How writing for ourselves can help us as writers and as people.
When I was a very small girl, I would spend hours making tiny books out of folded pieces of paper and filling them with my thoughts. I didn’t know it then but this was my way of making sense of the world around me. Five decades later, a pen and paper have continued to provide me with comfort and strength through many of life’s challenges.
In her famous essay, ‘Why I write,’ Joan Didion tells us: ‘I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.’
Didion’s words are often quoted without further context. After all, they are powerful in themselves. Writing is a kind of thinking, a kind of looking, a way of experiencing and finding out.
But the essay in its entirety – which Didion originally delivered as a talk – shows us so much more than this. It shows us the way in which Didion, as a young writer, dedicated herself to the process of trying to capture in words the pictures that ‘shimmered’ in her mind.
We see her paying careful and precise attention to what these mental pictures can tell us as writers:
‘The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what's going on in the picture. Nota bone:
It tells you.
You don't tell it.’
Before Didion ever thought of publication, she was thinking about this process – about paying close attention to the pictures in her mind and the words that might transcribe them. She was noticing the world around her in all its specific detail and practising the art of translating this detail into words.
You too might see things visually in mental pictures like Didion, or you might hear them, taste them, feel them in your body. Like Arthur Rimbaud or Joanne Harris – writers who have drawn on their own synaesthesia in their work – you may experience the world through a combination of feeling colours, hearing shapes and tasting textures. The challenge then is to capture this experience in a grammar of your own making.
For me, this process is part of what I call the ‘lifelong apprenticeship’ of writing. I believe that, as Didion tells us, even if eventually we decide to share our writing with others, it is essential for us, as writers and as people, to begin by writing for ourselves, paying careful attention to what we experience and how we can capture it in language.
Here are three ways in which this writing for ourselves can help us:
Writing for ourselves helps us to gain new insights into our experiences.
When we create private space to explore our feelings and find the language that feels the right ‘fit’ for them, we very often find that we come to new understandings. We may experience a sense of release or find order and meaning in events that previously felt formless, confusing or chaotic.
Writing for ourselves helps us to befriend ourselves on the page.
When we focus on writing for ourselves rather than for an audience, it can be easier to bypass that inner critic that can keep us stuck and practice the self-compassion and kindness that can help us to find our creative flow. We might have more space to develop our ideas and to write what we really want to write rather than what we think we should or ought to write or what others expect of us.
Writing for ourselves is creative resistance.
In a world where we are surrounded by people telling us what to think, what to want and what to fear, cultivating a private writing practice is powerful resistance. Creating a space where you can slow down and notice what you feel, reflect on the things happening around you and work out what is most important for you is becoming more crucial than ever before.
A private writing practice does not demand of us that we live out loud, online or anywhere else. It does not demand sound bites or certainties or quick fixes. In our writing, we can ask questions of ourselves. We can exist on the page in uncertainty as our own ongoing work in progress.
When we write to practice and celebrate the creative process of living, in and of itself – the song, the poem, the story – we do something powerful, something that no one can ever take away from us.
