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Is Shifting One’s Point of View a Healing Habit?

Posted by on January 30, 2007 in A Different Perspective

In 2003, James Pennebaker and R.S. Campbell published an article that carried the intriguing title, “The Secret Life of Pronouns”. The authors proposed, based on the analysis of thousands of texts, that flexibility in a person’s use of pronouns when writing about painful memories is associated with improved health. This was not a predicted finding. It emerged when Pennebaker and associates persisted in asking the question: Why it is that writing about emotional topics results in better physical health? What actually happens? The most consistent finding prior to this 2003 study had been that people who participated in expressive writing reported that, afterwards, they actually thought differently about the experiences after they wrote about them. Pennebaker’s question then became: “Is this change in thinking reflected in the ways people write?” In other words, do people become healthier as their writing changes in some way? To try and answer this question Pennebaker used a computer program developed by researchers on artificial intelligence, a program which performs linguistic analysis on written texts. 7501 writing samples were examined. A total of 3,445,940 words. A virtual sea of words. In this sea, he looked at how a person’s writing changed over successive days—and whether or not these changes were correlated with better health. The first thing Pennebaker looked at was content. Did changing the content of one’s writing over a period of days affect health? For instance, did the health of those persons who wrote about a different topic on successive days fare better than the health of those who wrote about the same topics? The answer? It appeared to make no difference. Next, Pennebaker looked at writing style. And he discovered that when people changed their writing styles over several days they were more likely to show improvements in health. When he narrowed down these changes in style, he discovered that participants were most likely to show improvement in health if, over the course of different writing samples, they changed what pronouns they used. It’s an intriguing finding. For instance, writing from the I point of view some of the time, and then you, then we, then he or she or they correlated with better health. The finding was not a directional finding. It was not better, for instance, to move from first person to third person, or visa versa. What mattered was the simple fact of variability—flexibility. In his remarks about the study, Pennebaker makes this comment: “Pronoun choice is based on perspective.” He also admits that the finding is enigmatic. It raises more questions than it answers. For instance, does pronoun flexibility actually cause improved health, or is it a feature that merely emerges coincident with improved health? Is pronoun flexibility a skill that can be learned? Could it be like yoga? Flexibility increasing with practice? Or, to put this yet another way: is there any benefit to be gained from intentionally writing from a different point of view? Is shifting one’s point of view a potentially healing...

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When Writing Takes Us Outside Our Own Skins

Posted by on January 28, 2007 in A Different Perspective, Fiction

The thread this month (though this may or may not be apparent) is the way that coming at things from a different perspective—a new angle—can sometimes lead to good things. And when I think about looking at things from a new angle—from a fresh perspective—one of the things that comes to mind for me is something I learned from college freshmen when I first started teaching them. When I first started teaching writing, I wanted the students in my classes to care about what they were writing. So I started out by telling them they could write about whatever they wanted. This did not go quite as well as I’d imagined it might. For the most part, the students wrote about their dormitories, their roommates, fraternities, beer. They seemed just a bit bored by their writing—and, I’ll admit, I was a bit bored by it as well. I suggested maybe they try writing about something more controversial—argument papers. They gave me papers on abortion and gun control. Lots and lots of papers on abortion and gun control. And, well—it was still boring. For them and for me. Their sentences seemed canned, as if someone else and not them had written them. They were giving me what they thought I wanted. They were giving me what they thought teachers wanted. I kept trying. Then at some point in the middle of the semester I remembered that story the teacher had told us about Sarah and her son—about writing fiction from a new point of view—and I told the students I wanted them to try stepping out of their skins. Their assignment: to write a paper from a different point of view. I invited them to imagine inhabiting some another body—animate, inanimate, I told them it made no difference. Just imagine being someone or something else, I told them. Be a different age. Be a different gender. Be a rock. And then write about it. And they wrote. John, an avid hockey player, imagined himself as a hockey player who had undergone a crippling accident and was left in a wheelchair. He wrote a story about this young man sitting in his wheel chair, watching movies, over and over, and then, one day, getting up and out of the wheelchair and travelling into the movie screen, onto a space cruiser, and then deep into the Andromeda System, to a planet called Saturn 9, which was like a place the young man used to dream about as a child. David became a police officer who got shot in the line of duty. Sam became a homeless man. Glenn became Alfred Einstein—Albert’s nephew. Chris became a white Camaro. The students leapt out of their skins in ways I had not anticipated. It was as if I’d pointed to a door and they flew through it. Actually, the five stories I’ve just described briefly here were chosen by these students as their best work of the semester, and they were in turn chosen for publication by the editors of the freshman review, a small magazine at the university of the best freshman prose and poetry. And, as it turned out, their stories accounted for half the prose pieces in the review, suggesting that I wasn’t the only person who found these new stories they’d...

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Alive

Posted by on January 26, 2007 in Uncategorized

Yesterday, while my son was at his piano lesson, I went to the public library, and while I was there I came across a book by Mary Oliver entitled Long Life: Essays and Other Writings. Mary Oliver is the author of that poem, Wild Geese, among many others. In any case I brought her book home, along with a stack of others, and last evening I opened the book, and in the introduction I came across this—one of the loveliest invitations to making language–to writing–that I’ve seen— And that is just the point: how the world, moist and bountiful, calls to each of us to make a new a serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning, ‘Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a...

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Writing and Healing Idea #22: Once Upon a Time

Posted by on January 25, 2007 in Writing Ideas

There are perhaps a million ways to enter or re-enter the writing of fiction.  Here is one: Begin with “Once upon a time.” This particular idea springs from one in Dee Metzger’s 1992 book, Writing for Your Life.  The book contains a wide range of exercises.  One of my favorite of these is an exercise entitled “Entering the Tale”.  In this exercise, one is instructed to simply choose a fairy tale—any one at all—and then shift the point of view so that one is writing it in the first person from the protagonist’s point of view.  You write from the main character’s point of view as if the story is happening to you right now. For instance, if you were to choose to write—or rewrite—the tale of Cinderella, you might begin: Once upon a time, when I was a girl, and after my mother had died, my father decided to marry a woman who was not only cruel but who had two cruel daughters. . . Or, you could write in the present tense, in a more immediate style: My father has decided to marry again.  I am devastated. . . You have a number of options here.  You can include as many of the original details of the story as you like.  You can also alter the details as needed.  The fairy tale is at the core of your story—it’s the seed of your story—but you can take this seed, and shift perspective, and carry it wherever you like. Simply begin at the beginning—Once upon a...

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Fiction and Truth

Posted by on January 23, 2007 in Fiction

When I was in graduate school, one of my writing teachers told us this story, a true story about one of his students. Call her Sarah. Sarah’s young son had been ill for a long time with leukemia and then had died. It was a terrible grief, and one she had tried to write about many times—and couldn’t. My teacher suggested she try writing the story again, and this time switch the gender, telling the story from the point of view of a father who has lost a young son. Sarah wrote. The story began to come. And what she’d held in—a hard truth she’d believed was unacceptable—began to spill out into the story. Relief. One of the things the father in the story felt when the boy died, after months of watching him suffer, was relief. Question: Can writing fiction be a way of getting at something true? This same teacher who told us this story–or maybe it was another teacher–told us once that in order to write a good story you need to love all of your characters–have compassion towards them. And it occurs to me now that if an author could love all of the characters in a story, then it might become possible for one of those characters to express a feeling that the character might have thought was unacceptable. As the author felt compassion toward him–toward that character–an (apparently) unacceptable feeling might become, in that moment, more acceptable–ordinary–human. And that would be, I think, a good...

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