Writing Practice Prescription

“Just the facts, Ma’am, just the facts,” may be good advice to keep your writing simple and on track, but there’s no reason why you can’t arrange those facts to put color and a little grin into the essence of things.

Consider the standard tagline used by many authors: “XXX is YYY who ZZZ. He/she lives and works in Mysterland and can be reached through his/her website www.bestwebsiteever.com.” Brief and to the point to be sure, but do you have any idea whatsoever about who the writer is?

Some authors breathe a little life into their taglines by mentioning hobbies, pets, and small children. Anne Bingham, pictured in this post, has a short tagline that stopped me in my tracks. In less than 40 words she tells the reader what she does and where she lives. And her detail-rich copy hints at who she is: a person with quite a healthy sense of humor:

“Anne Bingham writes business copy on the computer, edits manuscripts with a 9mm mechanical pencil, and reflects on faith and family life in a spiral bound notebook with a rollerball pen. She lives a few miles west of Lake Michigan.”

What does your tagline say about you?

Mindstorming, sometimes called prospecting or the “20-idea method” sets the stage for letting your creative juices call forth suggestions for your writing as well as ways to improve your fortune and productivity. The process of mindstorming involves taking a question and then doing some personal “brainstorming” with your writing. This exercise is a great jogger of creativity why you find that you have run up against a wall with your writing.

Here’s how to do it:

• Formulate a question and write it at the top of a page
• Then, as fast as you can, write at least 20 to 25 answers.

While you write. Just write. Don’t think, judge, or edit. The more far out an answer that appears on your paper, the better.

After you stop writing, take a few minutes to review the answers that spilled onto your page. Some of the answers will guide you and others may even provoke an “Ah Ha!” realization. Often you will find the answers at the end of your list better than the first few.

Then there will be some days when the answers appear on the page but fail to turn up anything new. On these days when you strike out, just be patient. Set the question at hand aside for a few days. Then return to it and repeat the exercise.

On a personal note, I find that if I strike out too many times, the problem is not with finding the right answer but the right question. If you suspect that this might be what’s happening to you, try this. Take your question, XXX, that you were writing on the top of the page and then start with a new question at the top of the page: “What is a better way to ask XXX?” Then write to turn up 20 to 25 answers and reassess.

For productivity, consider this approach offered by career guru, Brian Tracey:

Begin by writing a particular goal or problem at the top of the page.

For example, if you want to increase your income by 50 percent over the next year, you would write something like, “What can I do to increase my income by 50 percent over the next 12 months?” Or, you can be even more specific by writing the exact amount. If you are earning $50,000 a year today, you would write: “What can I do to increase my income by $25,000 over the next 12 months?” The more specific the question is, the better the quality of answers will be. So don’t write, “What can I do to be happier over the next 12 months?” That kind of question is too fuzzy for your mind. Be specific, detailed, and focused in your questions and you will find practical, effective answers.

Once you have written the question, jot down 20 answers. Let your mind flow freely. Write down every answer that comes to you. Don’t worry about whether it is right or wrong, intelligent or foolish, possible or impossible. Just come up with at least 20 answers.

Whatever you write, keep writing until you have at least 20 answers. If you get stuck after writing the obvious answers, write about the opposite solutions. Don’t be afraid to be ridiculous. Very often, a ridiculous answer triggers a breakthrough thought that might save you years of hard work.

Next, go back over the answers and select the one that seems to be the most appropriate for you at this moment. You will often have an instinct or feeling about a particular answer. It appeals to you for some reason. This is an unconscious suggestion that you are on the right track.

Once you’ve selected the best option, here’s a way to double the creative impact of this exercise: Transfer the answer to the top of a new page and then write 20 ideas for implementing it in your life. You will be astonished at the outpouring of creative ideas that flow from your mind through your hand and onto the paper.

One of the great joys of engaging in an ongoing personal writing practice lies in getting to know yourself better. With pen and paper at hand, you begin to live an examined life. Mindstorming questions for living the examined life might include the following:

• What is your life about?
• What do you want your life to be about?
• What purpose do you want to guide your life?
• What do you want to happen in your workplace?
• What do you want to happen in your career?
• What do you want to happen in your relationships?
• What do you want to happen in your spiritual life?

