Writing Impacts Your Personal Life

Every writer understands on some level that writing helps them work through issues. Writing assists in toning down inner demons and angst. Writing as therapy gets assigned by counselors all the time.

Even if writing becomes escape, the time spent away from the 'real' world may be just what the writer needs. Writing fiction sets some writers off cavorting in mythical, mystical, surreal, future, romantic or any other 'world' you can think up and allows the writer to explore emotions. He can dress up his characters in jealousy, hate, love, revenge. You get the point.

By putting on and taking off these varying emotions, the writer on some level works through his or her own issues in these areas. Whether we consciously realize this or not, it happens each time we write.

Non fiction writers also get freed up to escape by applying their knowledge to a topic and working that topic until what the writer wishes to pass on to the reader matches the words on the screen (in the author's best estimation). This process of writing frees up the emotional side of the writer to wander and ponder at the least on a subconscious level.

Many non fiction pieces are slanted, lent a particular bias, given the writer's mood and/or position on the topic on which they write. Often, simply completing a piece of writing will lift the spirit of a writer, even though whatever weighs him down emotionally was not addressed in what was written.

Writing as therapy has been covered by minds far more intelligent than mine. What writing offers me on a therapeutic level is refuge. Often this refuge stems from self-doubt. A writer with self doubt? Oh my! How can we take him seriously from this point forward.

Thoughts like that chase me around the screen at times, and writing through them shores up my confidence. I'm not sure I would trust a writer who said they know everything or that they do not suffer periods of questioning them-self. I don't see a lot of writers giving voice to this. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm a 'Woody Allen-esque' writer, wrapped up in my own angst and self-esteem issues and not the strong, stalwart writer my peers appear to be.

Or maybe, just maybe, most writers struggle with aspects of what it means to be alive and writing, and sometimes this struggle bleeds into therapy on the blank page and I'm not alone on this emotional island. I do write from an emotional center. I need to feel passion for a topic to make it interesting to me. If I'm not interested, I do not feel the reader will be either.

Fiction lies within my writing passion. Obviously, having published two non fiction books (my poetry book is totally non fiction!), fiction is not the end all of my writing passion, but it comprises the larger portion. Fiction beckons me when I am overwhelmed with the desire to write. When my passions run Mt. Everest high, I long to flee to fiction.

Writing becomes outlet, therapy, and I find a wonderful peace of keying or penning words that connect into ideas and ideals and those ideas and ideals form into story which breeds interaction between people which play out something that never existed before onto a white page for others to experience. Creation is therapy.

Yes, there are limited plot themes. Yes, most all stories have been told before, but my particular stories have their own signature, their own separate flavor, just like the people walking down the street. Each person on that street was born of a woman. Each person grew up as a child and each childhood had its own peculiar set of ups and downs, pain and joys. We all share in these, yet there is something different about each of us. Something that tangibly marks us as our own individual self.

That is the therapy that comes forth in writing. That statement of self in both the fiction and non fiction realm of writing that puts your own particular and peculiar stamp on the manuscript. Otherwise all we would have would be total word-for-word plagiarism. Writing affords us the ability to put ourselves out into the world with this message - "I have something to say from my life experience".

We all, as writers, desire the masses to read us and love us, do we not? Can we tell this lie? "I don't care whether anyone likes this or not." Or, if that statement is not a lie, have we arrived at a point where we are totally in touch with ourselves and we are throwing our writing out purely as a statement of self? Is anyone really that self absorbed?

I've never witnessed a writer totally indifferent to the reception their writing receives. Partially because writing is therapy, we leave a part of ourselves in everything we write. Sometimes it can be ugly. Sometimes it can be ugly and we don't realize it (this is why a great critique group and editor is necessary). Sometimes we shine like a new-minted coin. In all instances we desire our writing to be accepted just as we desire to be accepted.

How others react to your writing will impact your life.  When someone praises you your writing, you are lifted up emotionally.  Scathing critiques can hurt.  Sound critiques offer an opportunity to improve yourself.  All in all, writing affords you the chance to improve from the inside.  Keep writing.  Keep evolving yourself into who you want to be.