Write Yourself

Creative Writing and Personal Development

Gillie Bolton

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780857003089
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Write Yourself is the ideal introduction to how to facilitate groups and individuals in finding inspiration for their creative personal writing voices. This book explains how and why writing is such an illuminative, healing, and cathartic process, and provides many practical exercises that encourage the exploration of emotions, memories and experiences. Chapters cover the use of writing with a variety of client groups, including those made up of people suffering from depression, anxiety or health problems, and advice is given both on running and participating in successful writing groups.

This book will be an invaluable resource for professionals working across the health, social care and caring professions, arts therapists and for everyone interested in the therapeutic qualities of creative writing.

Part One

Creative Personal Writing – What, Why, How, Who, When, Where

Chapter 1

Becoming Our Own Shaman: Introduction to Therapeutic Creative Writing

‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’

‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cheshire Cat.

‘I don’t much care where –’ said Alice.

‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.

‘So long as I get somewhere,’ Alice added as an explanation.

Lewis Carroll 1954 (1865), p. 54

Art has the power to help people understand themselves, each other and their world better, to reach that depth, make sense of my life (all italicised quotes are by very sick or terminally ill writers). Art, creative use of the imagination, is a magical quality which marks us out as different from most other creatures. Creativity is a process of learning; it can deeply affect self- and world-views because it is attained through experience, exploration and expression rather than instruction. ‘Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world’ (Einstein 2002 [1929]). Writing uses subtle, deeply human modes of communication such as narrative, detailed accurate description, experimenting with point of view, image (particularly metaphor) and, particularly in the case of poetry, rhythm and repetition. Breaking the skin of lifegiving clear well-water, creative explorative and expressive writing can communicate psychological, social, cultural and spiritual truths. This insight can be achieved appropriately and gently when people give themselves permission to explore experience and express feelings, memories and knowledge through writing. Effective learning is like growing wheat, a staple fundamental food. Its seeds need patience, sunshine, well-prepared ground, and appropriate moisture and nutrients.

Art allows a safe revisiting of that place of revulsion. It has been compared to a rollercoaster ride. We ride a rollercoaster in order to be terrified, and yet none of us would willingly step on a rollercoaster knowing it to be unsafe.

But art, writing, music…allows us to revisit painful times whilst knowing that the seatbelt is secure around us, rigorous safety checks have been passed, and we are going to walk away from the memory intact. (Teenage Cancer Trust Unit [TCTU] patient)

Apollo is god of both poetry and healing. Writers have probably always known the deeply healing power of writing, certainly since the ancient Greek poet Sappho. But they have kept the secret until recently. Now it is increasingly used in mainstream and complementary healthcare, medicine and therapy. Writing is powerful communication: perhaps even more so than speech, as it does not disappear on the breath. Every utterance is communication between interlocutors. But no one initially listens to writing except the quiet accepting page, which creates a record. The etymological roots of the word ‘record’ are ‘re’, meaning again, and ‘cord’, meaning heart (Oxford English Dictionary). Recording is getting closer to what is in the heart. The writer is their own first reader, their own primary interlocutor. So writing, in the first instance, is a private communication with the heart of the self. Strenuous but not thought-engaging exercise such as digging or solitary walking can induce a similar mental state. It can’t be chance that poet S. T. Coleridge walked and climbed strenuously for miles and miles, and then wrote on mountain tops (Holmes 1989).

Expressive and explorative writing is really a process of deep listening, attending to some of the many aspects of the self habitually blanketed during waking lives. Some of these aspects we ignore at our peril. People who write for the first time with a trusted facilitator say things like ‘it unlocked something I didn’t know was there’ (participant in a family medicine project) (Opher and Wills 2004). And ‘Hell, did I write that? Was that really me? You can’t pick something safe with writing, like you can with role-play. I suppose it’s because you’re not listening to yourself as you write. Writing takes you out of control’ (Bolton 1999a, 2001).

‘You’re not listening to yourself as you write.’ No, while writing, the page offers no judgment at all. But there is a future interlocutor: writing with a white pen on white paper would not have the same effect. You listen to yourself after you write, rereading. Writing creates tangible footprints which can, and probably will, be followed, but it postpones interlocution. There is no immediate reaction of head-nodding, smiling, frowning or grimacing, no immediate response of questions, affirmation, shouts or screams. The process of gaining insight is three-staged: first the dash onto the page, then rereading to the self, then the sometimes emotional reading and sharing with a carefully chosen other (or others). Writers have authority: nobody else is in control, though it takes some a long time, or even never, to realise this.

