Right Here, Write Now

Keeping a diary could keep you healthy.

"In one of their studies, Pennebaker and Seagal asked groups of students to write about an assigned topic for 15 minutes on four consecutive days. Later in the year, the students were asked about their health: the students who had written about emotional topics had far fewer doctors' visits.

One way to increase these health benefits is to learn how to write more fluidly and with less angst and frustration. When you're engaged with what you're doing, the rest of the world recedes.

The Write Ritual

Constraints and fears may add up to what is called writer's block. It can happen to anyone, but successful writers have learned not to panic. Here are some suggestions that may help you reframe your nonwriting periods and figure out what you need to do before continue writing:

- Set reasonable goals. Giving yourself a daunting task, such as "I will write the story of my life and appear on Oprah," is antithetical to the writing process. It is better to trivialize the task and realize that no single writing session really matters.
- Increase your knowledge of your subject. Search the Internet or go to the library to look for more details you can add to your story.
- Take risks. When Suzanne Greenberg, an assistant professor at California State University at Long Beach, researched risk-taking in creative writing, she found that many people are afraid of the repercussions of saying something honest. "It's an emotional stretch to really look at life and see all its gray areas," she says. Remember: Even though writing can sometimes feel risky, you're not really risking anything in the writing. Take a chance.
- Visualize your ideal reader. Don't picture an old boyfriend saying, "Who'd want to read that stuff?" Instead, imagine a writing buddy or a good friend who appreciates the efforts you make and never puts you down.
- Find a ritual or routine to help you through the process. Sometimes the hardest part of writing is deciding if it's worth the effort this time. But if you simply follow a pattern, it becomes automatic. As mystery author Sue Grafton explains, "I think part of the issue is presenting yourself for the task. So I show up at my desk at 9 o'clock every morning. I think your internal process needs to be geared to the fact that you will show up for work at a certain time every day."
- Remain focused on what's important and filter out irrelevant things. "The feeling that people have of being overwhelmed is verifiable in the lab," says Ronald Kellogg, Ph.D., of the University of Missouri at Rolla and author of The Psychology of Writing and Cognitive Psychology. To eliminate the confusion, Kellogg recommends outlining and prioritizing your ideas.
- Organize your thoughts. If you find yourself struggling to get words down, you might try an informal organizing device such as clustering, where you splatter information about your topic on a large sheet of paper.
- Change something about what you're doing. If you're stuck, try to write something else, perhaps in a different genre. Or find an anecdote that makes you laugh. Putting this down on paper may revive your interest in the subject."

- Psychology Today