Putting pen to paper, why write?

As I have been looking through my journals and pieces of writing I have done over the years, I have been trying to explore the reason why I feel so strongly about trying to write.

I started and completed a creative writing course a few years ago, the course was excellent (run by the OU and I highly recommend it if you are unsure where to start).  The emphasis on this course was to write fiction, and how to use language to form a narrative, the setting, the story, the characters and then how to use various tools to enable you to write.   The short story I finished as my final piece was about an unseen ghost, and I was quite pleased with it (if I can find it I will add it on here someday).

But now I look back at some of my non-fiction writing too and see that I have written poems,  descriptive pieces, lists and thoughts throughout various times in my life.  Sometimes I have been happy, sometimes sad, sometimes very angry and a lot of the time when I have been looking for answers.

That is when I realised that, maybe, one of the reasons I write is as therapy?

I can write the thoughts in my head much better than I can articulate them at times.  Especially when I am feeling happy or sad, as an emotional (some may say highly emotional!) person, there are times when the words I need to use to signify how I feel get muddled and garbled, and of course, I am absolutely useless if I get upset or tearful.  There is really then no hope of me trying to communicate my thoughts, emotions and needs.  This is when I write and through the writing I become coherent.

Over the years I have kept gratitude journals, wrote memoirs from my childhood, wrote letters about grief, letters about my own flaws, my wants and my needs.  I don't need to show them to anyone, but the writing is a way of me telling my story, or sharing my anxieties, my hopes and my fears and it works for me to then be able to read it back.

And as with any form of good therapy, through my writing, I then feel as if I am talking to someone who is listening to only me.   It is 'me' that is listening to me.

Writing gives me a space, a pause to stop and be, a chance to read what I have written over and then perhaps to realise that 'yes, I need to discuss that' or 'you need to get outside in nature, Ali', whatever the advice I decide to give myself.

Just as I can escape into a good book, I can also become immersed in the process of writing, it feels good to be able to do that sometimes.

There is also the joy, and the power of putting pen to paper.  I feel then as if I regain ownership of my voice, my feelings, my life and this is a then a tangible thing, not just a spoken conversation that can be remembered or forgotten but an actual object.  A real thought, emotion or moment that becomes more vivid and more lucid because I have taken the time to write it.

So perhaps, this is the main reason I write, not just because I have an imagination with wonderful stories to tell but also that I have a voice, and that sometimes the person I need to listen to the most is myself.

Ali
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