The writers’ path can often be quite lonely – it is also littered with moments of great joy and the end of the road can bring up a whole gamut of emotions – from elation and pride at your new “baby” through to a sense of anti-climax, or even loss.
This whole journey can be used to great effect as a therapy and as a tool for personal growth and development.
When you start writing, you will experience a whole raft of emotions – excitement, euphoria and sometimes a sense of foreboding at the task you have undertaken. Emotions from your childhood – lack of self worth or the memory of the odd jibe from a teacher or classmate might surface.
You’ll experience and notice coincidences. You write about something and then it happens in your life. From my own experience and that of working now with many writers, the diagram below shows a typical journey for a writer. As well as moments of enlightenment, events and circumstances can get in the way and seem to conspire against you. This is just for your learning and personal evolution.
At the end, one thing is guaranteed, you will become a different person, your book will open new doors for you AND at least two new ideas will come in for books you can write next.
Note that this writers’ journey can be used constructively as an adjunct to therapy. If somebody has experienced trauma – e.g. PTSD, an accident, a bereavement, an illness – writing about the experience directly or even something else completely unrelated, seems to have marvellous therapeutic effect.
For this reason, we combine our conventional and practical authors’ mentoring service with personal evolutionary mentoring, block clearing, hypnotherapy, Time Line Therapy and even Past Life Regression.
We also get requests from many writers who have started a book and have got stuck. In virtually all cases, the block is not about the plot or the book itself but something that has arisen in the writers’ world that they have to deal with in order to move on.
If you are a writer stuck in a rut or want to learn more about the process, contact me
Filed under: Articles | Tagged: anti-climax, catharsis, cleansing, elation, gamut of emotions, Hypnotherapy, negative emotions, Past Life Regression, ptsd, Time Line Therapy, trauma, Writers' Block, writing as therapy
A common carthartic writing tool is keeping a journal, or just a diary. For someone in a crisis, just jotting simple things down each day can help keep a hold on time, place and normal things around them, as an anchor. Keeping a dream journal can be very illuminating. A good percentage of dreams can be pre-cognitive and reveal guidance, although when in an emotional low, dreams can seem like chaos and confusion – but writing about it externalises and releases it. Perhaps the majority of books are based on the writer’s memories, personal life and people they have met.