How does one write fluff?
So in watching playthroughs of various video games, because I do that when I find something interesting, I had this strong urge to write some fluff. However, when I sat down to think of it, any kind of process that came to it kind of left my head.
How does one actually write effective fluff? It seems so much easier to think of darker stories, but the lighthearted ones escape me.
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With lighter stuff the trick is not to play down the importance - someone thought it significant enough to write about it, so thinking of it as fluff could be counterproductive. It could be something ridiculously mundane, but if written well it can attract more readers than heavier plots.
I'm seconding Henry Taylor's Twain recommendation, and if you wanted to go even lighter throwing in a dash of P.G.Wodehouse wouldn't hurt.
You might find some good examples in the video games you're watching. I know it's not the most original answer, but finding someone you think does it well and trying to paraphrase their style will take things in the right direction.
There's a nice one paragraph short story about a writer struggling to give their words a certain feel at the top of this page. If you can get in the same frame of mind as when you wrote the question, you're most of the way there.
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A lighthearted story is generally one where the consequences of failure are mostly the status quo. The MC isn't going to die or go bankrupt if they fail. They must have something at stake (money perhaps, lifelong dreams) but if they fail their life isn't ruined. Nevertheless, the reader wants the MC to succeed, and sympathizes with them.
Consider a story like "The Money Pit", an engaged couple naively buys a dilapidated house as-is, thinking it just needs a coat of paint and some minor repairs, and in scene after scene they realize it is worse, and worse, until they are going to give up, perhaps not get married, but in the end it all works out.
Or Brewster's Millions; the 1985 Richard Pryor version: In order to inherit $300 million, Pryor must spend $30 million in thirty days, and cannot tell anybody why he is doing it. The audience knows, of course, so it becomes very funny watching somebody desperate to unload money by the rules (a limit on charity, gambling, etc), and funny when he thinks he has made a terrible investment but it works out (so he didn't get rid of the money). A lot of reversals that make him seem crazy to other characters, but we know he is not.
But the stakes are neutral. Expected windfalls that do not materialize, in both cases. Perhaps monetary losses in The Money Pit, but nothing they cannot afford.
Once you are free of the consequences being dark or devastating, failures can be funny, as long as the consequences of failure are not life changing. If your character falls off the roof, he doesn't break his neck, he gets up and limps away and is fine in the next scene. If something explodes in his face, he isn't blinded or scarred for life. The dog getting loose causes a fender bender he ends up paying for, without hurting the dog.
The same thing can go for moral failures or cowardice: Say after causing the fender bender, the prospect of him having to pay for it makes him grab his dog and literally run away, being chased for a minute by one of the motorists. Cowardice has been played for laughs (eg Angel in the Rockford Files), as can minor violence (getting punched in the nose, falling on the ice, crashing into a tree on a bike).
The key is that the setbacks and consequences are all recoverable by the characters, things tend to stop being funny when the audience senses life-changing (or life-ending) consequences, at least for the main characters.
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I think the heart of your difficulty is that you are equating light hearted with not serious ("fluff"). Your intuition that it is easier to write dark than light is correct, at least in the sense that going dark is an easy way to seem serious while covering up the fact that you don't actually have anything original to say.
Most people, of course, don't have anything original or particularly insightful to say and you can build a nice career as a popular novelist simply by affirming the prejudices of your chosen slice of the reading public. But writing optimistic works in that mode will always tend to seem fluffy, whereas pessimistic or dark works can masquerade as serious much more easily.
There is no particular mystery to writing light fluff rather than dark fluff. You simply need to write from a place of facile optimism rather than a place of facile pessimism. Getting yourself from a position of facile pessimism to one of facile optimism, on the other hand, can be very difficult.
On the other hand, if you really want to write light (as in optimistic, rather than insubstantial) you have to find a way to see the good, to see the light. This will be very much against the zeitgeist, but that is not a problem we can help you with here.
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