Person on the Page

For most of my writing life, I have resisted the idea that writing is therapeutic.  Maybe it is, but so what? That’s not why I wanted to write.  I wanted to create literary art.  I wanted to write for an audience, not for my mental health.

I used to think that those who use writing as therapy write privately, in diaries or private notebooks that they squirrel away from the scrutiny of others.  That they release their uncontstrainable emotions spontaneously in rivulets of emphatic prose onto the page, line after line, without regard for a reading audience, without regard for the quality of the writing.  Real writing is something other, I thought.  Real writing is planned, measured, restrained, revised, orchestrated to be aesthetically pleasing to a reader.  Real writing is work.

Now many years into a career of urging college writers to consider their audience, to write for a purpose other than their own catharsis, I wonder.  Can writing be both? Therapeutic and artistic?

Recently I have delved into the research on the therapeutic benefits of a regular writing practice, and it’s clear.  The work of psychologists such as James Pennabaker and Joshua Smyth provide convincing evidence that sitting down to an empty page and filling it with thoughts about one’s difficult experiences or worries for about 20 minutes per session a few times a week improves one’s health.  The immune system is strengthened, blood pressure lowers, levels of depression and anxiety decrease, and one’s perception of the difficult experiences or worries changes.  Writing about them allows the writer to take control over them, to reconstruct them in language, to own them.   

All of that is great.  And I admit that in my more difficult times over the past few years I have written as a way of coping.  Not for an audience.  Not with any attention to the quality of the writing.  Just to acknowledge my own thoughts and feelings, and to move on. 

Still, many who write about the difficult experiences in their lives—traumas, abuses, secrets they’ve held for years, injustices—do so to affect an audience.  They want to raise awareness, change minds, prevent others from experiencing what they have or, like me, they want to create a text that is aesthetically worthwhile.  Though they may reap physiological benefits from writing, that is not their aim. 

Is there space for a merger between these two purposes?  Could a therapeutic telling of one’s story, whatever it is, be successfully refined into a literary text?  Could writing pedagogy focus more attention on the cross-sections of writing to heal and writing to affect an audience?  How does the writing we would never share with readers become the artistic products that we want to share?  In the past, I rejected the possibility.  Now, I don’t know.