Writing as Therapy
What makes a great writer? Vulnerability.
There are several things that make a writer great, such as knowing grammar rules (and how to break them), knowing the cadence of your prose, and voraciously reading in your genre of choice.
But there is one thing that makes a truly great writer and that’s vulnerability. It doesn’t matter if you write fiction, non-fiction, news articles, or web copy. In short, you write what you know, and as every writer knows, you’ll draw upon your own life experiences.
As a little girl, I filled notebooks with my writing, from bad poetry, to worse romance, to angsty teen melodramas. These pieces were fueled by my own teen angst and non-existent love life. What were my hopes and dreams? What were my daydreams about my schoolyard crush? I wrote them all down and shared them with others.
Along with the notebooks of trite stories and cringe poetry I had journals galore. Into those journals I poured my heart, my darkest thoughts, my secret desires. Even today I continue to write in journals, although they’ve evolved into prayer journals to God. I still write all my dark thoughts and secret desires, but thankfully with much tighter prose and a larger vocabulary.
However, in our world of social media and working from home, we can often feel one step removed from true interaction with others. Instagram gets the polished life, not life in the trenches. Twitter is a place to lob hot-take grenades and watch the carnage from afar, while Facebook… well, I guess it’s a meme repository with the occasional birthday tribute to some friend or family member.
Bloggers, social media influencers, and websites like Medium have tapped in to what people crave the most, which is connection, authenticity, and vulnerability. Writers crave this too, but they prefer to do so from their darkened caves of solitude.
Writers are usually the quiet, pensive types who people-watch in the coffee shop and spend hours happily alone. We crave connection, but on our own terms. The way we deal with life is to get our thoughts out of our brain and onto the proverbial page. In that way, writing is our therapy.
I’ve run into plenty of people who sometimes give me a little side-eye about how much I share about myself and my personal life online. There’s nothing wrong with being a private person. While writers seem private in the fact that we generally write in privacy, we crave connection too and this is how we do it.
Letting people into your heart is scary. But choosing what you get to share is power. I have been brutally open about my divorce and my very painful journey of starting over on my blog and social media. Why? Well, because I want to share, I want to help others, and I want to contribute to society.
Writers often use tears as their ink of choice. We’re the awkward kid who’s grown into the awkward adult who has a rich inner life. On the outside we might be shy and ordinary, but on the inside we are colorful, wild, and adventurous. We write so much better than we speak, and that can sometimes seem a contradiction to those who meet us in the real world. This is likely the reason why most writers use their work as a form of therapy, because they have no other way to express themselves in a way they are comfortable with.
Not every writer is your awkward adult. Some successful writers are very well-spoken communicators in real life. Even then, however, their writing remains a form of therapy, as not everyone they encounter is a well-spoken communicator like themselves. In this way, all writers are looking to speak to their tribe.
Sometimes, though, a writer simply wants to be known. The shy woman in the back row might have access to a large pool of readers online, and while she is ignored in the real world, when she is online or at the publishing house, she is a rock star.
It is precisely people such as these that make excellent writers. They are able to cross the gap and connect with like-minded people. Or perhaps they are able to write a piece that crosses the aisle, as it were, and reaches those they’d never be able to reach without being published.
Connecting with others and being authentic is key, but the crown jewel of great writing is vulnerability. If you are willing to open up your heart to share your darkest thoughts and wildest dreams, people will follow you. Why? Because you’re courageous enough to write what they are not. Readers are looking for their tribe as well, and when they come across someone of a like mind who happens to have a pen, they’ll be loyal and follow their work.
A pen is one of the most dangerous weapons in the world. It is also one of the most powerful. If you want to move a heart, you do it through the mind. Capture their mind, and you have their heart. So keep on with your trite stories and cringe poetry. Post it for the whole world to see. Be proud of it, share it, and make your mark on the world.
It might just be all the therapy you need.
