As promised, more on the idea of conflict and writing to heal. I like to think that whenever we encounter conflict, whether it's a person who cut us off on the way home today or it's a long-standing grudge that we've carried for years, writing through the conflict can be a way to make sense of it.
There's something healing about putting your own responses into the character's response (or what we wished we had done). We see in black and white the proof of what we did (or wish we had done) and we can either be proud of it or ashamed. If proud, great. You stared conflict straight in the eye and didn't lose your integrity. If ashamed, then you can further analyze why that was the case.
Writing should evoke emotion, as I wrote before. So if that emotion, evoked by words, can kill another bird with the same stone, i.e., make you think about something you said or did or didn't, then it's all the more powerful in the life of the word-writer.
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Very true. Excellent post. So many people have tried to get me to write about my daughter's seizure disorder when she was a baby, but I've not been able to go there. The closest I came was my sequel to Highland Blessings, which is coming out May 2010. It's a Scottish Medieval (1483) about a heroine who has a seizure disorder. In it I explore how people in that century would react to her--as they didn't know what a seizure was back then.
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Both comments and questions are welcome. I hope you enjoyed your time on the couch today.