The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

behavior rather than your self-conception and therefore may be a clearer guide to your preferences.
    WRITE A NOVEL.
    My most ambitious project for the month was to write a novel. In thirty days. I’d never had the urge to run marathons or climb mountains, but the thought of completing a novel in a month filled me with the same kind of lust for the thrill of exertion. I wanted to find out whether I could do it.
    A while back, when I’d run into an acquaintance on the street, she’d mentioned that she was writing a novel in a month.
    “You are?” I asked, immediately intrigued. “How?”
    “I got this book, No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty. You start withoutany preparation, you don’t edit yourself, and by writing 1,667 words a day, you write a fifty-thousand-word novel in thirty days.”
    “Fifty thousand words?” I asked. “Is that long enough to be a real novel?”
    “That’s as long as The Catcher in the Rye or The Great Gatsby. ”
    “Really? You know,” I said slowly, “I might try it, too.”
    “He also started National Novel Writing Month. That’s in November. Lots of people all over the country do it.”
    We were standing on a street corner one block from the Barnes & Noble at Union Square. “I’m going to buy the book right now,” I said, making up my mind. “I really am going to think about it.”
    I bought the book, and I came up with an idea: two people having an affair in Manhattan. I’d been reading Laurie Colwin, Roxana Robinson, and other novelists writing about the problems of middle marriage, and I wanted to think about the happiness and unhappiness consequences of a middle-marriage crisis like an affair. Also, I thought it would be fun to try to think through the logistics of how two people in the same social circle would keep their affair a secret and to write about New York City.
    On the first day of September, I typed HAPPINESS on the title page and wrote my first sentence: “When she thought about it later, Emily realized that she knew exactly when her affair with Michael Harmon had its start: about 8:00 p.m. on the night of September 18, at a cocktail party at Lisa and Andrew Kessel’s apartment.” And so on, for 1,667 words.
    Writing the novel was a lot of work, but I had less trouble squeezing the writing into my day than I’d expected. Of course I had it easier than most people, since I was already a full-time writer, but even so, I had to scrimp on time otherwise spent reading newspaper and magazines, meeting people for coffee, reading for fun, or generally puttering around. My blog posts became noticeably shorter.
    After the first ten days, I ran into a problem: I’d reached the end of my plot. I hadn’t thought of much action—Emily and Michael have lunch, they start an affair, they end their affair—and I’d already written most ofthat story before I’d hit even 25,000 words. Baty’s book promised that I wouldn’t have trouble coming up with more story, and somehow I kept going. And going. Each day, one way or another, I managed to eke out the minimum word requirement, until on September 30, I typed the sentence, “She’d do her shopping at a different drugstore. THE END.” I calculated the word count: 50,163 words. I’d finished a novel that was long enough to be a real book—as long as some of my favorite novels, like Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club .
    It was a huge amount of work, plunked on top of everything else I needed to accomplish in my days. Did it make me happy? It sure did. Writing Happiness took a lot of time and energy, it’s true, but it gave me a substantial boost in happiness. Tackling such a big project and carrying it through to the end in a single month contributed hugely to the atmosphere of growth in my life. It was thrilling to see what I could accomplish in a short time if I put my mind to it. Also, because I was always searching for material that could enrich the story, the world came alive to me in a new way. On my way home from the library one afternoon, I saw a large crowd milling around in front of the famous Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel. “This would make a great scene for my novel,” I thought.
    But perhaps the most acute source of happiness from writing was the happiness of expressing a very complicated idea—the kind of idea that takes hundreds of pages to capture. I remember the precise moment when the idea struck me. I’d been at a dinner party with several couples