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The Research on Fiction Writing and Health

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 21, 2007 in Uncategorized

There’s a piece of research that dovetails well with Lee Smith’s experience that I wrote about last week. It’s the only piece of research I know of that looks at what happens in terms of health when people write fiction. The study was conducted in 1996 by Greenberg et. al. and is cited in The Writing Cure (106). Participants in this study—college students—were divided into three groups: A group who wrote about nonemotional events A group who wrote their deepest thoughts and feelings about a previous trauma A group who wrote their deepest thoughts and feelings about an imaginary trauma Both the group who wrote about a previous trauma and the group who wrote about an imaginary trauma had significantly fewer visits to the student health center in the month following the writing than the group who wrote about nonemotional events. Thus, writing about real trauma was beneficial. And writing about an imaginary trauma—writing fiction—was beneficial. (Granted, not all fiction has to do with trauma or difficult life events but one could argue that a fair amount of fiction touches on this area. Consider, for instance, Stephen King. Edgar Allen Poe and that telltale heart. J.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Charles Dickens and all those stories of orphans. Grimm’s fairy tales. I can’t help but wonder, as I write this, if reading these stories—holding strong emotions through reading—might not also offer a kind of healing—but that perhaps is a different question for a different day—-) In a discussion of this study, the authors propose a reason that writing about imaginary trauma might be beneficial. They propose that writing about imaginary trauma may have allowed people to “accommodate themselves to negative emotions in a safe context.” This resonates for me with the words that Lee Smith used when she talked about writing her novel: I was in a very heightened emotional state the whole time I was writing it, and it meant everything to me to have it to write. And Molly’s story became my story, or at least a receptacle of all this emotion I didn’t have anything to do with. Story as a (safe) receptacle for emotion? Writing fiction as a (safe) way to hold strong emotions? Writing fiction may, of course, lead to a lot of other things as well. Beautiful novels. Moving short stories. A deeper understanding of life. A new way of looking at the world. Entertainment. Joy. All of this may happen for the reader—or for the writer. But maybe one of the other things that can happen—sometimes—for any one of us—and not just published novelists—is this opportunity for writing fiction to become a safe way to hold and digest—and perhaps transform—strong deep...

Fiction Writing as a Prescription for Grief?

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 18, 2007 in A Different Perspective

Last week there was an interesting article in our local paper, the Winston Salem-Journal, entitled “Lee Smith’s Pain,” by Martha Waggoner. The article describes how Lee Smith, the novelist, now living in Hillsborough, North Carolina, found writing to be a remedy for grief. But—and I think this is the interesting part—she didn’t write directly about her grief. She found a remedy in writing fiction. Lee Smith is the author of several novels, including Black Mountain Breakdown, Family Linen, and The Last Girls. A little over three years ago now, her son Josh, only thirty-three, died of acute cardiomyopathy. Lee Smith describes herself as feeling, afterward, as if her finger was stuck in an electrical outlet, all the time. She had, before her son’s death, been working on a new book, a story of an orphan girl named Molly in post-Civil War North Carolina. After her son’s death she put the story aside. She describes herself as being unable to eat, unable to sleep. She had trouble finding the school where she’d been teaching for twenty years. She had trouble finding the grocery store. She lost thirty pounds. She began seeing a therapist. And when, after several weeks, her therapist offered to write her a prescription, she figured it would be for some kind of drug that might numb her pain—and she was ready for such. Instead, the prescription simply stated: “Write every day.” Specifically, her therapist (I suspect he was a psychiatrist if he was writing prescriptions) told her he thought she would benefit by getting back to the book she’d been working on, that she might benefit from working on a narrative other than her own. And that’s what Smith did. She went back the story of that orphan girl, Molly, that she’d put aside after her son’s death. And, in the article, she’s quoted as saying this about returning to Molly’s story: I was in a very heightened emotional state the whole time I was writing it, and it meant everything to me to have it to write. And Molly’s story became my story, or at least a receptacle of all this emotion I didn’t have anything to do with. Molly’s story became my story. That seems somehow at the crux of it. A way to write her own story without writing her own story. The kind of catharsis that can come sometimes with a bit of distance. Incidentally, that story of Molly as an orphan became a book, On Agate Hill, Lee Smith’s twelfth novel, published in 2006, and well-reviewed, including this review in the Washington Post. I’ve not read the book yet, but I plan to look for...

