The Writing and Wellbeing Walk

Transcript of Helen Sword’s podcast episode The Writing and Wellbeing Walk

Hi, I'm Helen Sword from helensword.com. Welcome to Swordswings, my podcast series for writers in motion. Whether you're out walking or riding in a car, or on a train or a bus, or just pottering around in your kitchen, this recording will help you move yourself and your writing someplace new.

Today we revisit my WriteSpace special event on writing and wellbeing with Sophie Nicholls, which dates back to April of 2023. Sophie's a poet, best-selling novelist, and associate professor of learning and teaching in creative writing at Teesside University in the UK. She also has a wonderful Substack newsletter called Restorative Writing, which is devoted to writing motivated by mindfulness, pleasure, and well-being. So let's jump into this excerpt in which we discuss how writing can help us understand ourselves and others, collaborate, innovate, and grow.

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Sophie: This kind of work is happening all over the place, all over the world now. People are running writing workshops. They're using writing to explore their own feelings and emotions. You know, journaling courses are everywhere. And that's great in one sense. But something I feel strongly about is that there isn't necessarily a rigorous framework for that work.

And I think if we think about doing therapy, if we think about working with a therapist, we would expect that that person would have some sort of training, some kind of experience, have done some work on themselves, have a sort of lens through which to understand what they're doing and working with their clients.

Whereas you could walk into a writing workshop anywhere in the world tomorrow, and actually, you don't really know anything about who that person is running that workshop. So that's one side of it. And then also, because I've spent 25 years teaching writing, not necessarily with a wellbeing focus, but for example, you know, undergraduates at university, people on an MA coming from all kinds of different backgrounds. We start to talk about our stories. We start to share our stories. And this may happen even if it's not necessarily a writing course. So I've worked with students in education or healthcare. People start to write and things come up for them. Things surface, sometimes difficult things, sometimes things that are really shocking and surprising to the person themselves. How do we help people to manage that? And what do we really know about the research around writing and wellbeing? And the answer is not that much, frankly, you know. So these are the things that interest me.

And I have taken a psychodynamic approach to this work. That's not the only way to do it. But I just really felt that I wanted to create my own framework within which I felt that I was taking a certain approach. It's that word rigor, which I know, Helen, you have your own relationship with too, you know, and I just think it's very important. What are the contraindications for writing? Is it okay to invite somebody to write about very difficult experiences? when that person might actually have some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder that even they don't actually know about or are not aware of.

So all of these questions I think are very important and that's what I'm trying to address.

Helen: Fascinating. So what kinds of people are doing your Writing and Wellbeing MA?

Sophie: So the Writing and Wellbeing MA, it's interesting because because it's set up within a certain institutional structure, shall we say, you know, there are constraints. At the moment, the focus is mainly on people who want to explore their own relationship with writing and wellbeing, because ethically, I feel that's the only way we can do it.

In the future, I would love to be able to take people who are working with others now in their work, perhaps using writing, this could be people in medicine it could be people in social work could be people in working as therapists as occupational therapists in community groups in policy making and help them to create their own frameworks for doing this work with with rigor and with safety that's sort of my goal so I'm just I'm sort of I've taken the first steps towards that but we're not there yet I don't feel.

So the people who are coming in now, they're kind of like people who are doing creative writing for their own fulfillment, not necessarily to become teachers of creative writing. And to explore that relationship. You know, I think often people know, just like I did when I was much younger, that there's something about writing that is helpful to them, but they don't quite understand what that is. And they need a bit of guidance about how to explore that. And I would say, you know, Let's explore that as safely as we ca! So writing with wellbeing isn't therapy. For me personally, I think it's so helpful to do this kind of work, you know, to augment a therapeutic process. If that's where you find yourself in your life, you know, if you have big issues or things that are bothering you, things that are just really difficult for you, then therapy is very helpful. And writing can be part of that process. It doesn't necessarily replace it. But there are some really interesting things about writing that we can do on our own safely, I think, provided that we approach them in this particular holistic way.

It's about being curious, you know, “oh, OK, that's what's coming up for me,” which is self-compassionate, as opposed to “oh my goodness, I am just writing and this is awful! And I hate everything I'm writing and what am I going to do about it?!”

