Writing and Healing Prompts
Like many of these rooms, writing and healing prompts needs a bit of housekeeping attention. I initially started out, years ago, numbering prompts—and then at some point I stopped numbering. Keep the numbering? Let it go? Organize the writing prompts by category?
The first 44 prompts I posted were numbered and are listed here with links.
Below these are the newer ones—not numbered.
1. Designing a Healing Retreat
2. Freewriting
3. The Body as a Healing Place
4. The Easiest Writing and Healing Exercise Ever
6. Discovering Needs and Desires
7. Has Writing Ever Changed Your Life?
8. Buy a Box
10. Conjuring New Images and Metaphors for Healing
11. A Scavenger Hunt
12. Falling Apart
13. Lifelines
16. A Walk on a Strange Street
17. Steps for Making a Written Collage
19. The Good Part in Other People’s Stories
20. Finding a Benefit in Adversity
21. Meanwhile
22. Once Upon a Time
23. What If the Moon’s a Balloon?
24. Deciding Who to Bring on the Train
25. A Memo at Your Breakfast Plate
26. Figuring Out Where One Is on the Map
27. What Am I Here For? (part one) // What Am I Here For? (part two)
28. Consulting with the Wizard of Oz
31. Writing a Letter of Resignation
32. Keeping a Process Journal: A Long-Term Solution to Writer’s Block
33. Imagining Refuge
34. The Next Step
35. My Favorite Piece of Writing Advice from Natalie Goldberg
36. A Letter for Breaking Through Resistance
37. A Conversation with a Companion
38. I’ve Always Meant to Tell You: A Different Kind of Mother’s Day Greeting
40. A Clean Copy
41. Reading to Discover What You Most Want to Write
42. Making Peace with the Body
44. Rest Hour
Is Shifting One’s Point of View a Healing Habit?
In 2003, James Pennebaker and R.S. Campbell published an article that carried the intriguing title, “The Secret Life of Pronouns”. The authors proposed, based on the analysis of thousands of texts, that flexibility in a person’s use of pronouns when writing about painful memories is associated with improved health. This was not a predicted finding. It emerged when Pennebaker and associates persisted in asking the question: Why it is that writing about emotional topics results in better physical health? What actually happens? The most consistent finding prior to this...
When Writing Takes Us Outside Our Own Skins
The thread this month (though this may or may not be apparent) is the way that coming at things from a different perspective—a new angle—can sometimes lead to good things. And when I think about looking at things from a new angle—from a fresh perspective—one of the things that comes to mind for me is something I learned from college freshmen when I first started teaching them. When I first started teaching writing, I wanted the students in my classes to care about what they were writing. So I...
Fiction Writing as a Prescription for Grief?
Last week there was an interesting article in our local paper, the Winston Salem-Journal, entitled “Lee Smith’s Pain,” by Martha Waggoner. The article describes how Lee Smith, the novelist, now living in Hillsborough, North Carolina, found writing to be a remedy for grief. But—and I think this is the interesting part—she didn’t write directly about her grief. She found a remedy in writing fiction. Lee Smith is the author of several novels, including Black Mountain Breakdown, Family Linen, and The Last Girls. A little over three years ago now,...
Wild Geese: An Image for Writing and Healing
Three times in the last month I have come across, in three different places, the poem, “Wild Geese,” by Mary Oliver. After the third time, I thought this might be a poem I ought to pay some attention to. The poem opens with the speaker telling us, her reader, that we do not have to be good, we do not have to walk on our knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. And, then, this line: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body...
Have You Gotten to the Good Part Yet?
The theme for this month—Figuring Out the Good Part—springs from an essay, “The Good Part,” written by Dennis Covington and found in the anthology, The Healing Circle, which I’ve mentioned here before. Covington’s essay is funny and sharp. It asks excellent questions. In fact, the entire essay constitutes a kind of question in and of itself—a question that’s terribly relevant, I think, to writing and healing and to the way we try to make sense of the stories of our lives. The essay begins with a pair of Florsheim...