Writing and Healing Idea #21: Meanwhile

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 16, 2007 in Writing Ideas

What I like best about Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Wild Geese,” is the way it manages to hold two such vastly different things in such an apparently simple poem. Despair and the wild geese heading home. Not just one or the other. Both. She manages the juxtaposition of these two things—the leap from the one to the other—with that single word: meanwhile. And, in so doing, the poem itself becomes a kind of invitation. First a literal invitation: “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.” And, then, an invitation to consider what else might be happening meanwhile. So, the writing idea—- Write for ten or fifteen minutes about a moment of despair—it can be your own despair, or someone else’s, or it can be a fictional moment—a character, perhaps, experiencing a moment of despair. And then—stop—and skip down a line or two and write about some of the things that might be happening meanwhile—- You can read more about “The Wild Geese” here....

Wild Geese: An Image for Writing and Healing

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 14, 2007 in A Different Perspective, Healing Images, Healing Poetry

Three times in the last month I have come across, in three different places, the poem, “Wild Geese,” by Mary Oliver. After the third time, I thought this might be a poem I ought to pay some attention to. The poem opens with the speaker telling us, her reader, that we do not have to be good, we do not have to walk on our knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. And, then, this line: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” It’s a radical line. Maybe a radical poem. It goes against the grain of business as usual. The way the mind and the will are so often, for so many of us, yanking the body around to places it doesn’t really want to go—places even, sometimes, that can make the body a tad sick—or sicker. And sometimes maybe this is one of those silver linings of getting sick—or so people will sometimes tell me—the small good part—how a person can begin to learn to quit yanking the body around. The stakes are too high anymore to do all that yanking. Sometimes illness is the beginning, for some people, or so they tell me, of beginning to pay closer attention to what the body loves and needs—and what it doesn’t. I’ve been carrying the poem with me this month, looking at it now and then, and now, today, there’s one particular word that seems to jump off the page: meanwhile. MEANWHILE as the good part? Because after the speaker of the poem tells us we do not have to be good, we do not have to walk on our knees for a hundred miles, repenting, we only have to let the soft animal of our body love what it loves, after that she invites us, the reader, to tell her of our despair and she will tell us hers— And then there’s this shift—this leap—and she writes: Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes. . . Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. . . It’s as if the camera had been close in—a history of despair—or a history with some despair in it–but then—a shift—the camera pulls back—a shift to a larger landscape—a leap—meanwhile—somewhere—those wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading...

Writing and Healing Idea #20: Finding a Benefit in Adversity

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 11, 2007 in Writing Ideas

For this writing idea I’m going to set down, first, the instructions that Annette Stanton and Sharon Danoff-Burg used in the study that I wrote about earlier this week. These instructions are specifically written for a woman with breast cancer. Following these instructions, I’m including a slight revision, a set of instructions that might be applied in the wake of any adversity. An adversity I’m going to call X. What is your X? An illness? A loss? A setback? X can be whatever you would like for X to be. And you can, if you like, choose the first X that comes to mind. You really can’t do this wrong. (And of course if it’s too soon to find a benefit in X feel free to skip this writing exercise—to save it for next year—or for your next life for that matter. If you would prefer to deal with the part of X that hasn’t been so beneficial you may want to look at Writing and Healing Idea #12 or Writing and Healing Idea #14) 1. The Stanton-Danoff-Burg Instructions: Writing About Breast Cancer [from The Writing Cure] What I would like you to write about for these four sessions [of twenty minutes each] are any POSITIVE thoughts and feelings about your experience with breast cancer. I realize that women with breast cancer experience a full range of emotions that often includes some positive emotions, thoughts, and changes, and in this writing exercise I want you to focus only on the positive thoughts and feelings that you have experienced over the course of your cancer. Ideally, I would like you to focus on positive thoughts or feelings that you have not discussed in great detail with others. You might also tie your positive thoughts and feelings about your experiences with cancer to other parts of your life—your childhood, people you love, who you are, or who you want to be. Again, the most important part of your writing is that you really focus on your positive thoughts and feelings. The only rule is that you write continuously for the entire time. If you run out of things to say, just repeat what you have already written. Don’t worry about grammar, spelling or sentence structure. Don’t worry about erasing or crossing things out. Just write. 2. The Stanton-Danoff-Burg Instructions Revised: Writing About X What I would like you to write about for these four sessions [of twenty minutes each] are any POSITIVE thoughts and feelings about your experience with X. I realize that people who have undergone X experience a full range of emotions that often includes some positive emotions, thoughts, and changes, and in this writing exercise I want you to focus only on the positive thoughts and feelings that you have experienced over the course of X. Ideally, I would like you to focus on positive thoughts or feelings that you have not discussed in great detail with others. You might also tie your positive thoughts and feelings about your experiences with X to other parts of your life—your childhood, people you love, who you are, or who you want to be. Again, the most important part of your writing is that you really focus on your positive thoughts and feelings. The only rule is that you write continuously...

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