Writing can help achieve increased communication, self-understanding and well-being (NHS Estates 2002; Staricoff 2004; White 2004), alleviate stress and anxiety (Anderson and MacCurdy 2000), dramatically support positive self image (Tasker 2005), and can have significant therapeutic effects (Help the Hospices 2005). The British Medical Journal editor recommended that an NHS budget percentage should go to the arts (Smith 2002). This is nothing new: healing at the ancient Greek Temple Hospice of Asklepios was based on dream images and watching poetic plays which communicated deep psychological, cultural and political insight. The tradition continues. John Kani, South African co-author of Siswe Bansi is Dead, said ‘theatre is a weapon of change’ (Kani 2007). Writing his play about apartheid, Nothing But the Truth, enabled him to forgive himself for hating his brother’s murderers. His daughter only understood about the fight against apartheid when she saw the play. Marion Steel (2010) created a profound reflection on death, love and loss using a mixture of poetry, fiction, autobiography and philosophical musing to examine and deal with her complex bereavement reaction to a patient’s death.

All this sounds so purposive, yet to work both as writing and therapeutically it has to be undertaken in a pure spirit of enquiry. Explorative enquiry is process- rather than product-based: seeking answers to perceived problems or to get published will not create useful or communicative texts. Attempting therapeutic writing purposively would be as much use as therapists knowing what clients were to explore. Alice throughout her adventures underground accepted that it didn’t ‘matter which way you go’, but she insisted she did want to ‘get somewhere’ (Carroll 1954 [1865]). She certainly always got ‘somewhere’ dynamic. Shakespeare’s sonnets were perhaps a ‘way of working out what he’s thinking, not […] a means of reporting what he thought’ (Paterson 2010, p. 3).

Writers have used images to describe their art, and what it offers them. Poet Seamus Heaney’s bucket reached pure essential well-water:

Usually you begin [writing] by dropping the bucket half way down the shaft and winding up a taking of air. You are missing the real thing until one day the chain draws unexpectedly tight and you have dipped into water that will continue to entice you back. You’ll have broken the skin of the pool of yourself.

Seamus Heaney 1980a, p. 47

Helene Cixous (1991) filched jewels from the jewelry box of her unconscious. Ted Hughes’ (1967) intensity of experience was like a dog fox’s stench and presence. Keats (2000 [1817]) thought it had to come naturally like leaves on a tree, and Heaney (1980b) elsewhere dug with his pen. All describe intense, personally worthwhile discovery and creation in writing.

Cry Baby

Only once did I ever

see my father cry.

I caught him wiping an eye

dragged under for a moment

by the sinking in his heart.

It was Paul Robson singing

Sometimes I Feel

Like a Motherless Child.

Now,

alone in the empty silence of the night,

I understand. (Member of Families and Friends of Drug Misusers, Anthology ed. Mike Hoy undated)

What is therapeutic writing?

Therapeutic creative writing offers personal, explorative and expressive processes, similar to creative writing’s first stages. Patients, clients, tutees and students are offered guidance and inspiration by a clinician, facilitator or creative writer, and support in choosing a subject and form. Each writer works according to their own interests, concerns, wants and needs. Authority and control always reside with writers, to reread, share with appropriate others or not, store unread, or possibly destroy therapeutically.

The emphasis is on a process of satisfaction and interest to writers, and possibly a few close individuals. Whereas literary writing is oriented towards products of as high a quality as possible (e.g. poetry, fiction, drama), theapeutic writing is generally aimed at an unknown readership (see Chapter 2).

Therapeutic writing can help people understand themselves better, and deal with depression, distress, anxiety, addiction, fear of disease, treatment and life changes and losses such as illness, job loss, marital breakdown and bereavement. Ten or so solitary writing minutes daily can be significant. Special materials are unnecessary: paper today has unwanted typing on the back and a chunk torn from one corner.

Who writes?

Some fall naturally into reflective creative mode: I’m going to write a book about my life! Others want to experiment with approaches, work at allowing themselves not to achieve ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part One Creative Personal Writing – What, Why, How, Who, When, Where
• Part Two Writing with Specific Groups
• Part Three How to Run Groups; Conclusion