Updated: Apr 1, 2022
If you’ve ever visited my website, you have likely noticed that I am a volunteer for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, NAMI. I mention it on my About page and I have written several blog articles about mental health-related topics that are posted on my Blog page, but which were originally posted on the websites for NAMI.org and Life At The Intersection, my friend Terri Lyon’s creative activism site.
Like millions of other families in this country, there is mental illness in mine—diagnosed depression and anxiety.
For those who are diagnosed with mental health disorders or syndromes, treatment most often comes in two forms: psychiatric medications and psychotherapy (one-on-one talk therapy and peer support groups).
So, why in a blog for my editing business am I taking you down this road? As an editor, blogger, and writer myself, I wondered how best to merge these two worlds—my advocacy for those with mental health disorders and my skill with words.
That quest inspired me to educate myself about journaling. I found that journaling comes in many flavors—gratitude, art, prayer, dream, travel, and so on. But with a focus on mental health, I’ve chosen these three styles to discuss: therapeutic, reflective, and expressive. Let me share what I’ve learned.
What Is Therapeutic Journaling?
Therapeutic journaling differs from traditional journal or diary writing, which involves recording the details of daily events. Instead, difficult life events and challenges are written about and discussed with a mental health practitioner for the purpose of working through pain and trauma and moving toward self-confidence and recovered mental health.
Therapeutic journaling allows you to come to a deeper understanding of yourself and gain a different perspective on these difficulties. By identifying patterns in thinking, you see your struggles in a new light, allowing you to break the patterns.
Note: Therapeutic journaling sits in the wheelhouse of trained therapists, psychologists, LCSWs, and clinical settings. The type of writing that is done is not dramatically different from expressive or reflective journaling. The distinguishing aspect is that the journal entries are read and analyzed as part of the writer’s mental health treatment.
In summary: Therapeutic journaling is about delving deeper into your life’s experiences to make sense of them, learn from them, and gain new perspectives on your challenges. Writing about your thoughts and emotions provides opportunities for healing and growth.
Expressive vs. Reflective Journaling
I found this description of these two journaling styles in a February 2014 article on a website for the Education Resource Group. It is meant as a classroom writing assignment:
Expressive writing is personal and shows your thoughts, ideas, and feelings about an experience. Reflective writing goes beyond just sharing an experience, requiring the author to look back at the past and apply what he or she has learned to the future.
For some, the distinction between expressive and reflective journaling might be a case of splitting hairs. Let’s see if I can bring the purpose of each into focus.
What is Expressive Journaling?
Expressive journaling was popularized by Dr. James Pennebaker of the University of Texas, Austin. According to Pennebaker in his book Expressive Writing: Words That Heal, expressive writing promotes physical, psychological, and behavioral health.
Expressive writing, explains Pennebaker, is not so much about what happened during your day but how you feel about what happened. By regularly documenting your emotional reactions to life events, you are able to identify problematic thinking patterns that might not be serving you well.
In summary: Expressive writing is not about what happened but how you feel about what happened. Okay, so what’s the difference between expressive writing and therapeutic writing? The primary difference is that expressive writing looks at your current daily life, while therapeutic writing focuses on memories of past trauma or injury and how they detrimentally affect your thinking now.
What is Reflective Journaling?
Reflective journaling is the process of writing down your daily reflections (hence the name) about something positive or negative that happened to you. By thinking back on the day’s events, reflective journaling lets you put into words what you have learned from your experiences.
In summary: A reflective journal encourages you to think about all you experienced in the course of your day and decide what learnings you can come away with. It’s a reflection on your behavior and the behavior of others in relation to you. Whether an experience was good or bad, there are lessons to be learned.
Tips for Journal Writing
Regardless of which type of journaling you choose, follow these guidelines to get the most from the practice:
Choose a quiet, private place with no distractions.
Write at the same time or as close to the same time as possible each day you journal.
Write daily if possible or, at least, several times during the week. The more often you journal, the better you will become at it and the clearer a picture you will get of yourself.
Use whatever writing medium appeals to you: a pencil or pen that feels good in your hand, a special notebook or journal that is yours solely for the purpose of your regular writing practice, a laptop or desktop if you’re firmly rooted in technology. The choice is yours. The medium does not matter, just the practice.
Write quickly and don’t stop to edit or correct. Don’t over-think it. Just let the words spill out.
Pitfalls of Journaling
At the risk of sounding like a silly fuddy-duddy, journaling can have its downsides. Here are a few behaviors to be on the alert for.
Journaling can dredge up all kinds of emotions and might cause an outpouring of negative feelings and memories. It should never drive someone to a place of despair. Sharing your journals with a mental health practitioner, a journal writing group, or even just friends can keep you balanced and keep your memories and feelings in perspective.
