“Writing by Prescription”: Creative Writing as Therapy and Personal Development

Abstract

This chapter investigates how-to books on creative “life writing” for therapy, transformative learning, and personal development, in short, therapeutic writing. This subgenre of writing advice is situated in two different domains with psychology and pedagogy on the one hand, and life writing and creative writing on the other hand. After a brief overview of the history of therapeutic writing, we focus on Jessica Kingsley Publishers (JKP), a leading international niche publisher in the field of neurological and cognitive differences. JKP offers a combination of popular-science books, memoirs, and self-help publications, as well as a series of how-to books on writing for therapy or personal development. By this specific grouping of genres and formats, JKP turns its readers into writers and also guides the process of writing by setting out standards for narratives about neurological illness and disability, both in content and form. Combining both textual and contextual analysis, we examine the advice oeuvres of three JKP authors, Gillie Bolton, Kate Thompson, and Celia Hunt, to see how they relate to the therapeutic and self-help ethos as well as to more literary forms of creative writing, and how they negotiate the ideas of becoming a writer through craft, therapy, and self-expression.

Narrative Matters: Write the pain away – creative writing therapy for young people

“…Van Goidsenhoven and Masschelein (2021) suggest that, ‘Workshops can be organized as one‐to‐one sessions, or as groups, led by a writing facilitator who can also be a professional author, a creative writing teacher, as well as a clinician, a health practitioner such as a nurse, a social worker, or therapist. TW can be embedded within another therapeutic trajectory, or it can serve as a therapy on its own'.…”

“…Over the past four decades there has been increasing interest in its theory and practice. It is a heterogenous field with many disciplines, involving 'a variety of professions, sites, approaches, and goals' (Van Goidsenhoven & Masschelein, 2021). Techniques range from narrative and psychotherapeutic models of counselling to more informal or intuitive styles of practice.…”