Writing as Therapy

"I tell my story over and over in my head, over and over to my readers, struggling to make sense of it …"

-- The Repentance of Nicholas, Lauren Leach-Steffens

I wrote the story from which this quote was taken some twenty-five years ago. The story was a Gothic tale of heinous deeds, sacrifice and redemption, or that's what I told myself. In reality, the story was about an unreliable narrator who survived an attack by an incubus and suffered from Stockholm Syndrome, falling in love with her attacker in the aftermath. This scenario happens all the time, and is part of the reason it's so hard to leave one's abuser. It mirrored what I was experiencing at the time, and my denial. I will not post the story here because it glorifies Stockholm Syndrome.

Writing therapy, however, has legitimacy. Psychology uses the tool extensively as a therapeutic tool, although they utilize it more as writing sprints (short exercises) and journaling. However, it's not a large leap from that to working out events and feelings in a journal to fictionalizing them, either directly or symbolically, through specific scenes and general themes.

Writing as therapy can yield bad results. There's an often derided phenomenon called the Mary Sue/Marty Stu story in fan fiction, where someone inserts their fantasy of competence, fame, and winning the (insert desired gender of love interest here) into an existent world. It reads predictably ridiculously, defying characterization of other members -- after all, they're props for the fabulous main character -- plot, and logic. (Note that many women in fanfic and science fiction have had their legitimate works derided as "Mary Sue" simply because others can't imagine female characters as anything but the prize. I'm not talking about that.)  For a glimpse of Marty Stu, watch the first movie in the Star Trek reboot. Chris Pine's Captain Kirk takes over the Enterprise when he should have been smacked into a high-security military prison for trespassing, and the fun (?) begins. Every little thing he does, as they say, is magic. Credulity is stretched thin.

My favorite theme in my writing is therapeutic: ordinary heroes can save the world from the Apocalypse. I guess I write pre-Apocalyptic fiction. This likely comes from being a tween/teen during the Reagan Administration, where our president joked about bombing Russia on a hot mic and Russia and the US stockpiled weapons to up the threat. (To my Russian reader: If you're old enough to remember, you remember this differently. That's okay.) During that time I had near-constant nightmares where I was separated from my family as the sirens raged, and the only place I could find to shelter was a toilet stall. Because I have a sick sense of humor, think: flush and cover. I didn't realize where this theme came from until this morning because the subconscious is a wonderful thing.

The therapy we do in writing is transformational. We create solutions, or wishes, or a worst-case scenario that moves people to act. We heal ourselves, heal our readers, and tell our story, over and over, struggling to make sense of it.