“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?
28 responses
It’s very difficult to arrive at some kind of universal statement as to what writing is or isn’t. Writing is, for most writers, very personal and so for some writers, the act of writing is indeed therapeutic while for other writers, writing is something else entirely. I personally find it very therapeutic. It helps me maintain some kind of equilibrium and keeps me away from being stark raving mad. Therapy is therapy too but writing is cheaper.
“Therapy is therapy too but writing is cheaper.” Roxane Gay=brilliant.
yeah, totally, and also: therapy is writing. narrating. creating story-arcs. so.
That writing can’t be therapy is such a ridiculous notion that it doesn’t even bear discussion. To say you’re not interested in reading strangers’ tragedies is to say you’re not interested in the vast majority of books that are considered the greatest of all time. If very few people are interested in reading about your tragedies, it say something about the quality of your writing or your personality. It has nothing to do with the therapeutic quality of writing.
Writing isn’t, nor needs to be, therapeutic for everyone. But it absolutely is for some people. To claim otherwise displays a very narrow view of the world. A world view so narrow that it might benefit from some therapy.
I for one believe that people’s desire to write stems from (at least partially), the need to make sense of their experience, their coordinates in the world, and to make connections between seemingly disconnected emotions or events. I think that it is a similiar process, or need, that occurs in “therapy”. Whether the writing is actually well executed into a form that others can enjoy or connect to is irrelevant. The need to write still comes from the same place as the need to process, examine, and enlighten = therapy.
Roxane: <3 writing is cheaper!
I never stand by any monolithic statement that says [blank] is this or [blank] is that.
Writing as therapy, or not. I don’t know that I would have struck the distinction, before reading that.
I do not call myself a writer, do not call myself a poet.
What poetry I read seems personal to me. I do not mean to say that Wislawa Szymborska, when she writes, “When I pronounce the word Nothing/ I make something no nonbeing can hold.” she’s trying to tell me what living through Hitler’s regime in Poland was like, for me. When the Muse, through her writing, tells me, “I am who I am./ A coincidence no less unthinkable/ than any other.”, I do not feel that I am being handed tools.
I think of writing as a fulfillment of a bargain. I write because I have to, as common as that may sound, it’s true. I must write, but more importantly I will write. I will show up for work every day, on time and do what I must. Sometimes I even get to do what I want to do.
If I give nothing of my own experience, then I would have had to have lived a second life, with a second set of experiences. Someplace to go, when impartiality dictates that it is time to “write”.
Poetry to me, what writing is, to me, is what happens to a poet. The experience of telling the reader, “Life is the only way/ to get covered in leaves,/ catch your breath on the sand,/ rise on wings;// to be a dog,” includes the pain of knowing, or entrance, and the pain of leaving, or exit.
Writing as therapy? I agree with a friend, who says that writing is about communication. If we have experienced nothing, then at least we have technical manuals, as writers, poets, playwrights.
That’s just my take.
I’ve always thought the screeching about this was a denial of some people’s assumption that writing is only therapy, or that writing for explicitly therapeutic purposes was the same thing as writing to make art: those who write for other reasons, or who want the world to think they’re too whole and healthy for therapy, howl otherwise. Either position is silly, absolutist.
If writing doesn’t make you feel good, or better at least, after you’ve done it, why do it? And if it doesn’t illuminate some element of human life beyond your own personal dilemma, why share it? As with most dichotomies, most people end up somewhere in the middle.
Maybe the more accurate statement is writing isn’t just therapy. Writing might be an expression of emotions or a working through of personal experiences, but it must be accompanied by craft.
But now I’m thinking what do we mean by “craft”? Craft. LaToya is drawn to this word as a way of distinguishing between writing and the self-indulgence of therapy, and I am too. And craft, I think, refers to the superficial or fabricated nature of writing in which writing is really just the production of a fake but plausible world. But craft also refers to a kind of deception–think “craftiness”–and so this plausible falsehood is produced as an act of deceit or trickery. But writing–and arguably all art–must also communicate truthfulness through its trickery. So I guess what I’m saying is that therapy, in one form or another, might be indispensable to writing because therapy ensures truthfulness and honesty, and might even keep the writer from being nothing more than a sly trickster.