Don’t write excessively, to the exclusion of other activities. Journaling should add insight and growth to your life, not rob you of other life experiences.
Over-analyzing your journal entries will not lead to improving your life. You can analyze your words to death. Read your entries a day or more after you’ve written them with an eye toward planning, problem-solving, and decision-making. Journaling is meant to be a complement to your life’s activities.
Benefits of Journaling
Journalist and therapist Kara Mayer Robinson, in an article for WebMD, summarized the many reasons that journaling is beneficial. Journaling…
Promotes self-awareness. You will get to know yourself better.
Lets you take charge of your emotions and worries. See them. Name them. Take control of them.
Shifts your viewpoint about yourself and those around you. You will gain a broader perspective.
Creates a positive opportunity for healing and recovering self-worth. Whether you write in a journal about problems or gratitude, a healing process happens.
Your Comments and Stories, Please
I welcome comments about my descriptions of these journal writing styles and the usefulness of one form of journaling over the other. If journaling in any form has improved your life, I’d love to hear about it.
In addition to working as a nonfiction and creative nonfiction editor and writing coach, I am co-author, with Dr. Terri Lyon, of the book Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism: No activism degree required—use your unique skills to change the world. Visit my website page Make a Difference and Dr. Lyon’s activism website Life At The Intersection to learn more about Make a Difference, including how to place bulk orders.
Updated: Apr 1, 2022
Don’t believe the naysayers. The long-form essay is not dead. It is alive and well, but you have to know where to find it. Long-form personal essays are a mainstay of publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Sun Magazine, Creative Nonfiction Magazine, Dame Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, Slate, newspapers such as The New York Times and The Boston Globe, and too many other publications and websites to mention.
Reading long-form personal essays requires a patience and time commitment that stands in direct contrast to the itty-bitty nibbles we are served on social media and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sounds bites of 24-hour television newscasts.
What is a Personal Essay?
I have written about personal essays before, in my blog article of July 23, 2019, “With Creative Nonfiction, Reality Meets Great Storytelling.” Truthfully, I dedicated one paragraph to talking about personal essays, because the article was kind of a scatter-shot look at the genres within CNF.
So then, what is a personal essay? It is notoriously difficult to nail down but here goes: a personal essay is a combination of a super-short memoir, a touch of biography or autobiography, a pinch of journalism, and a slice of compelling nonfiction storytelling. Got that? No? Alright, how about this—
A personal essay is about a topical subject discussed from a personal perspective, yours or someone else’s. A personal essay must have, at its core, a discussion of an event, person, or situation to which the essayist adds personal experience and a unique point of view.
Personal essay is related to the op-ed, too. I’ll go into that in another article.
Examples of Great Personal Essays
In the event that this definition has only muddied the waters, it might be best to direct you to some great essays written by some great essayists. These are in no particular order, no particular category.
After the Shooting: A Year in the Life of Gwen Woods, by Jaeah Lee, The California Sunday Magazine, August 3, 2017
My Family’s Slave, by Alex Tizon, The Atlantic, June 2017
A Rattle with Death in Yosemite, by Kyle Dickman, Outside magazine, June 20,2018
Everything You Know About Obesity is Wrong, by Michael Hobbes, Highline, September 19, 2018
I’ve randomly chosen essays that have been recognized for their outstanding quality. If you want to read others, visit longform.org. There you will find hundreds of quality personal essays. Categories include Health, Crime, Science, Politics, Arts, Business, Tech, and Sports. Don’t be intimidated. Get a feel for the purpose and intent of the long-form essay and give it a go.
A Good Length
The word count of the essay varies depending upon the publication. Suggested word counts for the top 20 magazines, newspapers, and websites that use personal essays span 800 to 15,000 words. The average is 800–1,200 words. Review the submission criteria of your target publications before you write. No need to construct a brilliant 3,000-word essay if the publication you have written for has a word-count limit of 1,000.
If you are an accomplished writer with name recognition, magazines and big-city newspapers will snatch up your essays. But if this is your first foray into getting published, Writer’s Digest suggests your chances of success are better if you submit essays in the 500- to 900-word range. A word count of 800–850 seems like the sweet spot for a newbie essayist.
Define to Impress
Tell your friends and colleagues that you hope to be a published long-form essayist. When they inevitably ask, “What is a long-form essay?” impress with the reply, “A universal truth with a personal perspective.” That’ll get their attention. Now, write!
