Eleanor Cameron about a girl who’s an outsider but finds friendship and purpose in a relationship with a ghost from another century whom she first encountered as a statue in a museum. It’s way out of print, so I ordered a copy on Abe.books, which took a month to be delivered for some Louis-de-Joy-related reason. When it arrived — yesterday! — it turned out to be a signed hardcover edition, dustjacket intact, and the physical object catapulted me back to a daybed by a window where I plopped down for countless happy hours as a girl, replacing my own reality with different fictional worlds. I can’t wait to reread it, starting today. I think of this sort of research as Stanislavski-Method adjacent, drawing from your own authorial well to fill your character’s bucket.

So, for this prompt, even if you’re not writing memoir or anything that draws on autobiography, start with yourself. Think of some work of art — a painting, a book, a poem, a song or album? — that reminds you of an old, deep, happy moment, something from your youth or childhood. If you can, dig up that reference and listen, read or look at it again.

Then do this same work imaginatively for a character in your narrative. Follow the thread from a present narrative moment to a work of art that your character associates with some happy/ier? time — including a vivid description of that work — and be sure to go all the way back to the moment in the past that the work evokes.

Of course, you could also do this exercise with a dark or despairing moment too, but as for me, I'm presently working on trying to cheer myself up.