Therapy is making sense of those deep seated issues in our psyche our knowledge of the world or our past in order to share them with someone else. Sounds like writing to me. Universality accessibility and craft are on a writer by writer basis, but I’m with cougel, “The need to write comes from the same place…”
“…parasitic, self-indulgent narratives of the attention-starved and narcissistically wounded are uninspiring and ultimately a little pathetic…”
harsh,indeed! Also, quite brilliant – a point well taken. She does emphasize that form matters. Of course it does, if you want to master form, and I do, though it may take time. I’m slow, obsessively rewriting, and I consult editors. Even memoir is either brilliant, mediocre, or poor. It’s okay to have preferences. Good memoir reads the same as good fiction, and voice is critical to the process. Have you read ‘The Situation and The Story’ by Vivian Gornick (highly recommend)…illuminating explication of several memoirist;s styles, and analysis that leads us to an understanding of what is compelling in each individual voice. Is it theraputic? All writing is, in some manner, theraputic, even highly crafted and accomplished writing. We all have stories to tell, whatever form they might take. We all want to be understood, first, by ourselves, and then by others. Writing is a means to both those ends. I also practice with a group using The Amherst Method, which is not about craft at all, but about flow, and it is specifically theraputic, though no ‘therapy’ is applied (http://www.amherstwriters.com/).
How can Adina say this when her writing about her dead daughter is so obviously therapy for her?
Too late…kindly excuse inexcusable typos (Where is my editor at this late hour? Asleep)
The act of writing is inevitably a therapeutic act. But that doesn’t mean all books are exposes of the author’s inner psyche. I think for an author there’s a natural overlap between the act of writing and self discovery… it’s just a matter of how much the writer focuses her final product on what she’s learned about herself versus on the story for a story’s sake. Joan Didion wrote: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” It’s true… both stories and self-discovery being fairly organic elements in life. I agree that structure and craft will determine a good story from a personal journal.
I just read this Guardian review of Williams personal journals, if you did not, here is the site http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/mar/25/tennessee-williams-notebooks-diaries
No.
I write to live life twice
Still unclear what her motives are in writing this, especially since she admits that the writing she does about her daughter is effectively therapy.
“It becomes dangerously close to being what writing is never supposed to be, which is therapy.”
Giannelli also states that few people read her blog. And yet, it is a blog, http://todayfortalya.blogspot.com/ not a private notebook with “Today for Talya” written across the front.
As other people have said above, the dualistic distinction between writing and therapy is strange. First of all, what is therapy? What do we do that we THINK helps us heal (talk to someone we pay to listen, journal, etc.) and what actually helps us heal (roadtrips, gardening, breaking crockery, paying someone to listen, talking to friends)? This is assuming, too, that I even know what writing is. Sometimes my deepest writing ideas come when I’m walking, with no pen or paper or computer in sight, mulling things over. Do I stop being a person connected to my life when I start writing?
The only thing I know for sure is that–just for me personally–the writing produced by people who are very very concerned about keeping this rigid distinction ends up being the writing that doesn’t affect me personally and doesn’t keep me reading. The distinction missed here is not whether writing is therapy, but whether publishing makes us feel better about stuff that’s bothering us and/or whether reading journal writing is a good experience for the reader. People write all the time, and sometimes they don’t revise enough or they don’t have the reader in mind when they write, and then the stuff that they submit for publication ends up being not good enough for publication and so it’s rejected. We shouldn’t be worried; the editors do their jobs. People blog sometimes to make themselves feel better, and sometimes it works. We don’t need to police the internet.
I think a lot of us associate bad writing with “therapy writing” because we’ve taught creative writing workshops (or even just been members) where there are “writers” who want to inflict godawful bullshit on their fellows and then claim exemption from the opinions of others because they were just writing “for me” or “to get it out” in other words, for “therapy.”
But you shouldn’t inflict your therapy on others unless you give a shit what others think. If you DO care what others think, it’s a whole different ballgame: you’re translating your experiences into a universal experience that can benefit others as well as yourself. That’s fantastic. But that’s not what a lot of these people are up to.
This creature exists (and it is not a rare creature) that wishes to write boring, confusing bullshit, make others read it under the guise of “workshop,” and then sneeringly reveal themselves as bad actors, users and takers, people using the mirror of your brain to achieve their own sad selfish mental masturbatory act and then point and laugh when you suggest improvement. “Fools! I am not here to respect YOU or give YOU pleasure! Bwa ha ha!! And now because you are enrolled in this class for credit you must continue to read my painful horseshit and pretend to care!!” So saith the therapywritermonster.
So what I’m saying is I think this is a product of workshopland.
There are too many names for illness.
There are writers who use the wall of text as a wall, a shield and an explanation. There are writers who write questions because they need the answers and haven’t been successful asking their therapists, their friends.
We have academics that look with disgust upon these cardboard people, these alley writers. We have the loose cannons, those who fire first and edit later.
Do we all eventually come to what we mean? Is there real value to every perspective? Have we become so interested in our paychecks, (I know it is difficult as a writer, to collect all the little strings and tie them into rent – food…) we have forgotten to mentor, to be interested, to invest ourselves back into the community? Have we forgotten to set an example, make our work sustainable (to borrow a green word), make our names worth something? Attract those who should be here. . .
