Gillie Bolton

Creative writing is a powerfully therapeutic for personal development: recognized in the growing numbers of workshops and writing groups within professional contexts, including clinical, health and criminal justice settings. Writing Works is a guide for writers or therapists working with groups or individuals and is full of practical advice on everything from the equipment needed to run a session to ideas for themes, all backed up by the theory that underpins the methods explained. Experienced practitioners in the field contribute detailed illuminating accounts of organizing writing workshops for a wide range of different clients, together with examples of their outcomes.

This book will be an invaluable start-up reference for arts therapists and professionals working across the health, social care and caring professions, and one that will be referred to again and again.

Foreword by Blake Morrison

 ‘One sheds one’s sicknesses in books’, D. H. Lawrence wrote after completing Sons and Lovers, ‘repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be master of them’. Ted Hughes said something similar shortly before he published the Birthday Letters, a book of elegies to his late wife, Sylvia Plath: ‘What’s writing really about? It’s trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life – to attack it and attack it and get it under control’. This idea of writing as a way of controlling or mastering one’s emotions has sometimes been frowned upon; surely writing ought to be more than therapy, people say.  Well, yes, but the process of articulating painful truths can be restorative, healing, even life-saving. And there’s no reason why writing produced at moments of crisis or distress can’t be good writing, especially if the writer has some guidelines to work with – or a midwife at hand to assist with the birth.

This handbook is written in that spirit, not just to give vague encouragement to would-be writers but as a practical how-to book, with warm-up exercises, tips on how to form and convene writing groups, descriptions of the responsibilities and difficulties involved and countless examples from the pioneering work which the three authors and others have done in this field. There are also personal testimonies from those who have benefited from attending workshops, including, for example, Jane Tozer, who recounts how writing poetry in a little-known verse-form, the ghazal, restored her confidence and ‘connected me with intensely personal subject-matter’.

The term ‘bibliotherapy’ has entered the language only recently. But the link between literature and healing goes back to Aristotle and his notion of catharsis (or ‘purgation’). Shakespeare, too, understood the importance of self-expression: ‘Give sorrow words’, he wrote, ‘the grief that does not speak/Whispers the o’er fraught heart, and bids it break’.

Giving sorrow words needn’t mean pouring things out in a torrent; even confessions have to be shaped. Some poets prefer free verse, but many are liberated by working within a given form or of regular rhythmic pattern.  Some prose writers are candidly autobiographical, while others boldly invent. There are no hard and fast rules and this book doesn’t attempt to legislate. But the  exercises it describes – with alphabet poems, acrostics, stories, sonnets, pantoums, fairytales and visualisations – are immensely useful, and whatever your interest in writing,whether you’re a counsellor, a teacher or a student, you will find yourself wanting to try them out.

This is a book that deserves a place not just in schools and colleges but in hospitals, prisons, rehab clinics and community centres. Anyone who cares about writing will find it rewarding. And anyone professionally concerned with the health – and mental health – of this country should be made to read it. ‘One sheds one’s sicknesses in books’, as Lawrence said, and this book is part of the cure.

Blake Morrison,
poet, novelist and critic