I have been following the work of Professor Jamie Pennebaker for a few years now.  He’s a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin who studies writing and healing.  One of his basic premises is that the act of writing about traumatic events helps to heal the writer.  Another is that it’s important to write in a narrative style, that is, a story, with a beginning, middle, and end.  It’s as if the very act of creating a narrative helps to make sense of—and peace with—traumatic events.  He also advises to write as if you're throwing this material away. If you eventually do or not once you've finished the exercise is your choice.  But don't be precious or pretentious about it.

Some of us just post it up here, which may not be so different than throwing it away. 

He’s starting to get more interested in analyzing what people write, although I heard him speak about it recently, where he said something along the lines of, “The problem is, reading all this stuff people write is really depressing.  So I’ve been using computers to analyze it.”  He’s been mashing up lots of people’s therapeutic writing and searching it for trends of words:  feeling words and thinking words.  He’s really interested in pronouns right now.  That's what his new highly acclaimed book, The Secret Life of Pronouns, is about.  I worry this is not seeing the forest for the trees.  Plus, who wants to be judged on their use of pronouns?

But I still like and respect his work.

I have become increasingly aware of how my own personal and creative writing really is about problem solving in my own life.  I can see through the arc of my dramatic work, plays and screenplays where nothing in the characters or settings or plot is intentionally autobiographical, where I’ve dealt with my feelings about loss, abandonment, prejudice, conflict, failure, and unrequited love.  One of the wonderful things about dramatic writing is that there is no point of view:  It's all about the characters viewed through a fourth wall (with some exceptions).  Also, I journaled in spiral bound theme books and bound composition books from the time I was in high school until just a few years ago, when I just moved pretty much to online writing for everything (although I do from time to time still fill up a legal pad.  My handwriting looks like chicken scratch).  But these were two very different practices.  Now they feel more like they're blending.

I made two posts here recently that were really about working out problems with the characters in the novel that I’m working on...although they were also influenced by news that another one of my friends is getting divorced.  I don’t know why I’m so upset when my friends divorce, but I am.  I realize that for some people, it probably is the best option.  I work so hard at my marriage, I just hate to see people giving up.  But it was funny, because the comments on my posts seemed to take them as more personal than they actually were.

Anywho, I have been thinking that this is part of the internal obstacle that I’m having with trying to finally finish and get out to the commercial market some long form fiction:  is that it really does feel more like therapy to me than making literature or entertainment for public consumption.  Why on earth would anyone want to read about me working out personal traumas?

But maybe all entertainment is basically public therapy.  

More about Jamie Pennebaker’s method of therapeutic writing:

http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Faculty/Pennebaker/Home2000/WritingandHealth.html