How to write happiness

I'd say to look at what you're trying to convey when you put the 'happy childhood' on stage.

If you just want to say "She had a happy childhood'
you only need five words to do that.
It would indeed be boring to stretch five words of info into 5000 words of text.

If you are saying -- the surface of her childhood was bright and glossy. The underneath was slimy dark places full of spiders --
then that is 5000 words worth of interesting.

In short, tell a story that is not 'She had a happy childhood.'
Tell a more interesting story.

Show the spiders (quietly, non-explicitly, ambiguously, sneakily) from page one.

GiddyUpGo said:

I think it's really important for the reader to understand how happy she was, because that makes the events that happen in the current timeline much more tragic and interesting. But I am having a really hard time establishing happiness for her, because every scene I write in which she is happy is boring.

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If it were me, I'd write a scene that starkly and on-point contrasts with whatever it is in her later story that's making her so unhappy. Zero in on the exact cause of her current unhappiness, (I'm sure you have) and write a scene showing the opposite cause and effect. It doesn't have to be a Bull's eye. In fact, if it is, it could come off as manufactured, as an obvious ploy. So be a little creative about what you choose to illustrate this. Maybe let the reader work for it just a little, so that when they get it, it's kind an Aha! moment. Sorry if I'm not on-point, but that's what I've done in the past.

ETA: Happiness, or serenity, or bliss may be boring. But extreme joy or peaked excitement or rolling on the floor laughter is not. IMO.

If you're showing pure happiness, do it in as few words as possible. Evoke it rather than describe it. Show it using single lines, rather than paragraphs or scenes. Don't get in the reader's way of imagining happiness--and that means providing as little information about the happiness as you can so that you don't interfere with their own happy feelings, which they are willing to tack onto your story.

Something that might help-

Children pick up on a lot, but regularly discard things they don't understand right away, or at all. You're character's childhood self can still be happy while her family hints at terrible things that only an older reader is going to pick up on within her memories.

GiddyUpGo said:

But what about the scenes where I show the reader that she was once happy? How do I do that without boring the hell out of everyone? Can you think of an example novel where this is done well?

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Make them very, very brief. Happy moments rather than entire happy scenes.

Sometimes when we say happy, we mean content. Happiness lasts a moment. Life goes on, but you can be content with where you are and still have all of those little conflicts and struggles you need to have to stay in that contented place. Both never last forever.

I'd use contrast too. Let her remember happy as what she lost.

Without knowing more details about the story, in terms of what happens when she's younger and what happens when she's in her teens it's hard to say. But maybe you could write the story as she's a teenager, then show snippets of her childhood through flashbacks, maybe as she remembers things that happened then, when she was happy, in contrast to whatever's happening now that's making her unhappy. Maybe she could be reflecting back, as a teenager, on the things you mentioned that she hadn't seen as a child but now understood.

This way you can keep the childhood memories short and sweet - think of them as snapshots rather than film sequences - and convey the happiness without being boring, and also show whatever events are important for the main story when she's older.

Happiness IS boring to everyone except the person experiencing it. It's not story. Story is conflict.

Evoke the comparison between then and now if you want, but do it in the now of the story, when it matters to a character's action or thought process. You can say, "the last time she sat on a swing set, she was five and her father was pushing her and laughing with her. No one was laughing at the corpse tangled up in this swingset's chains."

You don't have to SHOW everything that happened to a character. The story is about what the character is doing NOW to accomplish a certain goal NOW, which may be affected by the past, but not so much by the blow-by-blow details of what actually happened in the past, but by how she thinks of the past.

In other words, perhaps when she was five, she was swinging and happy, and her father is laughing along with her, and yada yada, stuff happened (too boring to come up with even as an example) and then her father said they had to go home and she threw a temper tantrum and he let her stay a bit longer, and they were laughing again and she knew she could always get whatever she wanted, and the grass was green and the sky was blue and thre was no rust on the swingset and her sneakers were shiny and didn't pinch. And so on.

But virtually none of those details affect her decisions right now. She probably doesn't even remember ninety percent of them. What she remembers is something like: the last time I saw a swingset, I was happy, and now that memory has been tarnished by a serial killer, so I'm going to get that sonovabitch that ruined my good memory. It's not that things are different in the two timeframes that matters (to the reader; it matters to the writer, and you might have had to write it out to really come to grips with it, but then cut it), or the details of the past; what matters is how her MEMORY of the event, the few details she actually remembers, AFFECTS her actions, decisions and thought processes NOW.

We really don't care about the backstory all that much. And, seriously, if the character is still dwelling on how her childhood was so perfect but now her life sucks, well, she's not a particularly interesting character. We've all experienced disappointments.

It's like the overused trope in romance (not picking on romance; there are overused tropes in all genres, but this is one I know particularly well) where the hero had a bad marriage/girlfriend, so he's never, ever, ever going to love again. Because, seriously, how juvenile is that? One woman was a jerk, so all women are jerks? No. And even when using that trope, relying on backstory to give a character a single motivating moment in the past, you wouldn't spend more than a few words on how much of a bad marriage/relationship he experienced, and you CERTAINLY wouldn't show it in all its gory detail. You'd have the hero acting misogynistically (or at least pessimistically "I'll never have a lasting relationship," he mopes or thinks stoically while resisting his attraction to the heroine), and eventually he'll confess to the heroine, "Yeah, well, my ex-wife tried to kill me in my sleep." It will be in dialogue, NOT in some extended scene that shows the ex trying to kill him. Because what matters isn't the details of how and when and where she tried to kill him and he escaped. What matters is that he's come to the realization that one bad woman doesn't equal all bad women, and the relationship has advanced to the point where he can tell the heroine his fears. It's not every little detail of what happened in the past that matters; it's what he's DOING about it in the story now.

You write happiness the same way you write sadness, or hate, or anger, or any other emotion.

I think, depending on ... everything, you could have a nice scene of happiness. As you point out, conflict and struggle is what stories are made of, but there are also other parts of the story to be developed, and if this is a novel, you can dig deeper into those parts. You've said that she had a largely happy childhood, but less happy than she remembers it. So, you'll show some of that dissonance, but I think something that shows the other truth - that there were genuinely happy times - has it's place. As with all things, it's all about how you pull it off. (I don't necessarily think you need only treat a happy episode briefly, but probably one dose of it will be enough.)

Think of sitcoms that feature happy families. They're still full of conflict, but the conflicts are minor and often cute. If your character grew up on "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and is now living through "The Walking Dead," you can show conflict in both timelines and the contrast will still be completely obvious.

If you want to make it doubly clear, just have the character think something along the lines of, "did I really used to think that was a big deal? I was so upset about Dad missing my ballet recital; now I just wish he would quit trying to eat my brains."

It would be interesting for me if the narrator comes to the realization that they're happier in the know than when they were young and unlearned: a bitter-sweet realization that life isn't perfect, it never was, but with a conscious understanding of its flaws, we can appreciate the beauty, no matter how fleeting it may seem.

(sometimes I don't actually answer questions . . . sorry!)