No. We haven’t. Fine, don’t want writing as therapy? Go ahead. Make it so. If you need a crusade, need to cleanse, to purify writing, then start with your own. Some of us will be afraid. Some may skitter for the corners, go underground. Some will take what works, and praise you for your awesomeness, and leave the rest.
What we won’t do is feel pressed to conform to a non-standard. We will not lay down and lap the air in submission. Be proud of us, the persistent and rebellious dozen. Own your alley writers, treat them as they can be, and they will become as they can be.
Adina responds: http://todayfortalya.blogspot.com/2011/03/is-this-writing-therapy.html
I note that this discussion seems more like an argument, but there is no argument to win unless that is the agenda. For me, no agenda but the joy of self discovery, the privilege, to share my discoveries, and the surprise of discovering others. I rather agree with Rebecca West’s pronouncement that “Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person’s mind.”
“Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you;
figure out what you have to say.
It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.”
-Barbara Kingsolver-
There is a very good writer, I can’t remember his name, but he spent a year in Rome with his wife and twin babies. He wrote that a personal journal is for you; a book is for others and should be read by the writer before publishing, to eliminate anything that would disturb the experience of the reader. I think he has a point.
Anthony Doerr, “Four Seasons in Rome”: “a finished piece of writing . . . should help its reader refine, perceive, and process the world – the one particular world of the story, which is an invention, a dream.”
“The act of writing is an act of attempted comprehension, and, in a childlike way, control; we are so baffled and exhausted by what has happened, we want to imagine that giving words to the unspeakable will make it somehow our own.â€
— NY Times: Joyce Carol Oates in “Why We Write About Griefâ€
I don’t know what I can add to this already rich conversation, but I’ll proffer these:
Several of my clients – memoirists and novelists – wrestle with these very issues.
1. It’s easy to latch onto the sentence “Writing isn’t therapy” without considering the context, namely the first sentence. I might amend Gianelli’s claims in a couple of ways: 1) “Writing for an audience is not therapy. It’s about creating an aesthetic experience for an audience.” 2) Many people read to have a moving experience by reading about other people’s tragedies; we’re less interested, as readers, in that actual person’s trauma.
2. Just as musicians love rhythm and notes and try to push the limitations of their instrument and just as painters love light and color and composition, so writers who relish their medium love sentences and words and the effects created as much if not more than the content.
3. Language like all art, of course, is “crafty” in that it potentially alters people’s imaginations and awareness. It’s learning that craft that often distinguishes writing that is useful only most to the writer versus writing that creates an moving and interior experience for the reader.
4. Andres Dubus III’s new memoir _Townie_ is so magically written that I could not put it down last night until I fell asleep. Had he no sense of how to create that spell on me – the writer’s ‘craft’ and storytelling sensibility – and had been focused mostly on purging himself psychoanalytically of his complex feelings for his author father, I’d have dropped the book on page 1 into the bin.
5. Of course, writing the memoir likely helped him make meaning of his complex relationship w/ his father and likely was a primary motive for writing it in the first place. Hence, writing it in part was likely therapeutic. But it’s irrational to extrapolate from that that Dubus crafted a memoir as his personal therapy. He could’ve just written a personal diary for that and forgotten about “writing for an audience.” Eugene O’Neill’s last play – the brilliant Long Day’s Journey Into Night – was the most challenging and autobiographical and surely therapeutic, but had he no sensibility about ‘craft’ for the benefit of his audience’s experience, it likely would not be considered one of the best plays of the 20th century.
6. I heard James Hillman – a trained Jungian psychologist who refers to himself now as a writer – say a few years ago, “Our culture has replaced tragedy with trauma.” There’s weight to that claim.
“Writing is not therapy!” is just a counterpoint to the belief that any expression of something emotional, no matter how cliche or redundant or, is worthy art.
Therapy is treatment intended to relieve or heal a specific disorder. We’ve just lost the meaning of the word if we generalize “therapy” to simply mean growth or insight. An olympic champion’s performance can have therapeutic effects for everyone involved, but it’s simplistic to call it therapy.
Those “chicken soup for the soul” books are a useful example of therapy writing, and they have a very apt title. They have their place, but it’s the same place as a greeting card. An artistic work becomes more powerful when it has more meanings for more people, but therapy and greeting cards only have one meeting. Nobody wants to read that. Or, everybody wants to read it, sadly, but nobody will want to read it in 20 or 100 years.
The statement that “Writing Is Not Therapy” just means something along the lines of: “You may need to come to grips with your parent dying, or some other sappy sentimental thing, and your writing may help you do that, but that’s totally irrelevant to the question whether it’s any good.” To take the example of musical composition rather than literary composition: it would take some kind of bonehead to think that all the great [non-lyrical] songs that were ever composed could be accurately summed up as “therapy.”
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