How Creative Writing Can Set You Free

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to words. Strung together and paired with pictures, words introduced me to new worlds. The stories taught me to exercise my own imagination and ask, “what if?” in response to the mundane and the absurd.

As a young child, I sat in my parents’ laps as they re-read my favorite stories. When I learned to read for myself, I would snuggle up on my daybed for hours with my books. As I learned to write, I began to draft up my own stories–from simple interactions with the family pets to the adventures of sentient fruit superheroes, I fell in love with the craft. To this day, writing is one of the few activities where I can effortlessly discover flow and completely lose track of the time.

Some serious health issues over the last year have slowed me down and forced me to take inventory of what matters. Interestingly, writing is the one task that I’ve gravitated towards, even on those days where I only last a few hours. Writing is deeply engaging and therapeutic for me, to the extend that I feel the shackles loosen just a bit every time I pick up a pen. I’m sure other writers might agree.

Whether you write a free-form stream-of-consciousness journal entry, a fictionalized memoir, emotion-laden poetry, or a list of things that make you grateful, creative writing has the power to set you free.

How Creative Writing Can Set You Free

Creative Writing Fosters Self-Awareness

Writing helps you come to know yourself, allowing and exploration of both internal experiences and external circumstances. Each of us is a complex, multi-dimensional creature. Writing gives us access to all those facets of ourselves, obvious and unseen.

Writing is a mirror, reflecting back your deeper truth, your heart’s desire, and your blind spots. Self-inquiry through writing help you discover aspects of your character and better understand your motivations. It excavates and examines the life experiences that shaped your personality and made you who you are today.

Creative Writing Heals You

Writing helps your mind detox from its own chaos, and clear out any negative energy that is stuck in your body. We all carry the residue of unfulfilled emotions and experiences, as well as the hidden traumas that haven’t yet healed. Writing has the power to transform this pain into art.

Writing offers us a safe space in which we can let go of the stories that no longer work, or at least test this process of letting go. Creative exercises allow us to release our disappointments, losses, heartache, and demons. Writing uses the fires of life to empower you, rather than destroy you.

Creative Writing Exercises Your Imagination

Writing gives your a new blank page, both literally and figuratively. Each time you sit down with your pen or your keyboard, you have a second chance to write your story–one of aliveness, self-awareness, and passion. Your story needn’t be based on what hasn’t worked in the past, but what could work if you are willing to move forward.

It can be easier to allow yourself freedom on paper when it’s to scary to take action in “real” life. Your notebook (or computer screen) offer the freedom to make mistakes. Writing is a space of play and make-believe where simple “art” and “words” can initiates you to a truer, more creative reality.

Creative Writing Boosts Your Communication Skills

Creative writing exercises both side of the brain equally, combining the intellectual and analytical with the creative and intuitive. You can’t easily separate thought from language; your language thus affects and determines thoughts, which in turn create your reality. As such, the limits of your language–and overall communication–are the limits of your thinking, and the limits of your world.

The better you can express yourself, the richer, deeper, and more filled with possibilities your human experience becomes. Practice makes progress, and–when it comes to creative writing–practice opens up new possibilities.

Creative Writing Prompts You To Take Action

Writing is the beginning of doing. Writing is the safest and wisest creative action you can take to turn any idea into reality. In writing about life, you start creating footsteps that you’ll later follow through your actions and experiences. These actions will evolve into habits and a lifestyle. In the grand scheme of things, you can shape your entire life to the likeness of your dreams, and it all begins with a word.

Through every turn of fate, creative writing give you the power to take charge of your story. As long as you still have a pulse, your must keep recreating yourself, with every word you write and with every breath you take.