Writing for Wellbeing

Writing is a quiet wonder for mental health. There’s a reason so many teenagers dive into writing journals, diaries, and poems, during those years of so much hormone-and-identity upheaval. As we emerge into adulthood, though, we mostly ditch that. We forget what a wonderful help it can be, and we think everything we do has to be “good”.

Here’s a secret: writing can be good and good for us. Sometimes turn by turn; sometimes at the same time. Sometimes just good for us and we turn it into something good later.

I’ve written here before about how much writing can help our wellbeing. In The Wheelchair and the Cushion of Art, I described how it’s helped me navigate heartache, depression, and living with a chronic illness. In The Joy is in the Doing, I wrote about how process-focus brings back the joy (and the productivity!) and how I wrote myself back to health from a massive stress crisis. You Are Not Ark Fleet B explored how during the pandemic, everyone took refuge and respite in the arts – the films, TV, books, music, that helped us hold on: ”We can call it respite. We can call it mental health. We can look to the physical health benefits of easing stress, and how much that heals, how much it wards off. We can look to the societal benefits of not going berserk with cabin fever…” And why “even if no-one ever reads what you write, society is better for you writing.”

That’s because writing is amazing for wellbeing.

• Writing gives us respite. Whatever we’re dealing with – stress, heartache, grief, anxiety, illness, crisis, or even high-octane brain-fizzing excitement – we need a break, so we can be strong again tomorrow.
• Play, creativity, and flow-states protect us against stress. They literally physically protect our brains, and help us grow new neural connections, so we can respond more flexibly.
• Writing helps us process things. Instead of staying stuck, writing can hep us move through the emotions and thoughts, and emerge from it.
• Making something supports our sense of self. Crying on the sofa because you’re in so much pain that you can’t even put a ready-meal in the oven sucks. Writing a poem about it doesn’t get the ready-meal in the oven, but now you’re someone crying on the sofa and someone who’s written a pretty spiffing poem. And where the emotion is, there’s also a poem or story there now, as a container to help hold the emotion.
• Writing offers us free self-expression. Our full, varied, and wild selves can emerge on the page. That’s especially useful when our inner self feels constrained by work, by public face, by caring for others first, all the things that adulthood requires of us. From the page, it can even creep more into the world: a freer more playful sense of self.

All of this is good for us, and good for those around us. We’re not being selfish or indulgent by taking time to write. How much better, for our partners, families, friends, colleagues, even people who cut us off in traffic, if we’re rested, unstressed, flexible, able to process our feelings, and whole in our selves? (And it’s easier to ask for help with the ready-meal if you’re not a snapping resentful ball of rage. IME.)

Writing’s not a cure-all or a replacement for all mental-health support. After years of writing a poem a day, when “the blue curtain” kept cropping up, I finally booked therapy for my medical PTSD. Six sessions of EMDR therapy sorted that out, but its presence on my notebook pages took it from the shadows to booking an appointment.

Writing is an amazing power tool in our tool box. So here are my best tips for writing for wellbeing, from an amalgam of research, my experience, and my students’ experiences.

• Write by hand if you can. This has so many benefits that I’ve written a separate blog post about it.
• Don’t wait to feel okay – do it anyway. The same way we don’t wait for a headache to pass before we take a painkiller, you can sit down to write joyfully, grumpily, relaxed, or stressed. It still works.
• Make it a little treat. You don't want to drag a notebook onto a table cluttered with breakfast dishes or open another document straight after work for yet another chore to tick off: treat yourself a little. Sit somewhere you like, make your favourite drink, maybe put some music on. Take yourself out for coffee in a café or pub garden, if writing outside your home helps. Whatever modest effort makes it nicer, even if that's just putting the dishes behind you where you can't see them!
• Drop your standards. This is always true for writing: we need to let ourselves write badly and go for quantity over quality, not so we churn out rubbish, but so we let ourselves experiment. You can still develop as a writer, try new techniques, and write amazing stuff that way. You’re more likely to, if you’re not rigidly demanding perfection from every word. It’s even more important to drop your standards when you’re writing for wellbeing. In that stress-state, I literally muttered “Doesn’t matter if it’s shit,” on repeat while I wrote. The measure of good writing time, here, is time spent writing. Stun your inner critic with “Doesn’t matter if it’s shit,” and just write. That’s where the flow lives. It might turn out good later, but let it be rubbish now.
• For fiction, don’t write about you. The more clear blue water between you and the main character, the easier it is to step through the magic doorway into writing-land, as I wrote about in The Characters That Let Your Stories Fly. Try out new characters, new genres, new approaches: variety breeds joy and creativity. It will always be self-expression, because it’s still you writing, the self will out, but of a much freer kind.
• For poems, mix between you and not-you poems. Sometimes you need to blurt or to shape acidic little ditties about exactly what you’re experiencing and feeling: that’s healthy and good. Sometimes you need to take a break and write about spores: that’s also healthy and good. As with stories, the you still emerges; the self will out. My spore poem ended up actually being about my tenuous relationship with hope and a disappointment I feared. It was a stronger poem for being ostensibly about spores, and when the disappointment came, I had the exact poem I needed.
• Try poems with formal constraints: syllable counts, rhymes, metre, specific end words, a refrain to work in, and so forth. Something marvellous happens when you’re excavating a grief but also counting syllables: new objectivity, a you inside and outside the feeling.