When using mindstorming to improve your health and well-being, consider these questions:

• What is the one healthy thing I do that helps me best cope with my chronic pain?
• What can I do to make the most out of the available energy I have while undergoing chemotherapy?
• What changes in my life can I make to honor the passing of my loved one?
• How can I take more charge of my own health?
• What’s the number one thing I can do that will most help me with my weight, sleeping problems, etc?

Once you begin to use mindstorming and achieve some success with it, you will find yourself turning to it more and more.

Happy writing.
___________________________________

Information about Brian Tracy’s Mindstorming technique came from this website http://www.growingcoaches.com/briantracy2.htm accessed on 3/29/08. To learn more about Brian Tracy, visit his website at http://www.briantracy.com/

Author Shannon Brownlee in her book, Overtreated–Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, notes that our American Healthcare system cost us $2.1 trillion in 2006. The 2016 prediction of cost soars up to $4.1 trillion.

Worse, in spite of numerous past attempts to fix the system, 47 million Americans or one in six under the age of 65 have no health insurance. Uninsured cancer patients receive less care than cancer patients with insurance and thus may be more likely to die from their cancer. We have one of the finest trauma care systems in the world but uninsured auto accident victims receive less care and have higher mortality rates.

What’s left? An “unfair, dysfunctional, and spectacularly expensive system” that does not suit or fit. In fact, the 2006 cost of our healthcare was “almost as much as the worldwide market for petroleum.” Most shocking, our annual cost for this healthcare system exceeds what the United States spends on food.

Is there any hope?

Indeed, hope exists and lies in the wisdom of knowing when to access and use the healthcare system and when to turn to self-help that might work just as well. In spite of the fact that every other advertisement on TV tells us about new pills and cures for all sorts of ailments, simpler and less harmful healing aids exist.

Consider the lowly pen and paper toiling on without the benefit of costly advertisement, just waiting for us to engage them in the act of writing as therapy. They beckon us to write our personal stories to frame our plight and capture insights that provide healing.

One of the case histories in my book, WellWriting for Health After Trauma and Abuse,  features “Debra” who began to have severe migraines after a traumatic period in her life. She turned to writing to resolve and accept her situation, deal with the confusion and ambiguity of her emotions, and develop the wisdom she needed at that point in her life.

Debra sums up her experience this way: “Writing is something you can do for yourself. It’s not expensive, and it doesn’t hurt anybody, but you can gain personal benefit from it.” She ends by laughing and offers this advice, “You can’t afford a therapist? Write.”

Heart-health expert and CEO of the American Foundation for Women’s Health, Mellanie True Hills, sends an email noting that, “maybe writing can not only cure chronic disease but also keep you from getting it in the first place.” Her comment stems from a blog entry she read on the SHI Symbol International’s Weblog:

“Research from Arizona State University has shown that writing could lower your cholesterol and give you a healthier heart. Yes, by simply WRITING. It seems that if you write affectionately about loved ones for 20 minutes, 3 times a week you could receive this added bonus of a reduced cholesterol level.”

Can this be so? I cannot at this time find the original study, so in mulling this over, I find myself reflecting on Miller’s Law of communication: “Assume the communication is true and then imagine what it can be true of.”

My take on this blog entry, when I assume the presented information to be true, generates theses reactions:

• Stress can influence cholesterol levels. (read more)
• Expressive writing can lower stress because such writing often results in disclosure, emerging insights, and the ability to reframe and learn from what has happened to us.
• When we write to honor others, we honor ourselves. This can raise self-esteem and lower or prevent depression–a very bad emotion for heart health.

Most of all, this news underscores that we can use a writing practice to help ourselves prevent illness and distress which trumps having to turn to writing to recover from illness and distress.

There gets to be a place in chronic illness where you realize that being ill is not going to stop you from living well.

–Rachel Naomi Remen

When you carry the burden of a chronic disease or health condition, life can be downright hard and seem quite unfair. Still a ray of freedom resides in the form of choice. You may not choose to be a diabetic, but you can choose how to respond to your diabetes and manage it to the best of your ability. In an interview published online in Share Guide, Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, author of Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfathers blessings notes that “the place in chronic illness” mentioned above is “where your freedom lies.” She goes on to say, “Yes, I’d love to see perfectly, I’d love to be able to run three miles. I can’t do those things. But the quality of my life is so much deeper than it was when I was able to do those things. So there’s a freedom to transcend your illness, not by curing it necessarily, because a cure is not available to everyone, but by making your life larger than it is. Growth is possible for everyone, even if a cure is not.”

