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Creative Writing – When the Words Come Tumbling Down

by Annette Young

Creative writing can be a wonderfully relaxing pastime but more than that, it can be therapeutic too and used to enrich your writing in ways than you cannot imagine unless you connect with your buried emotions. We all have moments of sadness and emotional pain – whether through grief, relationship breakdowns or simply moments when life frustratingly goes wrong. Trapped emotions can be damaging – we can remain stagnant if not careful.Life throws a myriad of obstacles and often unwarranted events in our way and this pain can intensify and remain trapped within.

If you want to use creative writing as a type of therapy, then pour your heart out, get every emotion and frustration out of your system. Don’t worry about the result, it doesn’t have to read well and it shouldn’t. You are capturing every ounce of feeling, releasing the injustices, the pain, regret and anger. The moment may be intense, it might be painful, but afterwards comes exhausted release whether your emotions are newly raw or, have been contained for years.

When you are finally done, read back over your writing and try to make sense of it. Note the words used, any disjointed sentences, the purity of feeling – good or bad. Not only will you feel a sense of release, you will have every aspect of your inner turmoil captured on paper. It may not make for comfortable reading, but believe me, it is better out than in. Place the paper to one side, hide it away and leave it for a few weeks or months until you feel ready to review it.  When my mother died some years ago now, it was the single most wounding moment of my life. She’d battled for years against illness after illness, but I was convinced she was invincible. When she went into hospital for something minor, (or so we’d thought) and never came out again, the shock was overwhelming. I remained in a blocked state for at least 6 months. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t feel, I simply went through the motions of life.  I had been her carer for a long time so the bonds were strong. Suddenly, I had so much time on my hands yet I was trapped in a bubble of disbelief.

Friends told me to not write, they said I would always relate my writing with the pain of that time, but, I had to.It was the only release I had and something that I could tap into easily. Initially, it enabled me to block out the feelings even more, I went back to work, I took on new writing projects – it was my job, but my emotions were carefully shut away. I wrote with the confidence of one who could do a job without giving too much of myself. I got by.  One day , suddenly, out of the blue, I felt ready and then the words came tumbling out, they flowed for page after page. I felt the anger release and the healing begin. So you see, I strongly believe that by capturing pure emotion in its rawest form, it is so beneficial to our health, well-being and sanity, but more, by being able to feel so deeply, it makes us able to write with heart.

Creative writing when done well, can bring tears of sadness or joy to the readers’ minds. Beautifully crafted words written with sincerity evoke deep feeling in others, I don’t think I have ever written so well following the release of my emotions. Now when I write emotional scenes, I give myself up to it, so each word carries a little bit of me with it. It’s the only way to write with conviction.

Whether creative writing is a hobby or you would like it to become a career one day, you need to allow your experiences, painful or joyous, to come out – never keep feelings trapped inside. Not only can writing be your therapeutic friend, your emotions will enable you to connect with your readers on such an intrinsic level that they will never forget your words.

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