In early 2020, I was planning a series of thirty daily Poem Skills to coincide with national poetry writing month (NaPoWriMo) in April. When the pandemic hit in March, I redesigned it to support mental wellbeing, to help people find respite in calm absorbed flow, and ran it on the blog for free. I took all my experience of writing for wellbeing and made sure every topic offered people somewhere interesting, relaxing, or uplifting to put their minds. (The other things we need to express will emerge when they need to – like spores.) I alternated between poems with formal constraints and free verse (with optional forms), for the best of both worlds. I got so many lovely private messages from people who were finding, as I did, how much writing helped. In 2023, I ran it again, inside the Writers’ Greenhouse Community, this time adding flash-fiction (very short story) options in the same spirit of discovery, fun, and mental wellbeing.

And I’m thrilled to offer it to you now: reworked, spruced up, and expanded, as 30 Days of Writing. Whether that’s 30 days in a row, or every few days, or whatever works for you. It’ll teach you loads about poems and stories, because it’s me who made it (I’m a teacher: the self will out), but the sunlight flooding it all is writing for wellbeing. Because writing can be good, and good for us, and a joy.

So if you’re looking for something to write, or an added regular practice, and especially if you want to write for wellbeing, you can start here and try the first three days for free.

I hope it brings you joy, peace, and delight.

Things I've learnt: Having play projects

To celebrate the release of Rope of Words in 2014, I wrote a series of blog posts about its writing process and the various illuminations that came from sailing straight into the rocks at every turn. At least I had the advantage of hindsight, to know the story did work out in the end. The artist shared her process from the outset, with no such reassurance!

Play projects are vital: they're the place you try things out, make mistakes, explore new ways, or stretch a skill that your current work-in-progress isn't using. Or even dump out the rubbish idea that's clogging the pipes, keeping the good ideas back. The idea of the finished product, of perfection, is so luring and tempting, though. It's so easy to start thinking, Ha! And because I'm playing, this will be brilliant and perfect and the book will look like... And that thought freezes you up, just at the moment you were shaking loose to play.

Rope of Words is now a beautiful, handbound book with full-colour illustrations throughout, in a limited edition of 600 books which I spent last weekend signing. Having watched the artist finesse every last detail, I breathed out in relief that I'd spent every bit as much care on the words. If I'd set out to write it with that degree of perfection, though, I couldn't have. In fact, if I'd set out to write it, I couldn't have. 

I've written before about process versus product, that tension at the heart of creativity. Even while product may be what we're ultimately aiming for (the finished story, poem, book, artwork), we need to start with process and play.

The Joy Is In the Doing

Product is the drug de jour, our ego and superego hit, the crack of creativity.

The joy is the doing, not the having done: the long hours alone, spent in delight and creation and the pleasure of doing hard things.

The battle between process and product rages at the heart of the creative life. The creating, doing, inventing, and trying-out, versus the finished thing we want at the end: the complete published novel, collection of poetry, or final painting. The two can’t exist without each other, but product always seems on the verge of killing process.  

For the last few years, I’ve been chewing over ideas about creativity, ego, and that war between process and product. The more demanding life becomes and the harder it is to protect writing time, the more important this question becomes to me. What I want is to write more, more creatively, better, and finish more – but the product-driven thinking that serves me so well in other areas backfires in writing.

Process-driven thinking and product-driven thinking can feel almost identical, but use a completely different focus. Try these examples:

Process-driven thinking	Product-driven thinking
I want to spend the evening writing.	I want to write 2000 words this evening.
I’ll try this and see how it goes.	I don’t know if this will work.
Ooh, this is an unexpected direction.	It won’t go the way I want.
I want to…	I should…
Look what I’ve been doing!	Look what I’ve done!
I want to enjoy it.	I want to get it right.

Being product-driven helps us achieve things and evaluate success. It satisfies our ego’s need for achievement and its fear of failure, and our superego’s need to control and to obey rules.  But it also prevents us from exploring, experimenting, and doing new things: the risk of failure.  It inhibits enjoyment: our satisfaction comes briefly, at the end, from having done.

Ars longa, vita brevis, wrote Hippocrates: art is long and life is short. Creating art and writing takes a long time: finishing is a momentary thing, a brief list-ticking satisfaction. That’s not enough satisfaction for all the time we’ve invested, so the ego starts roaming around, demanding more: admiration, reviews, sales! These aren’t guaranteed, though, and they can never repay enough for what we put in. The ego sulks: “Why should I carry on creating? What do I get in return, huh?” The superego says, “What did I do wrong? What did they do wrong? Work harder!”

