“Writing for an audience is about narration and structure and voice; it’s about the situation and the story. It’s not about how good or bad things are in your own psyche. It’s not about airing your dirty laundry, and it’s not about your personal tragedy, however tragic…I’m not interested in strangers’ tragedies and I know: very few people are interested in mine. This is as it should be. Writing isn’t therapy. What I care about is writing.”
—Adina Giannelli, Last Word Giannelli on Open Salon
Adina Giannelli blogs about the things she does daily in remembrance of her daughter. Her take on writing is one I hear often: writing isn’t therapy. I’m sure someone will come along to revoke my MFA privileges because I’ve never subscribed to the belief that writing isn’t or cannot be therapy. And I won’t be swayed in the opposite direction unless every person who has written, published, (and received good reviews) about a personal experience screams from the rooftops of the interwebs that in no way was the process therapeutic for them.
Therapy is about growth, awareness, and insight. It’s about making sense of the world, of life, of self, and possibly shifting behavior and actions. (Sometimes it’s about drugs.) Why can’t writing be all of these things? Why can’t a well-crafted piece of writing be a form of therapy? Shouldn’t whether or not writing is therapeutic be left up to each individual writer?
I love reading the dirty laundry and personal tragedies of strangers as long as they are written well. Let’s say a woman sets out to write a story about a horrible experience from her past. What sets a writer—a good writer—apart from a woman journaling about a horrible experience is that the writer will have command of craft, create a good story arc and structure, develop characters, and weave in emotions that resonate with readers. Couldn’t looking objectively at the story with her writer’s beret on, revising and rewriting, shift her perspective? Even if this woman writes about an experience she’s already dealt with, the process of writing about it, reexamining memories, talking to friends or family, and doing research could shift her perspective, and that may also lead to further growth and insight. Isn’t that a form of therapy?
What do you think?
