How Writing Became the Tool for My Healing and Why I’m Hooked for Life
We write to perfect the craft and express ourselves.
As a young girl, I couldn’t wait to get home after school.
But I knew not to disturb my mother, who stood at her easel painting either a landscape from the postcard clipped to her easel or a portrait of an actor she had ripped out of a magazine.
I would either go to my room or, if the weather was nice, go for a long walk through the fields and let my imagination take me to wherever I wanted.
I was fortunate to grow up in England and live in an area surrounded by green fields and stone walls that span the horizon for miles.
During my pre-teen years, our evening rituals were that our family would eat dinner, then we’d all sit in the lounge.
My father would read his newspaper, my mother would pick up her notepad next to a stack of books she was reading, and I would work on my homework.
I occasionally glanced at my mother and watched her scribble words in her notebook for hours.
Oh, how I longed for her attention.
Don’t get me wrong. Our parents loved my sister and me.
My mother expressed her love by keeping a clean house, cooking meals, and ensuring we wore clean clothes.
I don’t blame my older sister for leaving home and traveling two hundred miles away when she reached eighteen.
This story isn’t about how I never felt loved as a child, nor that I’m the victim of suicide—it’s about writing.
Writing is an excellent way of escaping
Many years later, I understood why my mother immersed herself in writing.
When you write, you escape.
You enter a realm of words, and nothing else matters.
You feel no pain.
The wounds of the past you allowed to carve into our minds, body, and soul disappear.
You enter a realm where time has no meaning.
Writing grabs hold of you and takes control of your mind as you search for words to string together in sentences that create a sense of meaning.
You can write whatever you want to express, whether that’s the truth from a past historical or personal event or a world of fiction or fantasy where you can let your imagination soar and create three-dimensional characters true to life.
You step into another realm you don’t want to leave when you write. Even if you hit writer’s block, you ask your character for guidance.
Are we hiding from life when we write?
I didn’t start writing until my girls were seven and nine.
Now I think about it all the time.
My husband had committed suicide, and four years of fighting legal battles had ended.
During the day, I devoted my full attention to my two children, even volunteering at their school.
But when my girls were asleep, I was alone with my thoughts and the pain of losing the man I loved. I started writing.
I entered a realm where no one could hurt me emotionally.
I made up a fictitious life to keep me company on my lonely nights.
I could become my character named Vanessa, and wear a sparkling evening gown to a dinner party, a tweed suit for work, and have a career as a criminal paralegal with a couple of male suiters waiting on the sideline.
Writing, for me, was living a flamboyant life.
I could fly on a plane, drive through the countryside, and have a romantic picnic on the beach.
I was thirty-four years old, a woman in the prime of her life, yet scared by being a suicide survivor. I’m convinced people talked behind me, wondering if I was part of the cause.
It’s astonishing how people disappear from your life once you become a suicide survivor. It’s like I had a disease, and they’re afraid to catch it.
So, I withdrew into a shell and used writing to communicate my feelings. I created my fictitious characters; they would have conversations, and there was no one around to judge.
When I write, I am the heroine of my story and not a victim of suicide.
Can writing help you deal with tragedy?
The older I get, the more I understand my mother and why she disappeared into the realm of writing.
My mother was an only child.
My grandfather wanted a son, but that did not happen. My grandmother could not have any more children.
My mother tried to be a dutiful only daughter. As a family, we would visit my grandparents every Sunday. But when my grandmother died, she left everything in her will to my grandfather, who suffered from dementia. When my grandfather died several years later, he left everything to my grandmother, who was already deceased.
Neither will listed my mother as a beneficiary.
I understood that my mother never felt worthy as a child. She was a disappointment to my grandfather being a girl.
When you write, you create a three-dimensional world.
My mother wrote to escape, and so did I.
But this writing opportunity may never have come to fruition if it wasn’t for my mother.
A local publication allowed my mother to publish several short stories in its magazine.
An author can be a path opener or a role model for their child and help shape their literary destiny.
Is writing an addiction, and if so, is it healthy?
I have no problem admitting that I have an addiction to writing.
If this is an addiction, I’m hooked by every word written in the English language.
According to the National Library of Medicine, although women with Substance Use Disorders (SUD) have high trauma and post-traumatic stress rates, many addiction programs do not offer trauma-specific treatments. One promising intervention is Pennebaker’s expressive writing, which involves daily, 20-minute writing sessions to facilitate the disclosure of stressful experiences.
The results suggest expressive writing may be a brief, safe, low-cost adjunct to SUD treatment that warrants further study as a strategy for addressing post-traumatic distress in substance-abusing women.
I’m not saying I want to escape from real life to live in my fictitious world, far from it.
I keep my two feet firmly grounded on reality so I can enjoy time with my adult children and receive stimuli from real life that provide me with material for my fictitious world.
Has writing changed me? It sure has!
Writing has helped me process what I experienced and assisted me with my path forward.
It helped increase my well-being and reduce my stress, anxiety, and depression. As well as to bring me greater focus and clarity.
Writing has been a tool for healing.
Can you master the craft of writing?
According to Massachusetts English Language Arts and Literacy, the craft of writing refers to “the artistic skill or technique with which an author puts together narrative and other elements to convey meaning and produce an effect.”
Students need explicit instruction, practice, and feedback in writing craft techniques to become proficient writers. With education, training, and feedback, students can learn a skill with writing craft and blossom as writers.
To be remembered for your words, you need to write with skill, style, clarity and with economy, emphasis, and distinction.
With learning how to write fiction, it requires that you understand not only the elements of fiction, such as setting, plot, character, dialogue, and theme but also the techniques of fiction (the craft of fiction), such as characterization, minimalism, epiphany, plot twist, scene, summary, showing, not telling.
To master the craft of writing, you must also perfect your skills in research, planning and outlining, editing, revising, spelling, grammar, and organization are critical components of the writing process.
Will I ever master the craft of writing?
To author a best-selling novel, you must master everything I have written above. Or, if you have the means, pay someone else to edit and correct all your writing errors.
But I write for the love of writing and the mental challenge of stringing words of emotion and tension together in chronological order with a structure.
I’ve written the ending to my novel so many times, then returned to the first page, never satisfied with my writing.
Will I ever be satisfied with my writing? Who knows, maybe one day.
But for now, my fictitious character, Vanessa, is an old friend who knows my ultimate secrets.
When I’m ready to share her story, I want to get it right because she’s such an old friend. She deserves that for always being there when I needed her.
I want my readers to fall in love with her and give her admiration for the loyalty she has shown me throughout the years.
Once again, I’m about halfway through re-editing my novel.
Will I ever write The End one last time?
One day, I will embrace my writing, accept its flaws, and share my novel with the world, hoping to move and inspire.
That’s something one day I hope to achieve.
And I will continue to admire the novelists who inspire me and teach me the craft of writing. At last count, I had read over fifty-five books on the craft of writing fiction.
I’m hooked on writing for life. I read to write, am determined to perfect the craft, and will not rest until satisfied.
Write to inspire.
