Certainly, if happiness is defined as emerging from an authentic connection with yourself and your work, between yourself and your purpose. For writers today to be true to such an idea places them at the end of a long line of artists, a literal chain of being, that stretches back to the first artists. This is a tradition that honors writers as truth-seekers, explicators of the wealth of human feelings, chroniclers of our aspirations and failures. And frequently unemployable, out of fashion, the wrong gender or race, or just plain not what we re looking for. Marketplace requirements change with the seasons.
Fads come and go.
But good work, from which writers for centuries have drawn sustenance and power, is a private matter, a kind of secret of happiness residing solely in the artist s heart. And it s yours to discover, if you choose to, every time you write.