Note that she speaks to the fact that a cure may not be available to everyone, but healing can be activated nevertheless. “Curing” speaks to the elimination of disease or disease symptom, often through the use of medicine, surgery, or psychotherapy. “Healing,” on the other hand, refers to restoration of being whole, aware of the rhythms of the the world and in our lives, and being empowered by this understanding. Healing brings peace, acceptance, and love.

The Healing Power of Writing

You can use your writing practice to heal a chronic problem that sets you back. The goal of your daily 15 minute writing sessions will be to bring into focus the problem that now haunts you. Remember to write fast. Don’t think.

At the very beginning, just write about your problem using speed writing to let your angst take form on the page during your writing sessions. No right or wrong answers exist here–just “write” answers. Do this for at least a week writing at least 15 to 20 minutes a day, three times a week. You can write more than three times a week and you can do this for one week or more. It’s your call.

On the last day of your writing sessions, dedicate that writing session to describing how you felt when you began this exercise and how you feel now.

author of Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfathers blessings.

_______________________________________________________________________________

DrT notes: You can learn more about Dr. Remen by visiting her website at www.rachelremen.com. This post quotes Dr. Remen from an interview posted on the Share Guide website which you can access by clicking here. To learn more about Share Guide, click here.

Marlene Buckler, MD, FACEP, has arrived at a point where she thinks that she may be able to help more people not by actually practicing medicine, but by writing and speaking about it. In a recent article about her in the Pelican Press she is quoted at the beginning of the article as saying, “Stay away from doctors and don’t take pills.”

The article continues with another quote from Buckler, “…I used to see nothing wrong with people going to doctors. I also used to believe that pills had overall beneficial effects and that folks would be prescribed medications only when it was in their best interest. I have changed my mind.”

Much of her current belief stems from the fact that in her years practicing emergency medicine, she saw a lot of patients that she concluded were “worse off because they went to doctors and took pills.” Dr. Buckler is currently writing a book, Stay Out of My ER to help readers understand that there are more answers for many health concerns than just another pill.

I could not agree more. My own experience echoes what Dr. Buckler relates in the Pelican Press article.

Her website www.stayoutofmyer.com provides visitors with lots of free information and also has a membership area for visitors who want to contribute and seek more detailed information. Why not take a cyber stroll over there right now? To do so, click here.

I just attended a conference where one of the workshop leaders suggested we take titles of our articles and enter them into Google Alerts to see if anyone else had referenced or used our work. One of my past posts was titled “Writing as Therapy.” Today, Google Alerts notified me that a post with the same name appeared in a blog named The Brain, Fingers, and Keyboard Symphony. The author’s observation that “My writing slowly changed anger into grief, and grief into slow recovery” impressed me and I wanted to share the post with the readers of the Writing Practice Prescription blog. With her permission, her post follows:

Writing as Therapy

by

Amy

Three years ago plus change, my mother died suddenly and unexpectedly. It was nobody’s fault – just one of those things that happens sometimes. The next year and a half, everything else went wrong, one thing after another – my sister, already ill with glandular fever, was diagnosed with ME, a chronic fatigue syndrome; both my sister and my father suffered from depression; our dog died; I failed my A-level exams and failed to get into university that year. It set off a long, hard slog to get back to where I wanted to be, and away from where I had been put by circumstance.

You know what? I’m a much better writer because of it.

Don’t get me wrong – I would hand it all back if it would take back what happened to us. But the sheer magnitude of it changed me, and I found that I had to write, was forced to write. All my emotion came out in my writing – angry, painful, sad stories. I wrote my first full-length novel by six months after she had died – that’s around 100,000 words – and kept going with other things, too, just writing and writing for hours on end. Sometimes I would sit at the computer and produce 7,000 words in a morning.

Writing can be fun. But it can also be therapy. It helped me to vent all the things that I was feeling in a safe way. Of course, the sheer quantity I was producing also gave me a lot of practice, and I put a lot of the improvement down to that, too.

Writing still helps me to understand and deal with emotions I’m not sure what to do with, by taking myself a step away from them and putting them onto someone else, someone whose actions and reactions I can observe and understand and use. It lets me go deeper. And, in a strange way, I’m grateful for that.

My writing slowly changed anger into grief, and grief into slow recovery. You can see it in the things I wrote, in the changes in tone and story between works. It is still changing me in subtle ways I expect even I can’t see.

