Ten reasons to keep writing
As we watch and read the news about our bruised and battered world, and as we battle with the personal struggles that so many of us are facing — our growing anxieties about the economy, the climate crisis, our children’s mental health — it can all feel overwhelming.
What can we do?
And is there any point at all in trying to write at a time like this?
What can our words achieve when some things feel as if they are beyond language?
And isn’t writing, any kind of writing, merely a self-indulgent escape when the world is burning?
Here are ten reasons why I think that our writing matters more than ever before and why it’s important — essential, even — for us to keep writing.
1. Write to ‘get it out’ onto the page.
Disinhibition or catharsis is one of the main mechanisms by which the psychological and physical health benefits of writing are currently understood. Expressing our feelings can be helpful to our health.
When it all feels like too much, write to get it out there. Write to let go or to find out what you want to let go of. Let your page be your listener. Let it keep your secrets. Tell it everything that you’re carrying in your body.
But please go gently. Please don't write about something difficult if you notice that it makes you feel worse. If painful feelings surface for you whilst you are writing, please do seek help from a professional or talk things through with a trusted friend. I've made some suggestions for writing about difficult things here.
2. Write to get back in touch with or become more familiar with your bodily emotions.
By practising recognising, acknowledging and naming our emotions - the process of interoception - we can develop new awareness and understanding of our selves and new ways of being in the world. What is that sensation in your body? What shape is it? What colour? How would you give it a name?
3. Write to bear witness, for yourself and others.
Tell your story. Once it’s out there on the page, you might decide to share your story with others or keep it in a drawer, ready to hand down to future generations. Your story is your story and it matters.
4. Write to develop new insights and a new relationship with your story or your feelings.
When you can read your own writing on the page, you can begin to reflect upon it, and perhaps even craft it or reshape it. For example, writing in the third-person might help you to gain some helpful distance from painful events. Writing the same scene from the point of view of someone else (someone you know, or someone you don’t know at all) can help you to develop a different relationship to the material. Deciding what to leave in and what to take out, selecting, editing and polishing your words, can help you to gain a new sense of control over the events or feelings that you’re writing about.
5. Write to become a kinder and more compassionate reader of yourself on the page.
How can you read yourself with kindness and tenderness? How can you make space to listen deeply to your own words and needs?
6. Write to create dialogue.
Write to a part of yourself that feels lost and alone. Write to a part of yourself that you want to celebrate. Write to a past you or a future you. Have them reply.
Write to someone you love, even if they’re not around anymore. Write to someone with whom you have an ongoing argument or unresolved relationship. You don’t have to send the letter. Just write it and find out how it feels.
Write to the woman in the photograph, the child in the news footage. Tell them everything you wish you could say if you could talk to them right now.
7. Write to pay attention to the small things that you wouldn’t otherwise notice.
Write to slow down and take in the world with your eyes, ears, nose, tongue, feet, fingers. Be here now. Write this moment. This one. Make it count.
8. Write to protest.
Raise your voice. You do not need to keep yourself small.
9. Write to create a calm, quiet, rhythmic moment in your day.
Just you and your hand moving across the page. Breathe. Write. Breathe. Perhaps if we all took a few moments to do this for ourselves each day, the world/ our workplace/ our families might be kinder spaces?
10. Write to find out, in the words of Joan Didion, 'what you’re thinking, what you’re looking at, what you see and what it means.' Write to investigate all sides of something, the parts you don’t yet understand, the both, the and, the you as well as the I, the someone in the they, the everyone.
What would you add to this list?
What is most important to you about your writing? Why do you write? What do you want your words to do in the world?
