Gillie Bolton

Expressive and explorative writing is something almost anyone can do and find creative, absorbing and insightful. It requires no writing experience, knowledge or skills, and few literacy skills.

Grammar, punctuation & spelling can all be forgotten for this kind of writing.

Therapeutic writing is to

• discover and explore what you think
• reclaim lost memories, both good and bad
• express what you think, know, and have experienced
• enable you to think through, to unravel the thought-tangle
• play, try out, think about things flexibly and experimentally
• keep a record of experience / knowledge / ideas
• increase your ability to see other points of view, and collaborate
• develop critical awareness
• question previously-unquestioned assumptions
• perhaps create a satisfying story / poem / account which communicates
• perhaps share experiences with depth and significance
• increase self-confidence

Writing:

• makes direct contact with a deep enduring self: the writing hand knows what the talking and thinking mind keeps down
• is private until wittingly shared: a communication with the self in the first instance. It can therefore be a vehicle for deeper and more explorative thinking-through than conversation, in which once something has been said it can never be unsaid
• can be torn up or burnt unshared with anyone if that is required
• leaves footsteps which aid progressive thought. It is there in the same form the next day / year / decade to be worked on. Talking and thinking shift and alter, and then vanishes on the air.

You will need to:

• remember you cannot write the wrong thing
• remember you will always write the right thing
• forget grammar / spelling / logical forms of expression
• trust your writing hand: let it write without conscious direction sometimes
• prevent your brain from interfering with that writing hand
• suspend your disbelief
• remember writing is endlessly plastic; you can rewrite, add, subtract, try the opposite, fill in details, feelings, evidence from the 5 senses......
• remember you need not share it with anyone
• enjoy it

This kind of writing might not offer answers, but will throw up endless questions. This can lead to uncertainty and discomfort at times. But it will also be creative and exciting!

Forms of Writing

• Diary, or unfettered scribbling ( flow writing; explorative, expressive writing)
• Story
• Poetry
• Drama
• Unsendable letters and their replies
• Dream exploration
• Dialogues
• Mind mapping (clustering, spiders)