If something has happened to you, and you’re not sure you can deal with it, write it out. Let somebody else deal with it. You’ll be surprised what you come up with.

Editor’s note: visit Amy’s blog to learn more about her writing.

The melting pot of the writer’s mind calls forth childhood hurts to rise and haunt us in our troubled adult lives. The good news is that these childhood hurts may improve your story writing. After all, who wants to read about happy people with no ills or obstacles sailing through a golden life? No conflict, no story, nothing to learn.

Improve your writing by including information about troubled childhoods poisoning life by becoming acquainted with with the decades-long, ongoing ACE Study. When you learn about the ACE Study, you will know what problems might plague your adult characters.

ACE stands for adverse childhood experiences (ACE) associated with addictions as well as adult health and well-being problems. To date, ten such experiences have been identified in children younger than 18 who grow up in a household with:

• Recurrent physical abuse
• Recurrent emotional abuse
• Sexual abuse
• An alcohol or drug abuser
• An incarcerated household member
• Someone who is chronically depressed, suicidal, institutionalized or mentally ill
• Mother being treated violently
• The loss of one or both biological parents
• Emotional or physical neglect

Any one of the above ten items receives a score of one, no matter how many times it occurred. For instance, if you were sexually abused once or many times as a child, your ACE score is one and only one. The higher your ACE score, the more likely you will be to experience a wide range of health and social problems in your adult life.

Recently, Dr. Felitti, one of the founders of the ACE Study, spoke in San Mateo, CA, and presented an overview of the findings from the ACE Study. He noted that the official questionnaire for determining an ACE score was several pages long and needed to be professionally evaluated. However, recently the ACE Study Group developed a “self-test” version of the questionnaire. This survey has only ten questions and can be explored and taken by clicking the link below.
Click here to download a copy of the ACE survey

Here is the handout used for a recent 1.5 hour workshop:

Learn to write your story for healing and helping

Handout for January 31, 2008 workshop

by

Ellen Taliaferro, MD

Overview

The stories you hear and observe each day weave the rich fabric of your work and personal life. No wonder that at least one friend or relative has no doubt said to you, “You should write a book.” If so, did you want to faint at such a daunting thought? Or did you just wish for more time to write a book while at the same time harboring a secret knowing that there would never be enough time.

Think again. You do have enough time. This workshop shows you how to:

• Develop a writing practice in the middle of your busy life
• Turn your life experiences into rich, captivating stories
• Decide to self-publish or find and work with a publisher

Discover the benefits of writing your story from true life experiences

The unexamined life is not worth living.
–Socrates

When you begin to write and immerse yourself in the writing process dedicated to relating your life experiences, you begin to live an examined life. Living an examined life provides insight and the healing effects of disclosure. Moreover, as reflected in Eastern philosophy, when you heal and help yourself, you heal and help others.

Dr. Robert Sommer, in his 2003 article “The Use of Autobiography in Psychotherapy,” notes that a recent explosion of published memoirs reflects the “public hunger for authenticity, a preference for the real over the fictional life.” (J Clin Psychol. 2003 Feb;59(2):197-205.) When you walk into a bookstore, you will find that nonfiction memoir books compete with novels for front-row billing.

Dr. Sommer notes that the benefits of memoir reading provide the reader with:

• An inside view of the issues and challenges of the author
• Personal and strong story lines that pull the reader through the book
• Identification with the author

I think that the compelling narrative of memoirs gives readers safety through distance. As they read about the struggles of the author they can see with clarity some of the struggles in their own lives and they have hope when they rejoice with the successes of the author. Such vicarious victory may be the next best thing to “being there.”

What a gift you bestow on the reader when you undertake the challenge of capturing your own stories and turning them into compelling memoirs.

Develop a writing practice to write your book

People working in the healing and helping professions refer to their professional activities as practices. What makes their work a “practice?” A practice implies a set of activities performed often and repeatedly to set the stage for habitual engagement and proficiency.

Make the practice of writing your own

To add a writing practice to your routine, take my 90-day WellWriting® challenge:

• Write 32 minutes every day at least three times a week
• Write fast, without thinking or editing
• Write about emotionally charged experiences
• Every 3 to 7 days read and reflect on what came out of these writing sessions–jot down any insights that arise from your review and reflection

Supplement your writing practice with writing your book exercises

On the days that you are not writing about emotionally charged experiences in life, write 32 minutes each day about your book:

• What is your life story about?
• How will writing your life story help you?
• What benefits will your readers reap from reading your story?
• What 10 to 15 points do you want to make in your book?