In addition to working as a nonfiction and creative nonfiction editor and writing coach, I am co-author, with Dr. Terri Lyon, of the book Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism: No activism degree required—use your unique skills to change the world. Visit my website page Make a Difference and Dr. Lyon’s activism website Life At The Intersection to learn more about Make a Difference, including how to place bulk orders.
Updated: May 6, 2020
Recently, I was giving my PowerPoint presentation on memoir writing to a small audience of residents at a retirement community. When I said that memoir is a form of creative nonfiction, gentle laughter trickled around the room. “What?” I said. “Creative nonfiction? Does that sound weird?” Some thought I’d made up the term. One woman said what the others were thinking—creative nonfiction sounds like an oxymoron. How can writing be creative and nonfiction simultaneously?
Poor misunderstood creative nonfiction. Let’s explore this genre further.
Creative + Nonfiction
Everyone knows the distinction between the two major categories of writing: fiction and nonfiction. In regard to writing, creative typically means that people, places, and events in the prose have been invented. Therefore, fiction comprises imaginary events and imaginary people in an invented story. Creative writing requires using one’s imagination to craft every aspect of the story and its characters.
Nonfiction is writing based on facts, real events, and real people. Nonfiction itself has two main categories: informative nonfiction and literary nonfiction. When most people think of nonfiction, they think of informative nonfiction books or articles: self-help, how-to, academic, scientific, technical, and more. Creative nonfiction is literary nonfiction.
What do you get when you merge the mechanics of creative writing with factuality of literary nonfiction? Creative nonfiction, or CNF. Here are a few of the CNF categories:
Personal essays
Memoir
Journals and diaries
Literary journalism
Lyric essays
Nature, city, and travel writing
In its simplest terms, CNF involves the application of the elements of creative writing—plot, conflict and resolution, character development, setting, voice, dialogue, and point of view—with the telling of true events featuring real people and places.
Personal Essay
The two most closely related of these CNF categories are the personal essay and memoir.
Personal essays are usually written in the first person, as are memoir. But the focus of a personal essay is a topic (or subject) pertinent to the author and, unlike memoir, that topic is current or recent. The subject matter of a personal essay is typically a single contemporary issue as opposed to the recounting of a life event or series of related events that constitutes a memoir.
Memoir
This category of CNF is often referred to interchangeably with autobiography. Memoir and autobiography are not the same. The simplest distinction I can offer is this:
An autobiography is the story of a life.
A memoir is a story from a life.
Autobiographies explore the details of a person’s life in chronological order. You would read an autobiography to learn about the person. Autobiography is not a form of creative nonfiction.
Memoir, while a story from a person’s life, is constructed in the same way fictional prose is. But the plot (or story) is factual, the main character is the author, the other characters are real people from the author’s life, as is the setting (the locations where the story take place). The purpose of a memoir is to reveal what a person has learned after what they have been through.
With a personal essay and a memoir, the author’s challenges, struggles, and failures are laid bare. It’s one thing to create a fictional character who makes mistakes and suffers pain and loss. But with these two forms of CNF, the author must have the courage to expose their good and bad times.
Literary Journalism
While journalism is about being objective and factual, literary journalism takes the position that people cannot be objective because anything they have seen, heard, or experienced has been changed through their personal, subjective filters. For this reason, literary journalism uses the techniques of journalism (observation, interviews, and reviews) to look beyond the straightforward facts to probe meaning outside of the facts.
Lyric Essay
The lyric essay is much like the personal essay; it deals with a topic that has affected the author. As the word lyrical means musical, melodic, or poetic, this type of writing relies heavily on descriptive imagery to tell the story.
Other Categories
Journals and diaries are written to document the day-to-day events of a person’s life. But, as you know if you have kept a journal or diary, feelings are a vital component of these, and observation and reflection are welcomed.
Nature, city, and travel writing are popular forms of CNF. Again, the author describes the facts of the environment, but must make the reader share the experience of the places. Reality mingles with subjectivity and the result entertains and informs.
Merging Boundaries
What distinguishes a piece as creative nonfiction is writing that merges the real (the facts) with the mechanics of storytelling; real people, places, and events told in the style of fiction, employing character development, setting, voice, and tone.
If the author writes a piece of CNF, which deals with something and someone real, they have the freedom to take the storytelling in any direction they please.
CNF as a Career
Have you written creative nonfiction? Are you hoping to be published as an author of one of these CNF categories? Personally, I specialize is memoir, teaching memoir writing to residents of senior living communities. Please share your experiences with me.
Till next time. keep it creatively real. #creativenonfiction #personalessay #memoir
In addition to my business, Strike The Write Tone, I am an editor, book coach, and ghostwriter for The Cheerful Word, a memoir publisher in Hendersonville, North Carolina.