Craft Essay by Emma Hudelson

Untitled Film Shill #56 (1980), Cindy Sherman

Writing to Heal or Writing to Share: Beyond “Mere Expression of Emotion” in Personal Narrative

I champion “the therapeutic power of creative writing.” That’s in quotes because I say it. A lot. It’s on my website, in my bio, and in my blurbs for the writing for wellness service-learning course I lead. There is power in using writing to integrate events into a larger life narrative. However, writing for wellness isn’t the same as prepping a piece for publication. Those are two separate steps, but there’s room for both. Healing and craft are possible, and even more, some of the aspects of craft that make for good writing can also contribute to healing.

Memoirists like T Kira Madden and Jaquira Díaz have pushed back against the idea of writing as therapy, and Madden memorialized that idea in her 2019 LitHub piece, “Against Catharsis.” In it, Madden recounts a Q&A session they fielded together. When asked about writing being therapeutic, Díaz responded, “Our books are not our therapy. . .Our books are not our journals.” She’s right. Writing publishable personal narrative requires the same careful attention to craft that any other mode of writing does. Memoirists don’t vomit words onto a page and send them straight to their editors.

My own first drafts of life writing are just me trying to figure myself out. They contain boring details, they include characters (people) I haven’t introduced yet, and every other sentence begins with “I.” They’re not good writing—but they contain moments of beauty. Those moments are what I return to. What do those moments need to be contextualized? Grounded? How to thread the pearls together and make a necklace? T Kira Madden finds that thread in the power of craft. “What I am proposing,” she writes in LitHub, “is that we get real about what it means to render an experience for the sake of art, for the sake of sharing. To craft something and chisel it until there’s room for more than catharsis. . .”

Craft is vital, of course. My book Sky Watch braids equine biography and memoir, chronicling a famous show horse’s rise to fame against challenging odds while also wrestling with the ways horses brought me back to myself in the face of major life changes. Why do those life changes matter in the world? Where did they belong in the overall character arc of the narrator (me)? In history and culture? Answering those questions allowed me to use what novelist and memoirist Courtney Maum calls “the zoom out” on her Substack. “This technique allows you to pivot to anecdote or research, adding depth, intrigue, the weight of history, diversity and/or all of the above to whatever you are writing.”

Zooming out to history and culture pushed my personal narrative forward and gave me—and readers—breathing room. Braided narratives have that power. In H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald uses her experiences of training a hawk and the shadow biography of T.H. White to zoom out from the narrative of grieving her father’s death. In The Electric Woman, Tessa Fontaine moves between dealing with her mother’s failing health and the summer she ran away to join a traveling sideshow. In these examples, the strands of the braid knit a larger story together. Non-braided memoirs like T Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls and Jaquira Díaz’s Ordinary Girls find other ways to zoom out and create necessary space. Madden’s memoir-in-essays plays with form, interspersing traditional personal narrative with lyricism, anaphora, and jumps in time. Díaz’s book, on the other hand, pans to historical events or news stories that amplify and echo what her narrator—herself—is navigating.

In each of the books above, the authors also balance scene with reflection. The moments of reflection become a trail of breadcrumbs readers can follow to make meaning. These memoirs all deal with heavy stuff—grief, illness, sexual violence, addiction, death—but instead of scene after scene of trauma, the memoirists zoom out. They reflect. They breathe. They make meaning.

In an article for TIME, Díaz writes about the origin of her memoir as part of her recovery process from an episode of psychosis. “I was in treatment, getting better, and working [writing] was helping me find a way back to myself.” She began the work in 2007. Ordinary Girls was published in 2019. Over those twelve years, Díaz was doing much more than journaling. She was crafting a narrative. Psychologist James Pennebaker might argue that crafting is also part of the recovery process.

In the 1980s, Pennebaker founded the expressive writing movement, the first to research the therapeutic benefits of writing about troubling life events. In his book Opening Up By Writing It Down, he explains that what we think of as catharsis is not enough. “The mere expression of emotion is usually not beneficial on its own.” Later, he explains further. “We need to construct coherent and meaningful stories for ourselves. . .Particularly important is that writing moves us to a resolution.” The man who is possibly to blame for the entire idea of writing as therapy is suggesting the same tactics as Madden, Díaz, and Maum. He agrees that venting isn’t enough. Stories need to have meaning, coherence, and movement towards resolution. Sounds like the advice I received after turning in my first undergraduate personal essay.

Yes, writing can be healing. But writing for wellness is not the same as writing a finished piece. Once the memory is on paper—the work begins. In my own experience, that work offers many challenges, but just as many benefits. Turning people into characters helps me to understand them and how they fit into the world. Turning memories into scenes gives them more coherence. History, culture, and outside points of view allow me to see a bigger picture. These aspects of craft can be therapeutic, but writing is not the same as therapy. Blindly assuming it is would be dangerous, but I can’t ignore the ways that writing has helped me to make sense of myself and the world.

EMMA HUDELSON is a nonfiction writer from Indiana, where she directs the Writing for Wellness program at Butler University. She is the author of Sky Watch: Chasing an American Saddlebred Story, and her work can be found in the Cincinnati Review, the Chattahoochee Review, and the Rumpus. Emma holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Cincinnati. She has one daughter, one husband, three dogs, one cat, and one horse.