Being process-driven, however, is a sacrifice of ego: it allows exploring, experimenting, playing, doing new things, and making mistakes.  It disobeys the superego by “wasting” time, being “inefficient”, and breaking rules. It’s essential for discovery and invention: the new thing doesn’t exist yet, so the product isn’t guaranteed. It may go wrong. It may come to nothing. It may not work. The joy is the doing, not the having done: the long hours alone, spent in delight and creation and the pleasure of doing hard things.  It is liberating, risky, and much more fun.

My students often hesitate, when we start exploring process versus product thinking. If you just concentrate on the process, where’s the product to come from? How do you ever finish anything? I feel the same sense of alarm and hear generations of Protestant-work-ethic ancestors shouting over my shoulder to work, finish it, stop playing around, make a plan! We do need both – but I’ve yet to meet an adult writer who focuses too much on process. Product is the drug de jour, our ego and superego hit, the crack of creativity.

It’s so easy to become too product-driven: the ego quickly gets demanding and wants more, more, and more. So yeah, you won a prize last year, what about this year? Two short stories published in a year, big deal, where’s the novel, the two-book deal, the bestseller, give me more! If you have that, Where are the sales? The big book-signings? Why aren’t you more famous? Why don’t you have 1.9m Twitter followers? The ego keeps promising it’ll be satisfied “when X happens” – but it never is. It’s a strong driver but behaves like a hungry toddler. Feed it well at home and don’t give into its demands.  

The superego, meanwhile, quickly gets powercrazy with its lists, plans, and reassuring sense of Doing The Right Thing.  It sees how much you can get done when you pull all the stops out, so it starts whipping you to do that every day. What are you doing, relaxing? Make something up! Oh, you think what you’re reading / watching might be useful for your writing? Make notes! This time could be used. Go for a walk, you need exercise; what are you doing going for a walk when you could be writing?  The superego is the police – essential and valuable, but you don’t want them running the country. More than once I’ve turned my life into a police state, and my writing has suffered bitterly for it.

Turning away from product-driven thinking is terrifying. Surely product-focus is our guarantee of success? Again, if you just concentrate on the process, where’s the product to come from? But try this question, instead. If you just focus on the product, where’s the process to come from? The process is the thing that makes the product. Focusing on process may feel fluffy, a recipe for failure, but it works better. A study at the University of Chicago and the Korea Business School tested goal-focus versus process-focus on exercise, origami, even flossing. It turns out that people who focus on their goal instead of on the process destroy their own motivation and end up doing less. “Revel in the process and you’re more likely to make it to the finishing line,” they concluded. So when your ego and superego start yelling at you, you can shove some nice empirical research at them and tell them to shut up.

How do you shift to process-driven thinking? The trick here is changing your thinking, more than your behaviour (though you may need to curb some of your assessing, wordcounting, and lists).  You need to retrain your thoughts: cut goal-oriented thinking short and deliberately replace it with imagining the process.  If the difference between the two seems strange and nebulous, think about sex. Imagine having sex focused on the product: I want to get this done as efficiently as possible. That’s some seriously rubbish sex. Now imagine focusing on the process instead. That’s the difference between process- and product-driven thinking!

If you’re not sure how to get started, here are some starting points:

• your writing time: think about what part you want to write (not “finish”) and imagine the content
• going to write: think about the experience of working on it,  not The Thing To Tick: think of the papers spread on your desk, the smell of the fresh coffee at your side, the look of the document on screen or notebook under your hand, the juggling and weaving ideas…  Not “Go upstairs and write” but “My colourful notes, leather desk top under my arms, the look of story, shaping reality, those characters alive…”
• in the writing moment: see the time as space cleared for writing, not a scheduled block to get writing done.  Focus on what you’re doing, not how much you’re doing.  Resist the urge to wordcount – at the most, allow one wordcount per session, at the end, and don’t value writing purely by word count. (After all, Lorem Ipsum can churn out word count.)  Think in terms of ideas and content, instead.

This past summer, having superego-whipped myself into a crumbling mess of stress, I needed to write completely differently. Each writing day, I went to an open-air coffee shop in town and wrote by hand. I relished the buildings around me, the buskers, the changing tree above me, the smell of my latte. I didn’t plan the story at all. I followed bad ideas to see where they went, and they turned out to be brilliant. I followed good ideas into cul-de-sacs and left them there while I wrote something else. I couldn’t wordcount, because I was writing by hand, and I didn’t page count. I discovered a completely new voice, dozens of rich characters, storylines that took me by surprise, playful inventions that startled me, and I loved every minute. I also wrote 192,000 words. I’m already starting to salivate about the process of redrafting. And my ego can stay in its box, where it belongs.

The completed wall, after all my playing around with colours and techniques

If you'd like more support and insight with your creative process, The Writers' Greenhouse Community will help you grow and shape joyful stable writing habits. 

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Reflect on your writing

I have two twin pillars that have helped me shape my life closer to what I want it to be and make my writing happen. One is Jinny Ditzler's book, Your Best Year Yet; the other is The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. Between them, they help me straddle that eternal creative conundrum of product versus process, setting out to achieve something and finish something versus allowing space to play and make mistakes. Both have helped me see the value of reflecting. These are the questions I use to think about my writing practice, for your own use. I've given my own answers beneath each one.