Self-care for writers
This week, I have been doing some therapeutic writing with the support of a therapist and wrote down some thoughts about taking care of ourselves when writing becomes emotionally challenging. This can happen intentionally, when writing about something emotional, or completely unexpectedly. Emotions can surface and take you by surprise when writing at any time.
Louise de Salvo takes the advice of a yoga teacher when writing:
Concentrate on what your body is saying. Ask yourself if you can relax into the writing though you may initially feel some discomfort. See if you can extend yourself somewhat beyond your limits. But don’t force it. If you must, back off from the writing if it becomes too uncomfortable for you. Eventually, if you come to this practice each day, you will find that you can do what you formerly could not. Listen to the wisdom of your body.
from her book, Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Stories Transforms Our Lives (p.104).
Other thoughts in no particular order (and you do not have to do ALL of these things at once!):
Keep a journal on the process of writing for some distance and reflection from your emotions.
After writing, do an activity that brings you back to the present and allows your thoughts to settle, for example, cooking, gardening, walking. Notice your senses when you are doing this activity.
If you want to write about a particularly traumatic or emotionally challenging time in your life, do this with the support of a therapist or after you’ve been through a therapeutic process. Or at least take it slowly and with the support of a friend who is good at listening.
Use meditation and other ways of paying attention to the body such as yoga.
Contain the writing - give yourself a daily time limit, write about one thing or moment at a time, create a specific project with an end date.
Write a more happy or peaceful memory after one that’s more emotionally challenging.
Write about the same moment for 15 minutes every day for three days (as Pennebaker asked participants to do in his therapeutic writing experiments). I have written more about that here.
Read something unconnected with the work you are doing. Poetry is helping me at the moment.
But also, at times read memoirs by other writers so you can objectively see how they tackled emotional issues and draw strength from those that have gone before.
Remind yourself of the different stages of the writing process. The first therapeutic stage is the writing about what happened and your feelings around it, but then you may want to shape your story into something to keep for your future self or to share wider. Write it for yourself first, then think about the audience (if you want to and if appropriate) later.
Develop the therapeutic work by writing dialogues and unsent letters with the incident or time in your life, your memory, your past self or other people in your past, or with the work itself.
If the work is particularly difficult to tackle but it is still calling to be written, then try creating some emotional distance by writing in third person or use the structure of a fairy tale or myth to tell your story, or use another metaphor such as an object something from nature (the weather, the forest or a particular tree).
You could also try some experimental or fragmentary writing techniques to fit the complexity of the emotions you are writing about.
And last but perhaps most importantly, connect with why you are doing this writing. Is it to help you feel better or to share your story with others? How does it connect with wider social issues right now? Why is it vital that you write this story?
In my autumn memoir courses, we will begin each set of three weeks with a short session on taking care of ourselves as writers.