facts, feelings & healing
april writing prompts and weekly story work exercise
If you’re new here, Story Work is the name of my current book-in-progress. It describes a process of reflecting, reclaiming, and reimagining the stories of our lives. It involves looking at your life experiences as creative material that you have the power to shape.
The weekly Story Work topics cover universal life themes with references from literature, philosophy, science, and spirituality; offering perspectives that spark ideas for personal growth and creative expression.
Paid subscribers receive Story Work exercises every Sunday night at 8 pm et.
Hi everyone,
Okay so today we have our story work exercise for paid subscribers, but it’s also the first of the month so I’m sharing the April writing prompts for everyone, too. Read on for updates and a preview of the weekly exercise.
Writing to Heal
On Saturday we had our first quarterly two-hour workshop for paid subscribers. In case you missed it, you can access the video and writing guide here. I taught my approach to the expressive writing method, a well-researched practice that leads to creative expansion and healing narratives for adversity, trauma, grief, and loss. If you have a hard time accessing memories and deep emotions for writing, this technique will support you in exploring complicated experiences in an emotionally safe way.
This week’s story work exercise provides an introduction to what we covered in the workshop.
Keep in mind that we do this work for creative purposes, and this is not a replacement for therapy. I encourage writers to do this work in tandem with professional mental health therapy as needed.
April Writing Prompts and Free Workshop
Each month I provide #writingthelayers prompts that are meant to spark an idea or train of thought that gets you writing. When you read the prompt, what memories, images, feelings, or thoughts come to mind? Using these prompts as writing triggers, you can explore your voice and creative impulses in a playful, no stress way.
You are also invited to join us for my free monthly workshop on Friday, April 5 at 7 pm et where we'll be freewriting from these prompts. New faces are always welcome, and sharing is optional.
Okay, let’s get into our weekly exercise.
Facts and Feelings
Our current theme is the five senses, which we are exploring as a way to practice mindful writing, a creative practice that nurtures attention and well-being. When it comes to storytelling, by focusing on the five senses, we also bring our words to life in vivid ways for ourselves and our readers.
It just so happens that sensory writing plays a key part in writing to heal.
In the Writing to Heal workshop on Saturday, we talked about the difference between writing to vent and writing to heal. You know how sometimes you can turn to journaling to feel better and you end up feeling worse? Some of the workshop participants described it as spiraling, going around and around, getting stuck in negative emotions and thought patterns.
The expressive writing method is one technique we can use to create the necessary shift in perspective that leads to a healing narrative and all the benefits that come with it, like reduction in stress, anxiety, and depression, strengthening the immune system, lowering blood pressure, and improving overall well-being.
According to the expressive writing method, created by Dr. James Pennebaker, there are several indicators of a healing narrative, the main one being that you link feelings to facts and events. In one of my favorite resources, Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives by Louise DeSalvo, she says, “We must write in a way that links detailed descriptions for what happened with feelings—then and now—about what happened.”
For today’s exercise, we will explore how the five senses support us in this process when it comes to writing the details: the who, what, when, where and how of an emotionally transformative event or moment.
Often when we recall emotionally difficult or transformative events, our memories can be vague and blurry. When we attempt to access them, we might have a visceral reaction including stomach tightening, nausea, restless limbs, or even itchiness or agitation. This is our body’s way of protecting us.
But part of the healing process is being present with the details, the discomfort, the resistance. When we face these reactions consciously, with the proper support, we face the initial discomfort, so we can access long-term healing. (In the workshop, we also had a discussion about what healing actually means to each of us, because we all use different language to define it, but most of us agreed that it’s a never-ending, ongoing practice.)
So when it comes to difficult topics, we can’t heal from it if we never allow ourselves to be present with it.
Virginia Woolf described it by saying, “It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole. This wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me. It gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together.”
I mean, this is what we do as artists, isn’t it? We put the severed parts together to make something artful and new. When we glaze over the details, we don’t process it, and we can’t integrate it.
DeSalvo explains, “The work of inhibiting traumatic narratives and feelings acts as on ongoing stressor and gradually undermines the body’s defenses. Like other significant stressors, inhibiting our stories and our emotions can adversely affect immune function—the action of the heart and vascular systems, and even the biochemical workings of the brain and nervous systems.”
When we translate our difficult memories into detailed, coherent language, and integrate that language into our sense of self, we no longer have to put our bodies through the strain of inhibition and we alleviate the stress of hiding and holding back, which improves our health and well-being.
Today’s exercise is to experiment with the expressive writing method, paying close attention to the first step which involves separating facts from feelings. This includes identifying details like who, what, when, where, and how, and challenging yourself to use the sensory tools of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and touching to describe the details.
Exercise:
If this is your first introduction to expressive writing, the exercise for this week is to choose an emotionally significant memory (that you feel mentally ready and safe to explore right now) and go through the following steps. For your topic, consider issues you’re currently living with, something that’s been on your mind or perhaps in your dreams, trauma you’ve been working through or unhealthy behaviors you’ve been struggling with. I encourage you to watch the video as you do this exercise for additional guidance and insight from me and the group. You can also download the guide. For those of you who were in the workshop with me, see below for a fourth step you can take to continue the exercise.
Please note: Spend no more than 20 minutes on each step and take breaks in between each step. Keep in mind that you’re just taking notes for Steps 1-3, writing in phrases and fragments, you don’t have to worry about grammar, punctuation, or any of that.
Step One: Write down the who, what, when, where and how of the emotionally transformative event or moment. Write as many factual and observational details as you can. Write every detail you can recall, nothing is too small to describe. Write both the positive and negative facts and observations. If you run out of things to say before time is up, zoom out and/or zoom in, whichever one offers more recollections. An example of zooming out is: What was going on in the world at the time? An example of zooming in is: What were you or other people wearing? What did you see, hear, smell, touch, taste?
Step Two: Write about how this event affected you emotionally at the time. Explore your internal landscape. Link your feelings to the specific facts you described in the first step. What did you feel? Why did you feel this way? How did these feelings about this situation impact the rest of your life? If you run out of things to say before the time is up, look at a line you already wrote and ask yourself: What else is this connected to?
Step Three: Write about your perspective on this event now. Explore the things you know now that you didn’t know before this happened. How and when did your knowing change? What meaning do you assign to this experience? What questions remain? How does this experience connect to other experiences in your life, to other people’s experiences, to the human condition?
Step Four: Using the notes you’ve taken, write a piece about the memory, event, or situation you’re describing. It can be any form you like: a letter, poem, essay, short story, whatever form you like.