How to turn life experiences into rich, captivating stories

Writing for story marks the beginning of your successful writing journey. The trip doesn’t end until readers are interested in reading what you write.

The difference between a written memoir and a written-and-read memoir rests lin good storytelling. A good story draws readers in, challenges them, and then provides resolutions to the conflicts put forth in the story. Successful stories:

• Have a beginning, middle, and end
• Are rich with details that call forth the five senses of the reader
• Are fueled by conflict and resolutions

While bringing all of this together might seem overwhelming, don’t fret. Start with baby steps. Here’s how you do it:

• Outline your story
• Draft your story
• Craft your story

When I listen to successful writers, I often hear them refer to outlining as the “O” word. Once they introduce the concept of outlining, different writing styles emerge. Some writers outline in great detail, others start to outline and faint along the way, and others just plunge in with no outline. Each approach provides advantages and disadvantages.

One simple five-step approach has saved my writing soul and serves me best when it comes to story writing.

Every step consists of three-word sentences, each consisting of a noun, verb, and predicate. The first three-word sentence introduces a complication to set the stage for conflict. The last three-word sentence proclaims the resolution of the conflict. The three sentences in between detail the route the protagonist’s journeys between the first step and the last step.

Write the five steps in this exact order:

• Step one–complication
• Step five–resolution
• Step two
• Step three
• Step four

The inherent wisdom to this approach is that you set up your story by introducing the conflict. Next you decide how your story will end. From there, you fill in the middle.

Here is an example of this five step, three-sentence progression:

1. Boy loves girl
2. Boy charms girl
3. Girl charms boy
4. Boy loses confidence
5. Boy loses girl

Steps two, three, and four would have been quite different had the author of the outline decided that the story would end with “boy gets girl.” The charm of this approach is that it is easily remembered and that it gives the writer a compass and map at the beginning of the journey.

How to decide whether to self-publish or work with an established publisher

Pros and cons exist for each publishing process. The following guidelines can help you choose.

Choose to self-publish if:

• Your book is a nonfiction book
• You want to revise it often
• You want the book to come out sooner rather than later
• You want complete control of the book from content to cover and from marketing to distribution
• You don’t have an agent and don’t want to undergo the expense of time and money to get one.
• You are working with a small niche market

Choose to work with a publisher if:

• Your book is a work of fiction or poetry
• You have a wide audience and want to reach as many readers as possible
• Your main concern is the content of the book. You are happy to leave cover and related details to an experienced publisher
• You are new to the book writing business and want the guidance of an experienced publisher
• You already have an agent or want to work with one

Today’s technology for publishing changes from day to day. As the technology changes, so do the cost and benefits change. Your best approach is to research the decision to work with a publisher or self-publish as much as you can before you make your choice.

Ellen Taliaferro, MD, has written three books and given numerous presentations on the healthcare aspects of family violence prevention and intervention, WellWriting® (a form of expressive writing aimed at healing), and stress management. She is the Medical Director of the Keller Center for Family Violence and Intervention at the San Mateo Medical Center in San Mateo, CA. Dr. Taliaferro is the co-founder and former executive director of Physicians for a Violence-free Society. In 1998, she founded the Violence Intervention Prevention Center at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, TX, and served as its first medical director. Dr. Taliaferro invites you to visit her website at www.healthaftertrauma.com and sign up for her free newsletter.

Seeking the keyboard when everything else calls you away from your computer may be easier with these words from Sara Davidson in her Newsweek Jan 22nd, 2007 article, The First Day of the Rest of My Life:

“That’s the real reason to continue writing now: for the periods when your mind is humming and the narrative unspooling. You lose the sense of time as you’re carried to the place John Fowles describes as “the sacred wood” where the characters you’re inventing start to say things you hadn’t expected, and sentences will roll out that startle you with their rightness.”

To read the whole article click here and give it a few seconds or minutes to load.

Just reading Sara’s words inspired me and recalled for me my observation that:

• We teach what we need to learn
• We preach what we need to do
• We write what we need to learn

I hope you have a few minutes to read this article and reflect on the “narrows” in your own life.