Helen: So, yeah we're really getting into it we're getting into the nitty-gritty of it now I think. Because when you say writing and well-being, that end doesn't really tell you about the relationship, does it? So on the one hand, it can be writing that is used therapeutically towards advancing or developing well-being and you've already pointed to some of the little snakes there, the fishhook, that you may undertake what you think is going to be therapeutic writing and it actually ends up torpedoing, you know, your psyche or whatever. The thing that I hear, of course, in my work with the Writespace community, with academics around the world, is the way in which the pressures of academic writing undermine their well-being, which seems like a different topic, but obviously a related one. And one, you could be saying writing towards well-being, and the other, you could say writing kind of against, well, you know, writing as an impediment to well-being. So you've been involved mostly with the first of those things, but I'm sure the second issue must come up for you all the time, just as a teacher at university and in your own pressures, you know, that you have as an academic and that kind of work. Is that something you can talk about?

Sophie: Absolutely. I think I understand that distinction that you have just made, Helen, in the following way. It's the difference between writing as process and writing as product. And I think that especially if you are an academic and in the UK, where we have the REF (the Research Exercise Framework), this intensive pressure to produce, produce, produce. It's all about outputs. We call them outputs…products. And this does not see or recognise the value of process at all. But the irony there, of course, is that without the messy process, without learning how to tolerate it, that messiness, that uncertainty that we really have to allow ourselves to be in if we're going to make anything, we won't get this product, this output. And I think that when I started to do this work, there was a lot of snobbery and snootiness, frankly, around the idea of, writing and wellbeing or writing and personal development. I would go to conferences where people would say, ‘well, you know, you're not actually helping people to be better writers, are you? Because you're just getting them to write about their dead granny or their cat or, you know, like great.’ And honestly, I really, I had people say things like that to me on panels! You know, ‘you're just completely irresponsible. You're just making people feel good about themselves and they might not be very good writers at all.’ Wow! You know?

Helen: I've had that too I had that exact thing in a review of my early proposal for Writing with Pleasure. ‘Oh you know some people already have too much fun writing, so much fun, yeah I mean that's not right I think. If you want to be a proper writer or a proper academic, you know, you have to be much more serious about these things…’ So, yes, I mean, when I was younger, I used to really struggle with that. Now that I'm, you know, an older menopausal woman, I'm just like, oh stuff that!

Actually, I really don't care. I know that that's a load of rubbish. And, you know, I just I laugh in the face with that now, because anybody who has worked on a piece of academic writing knows that you cannot sit down and write your perfect outline and then just produce a perfect piece of work. It doesn't work like that.

Sophie: And I think that expectation that to be successful writers, that is what we are doing, is so damaging, so undermining. So more and more since I've been inhabiting this world of academia, I've realized that there's such huge value in helping people to slow down and allow themselves to be in that messiness, that process. The process is so important. The process will make you feel better as a human being, will make you feel better as a person, and it will help your writing. The two are so intertwined.

Helen: Except it won't necessarily help you feel better as a person, will it? If you've been acculturated to believe that messiness is bad, that being slow is bad. I mean, I encounter so many people, and I'm sure you do too, for whom the process is not joyful in any way. So it's not like saying, ‘oh, you just need to slow down and enjoy the process.’ And they're like, ‘I hate the process. Why would I want to slow down and spend even more time on something I hate so much?’

Sophie: Yes, that makes me so sad because it's part of this whole kind of machine that I think more and more we are living in. And it's not just academia, is it? You know, it's everywhere. I mean, on the one hand, you've got this pressure to produce very polished work right off the first draft. This ridiculous, crazy idea because we don't have enough time and we've got to fit writing a paper into a week because that's when we've got our research leave and, you know, and there's no headspace for that. And if you say to someone, ‘but why don't you just go for a walk and allow those ideas?’

‘Well, I can't because I've got to finish this because the deadline is Friday!’ So that's…I'm really aware of that reality and it's easy to dismiss that. On the other hand, we live in a world that is absolutely saturated with words or another word I hate, content. So, you know, we've got people kind of just pouring out all of their words, all of their ideas. And it feels like we have to process everything out loud. You don't need to do that. You can actually take a notebook and you can quietly, privately do some of that writing just for yourself. And that is so valuable.
It's just for you. You don't have to share it with anyone else.

Helen: Yeah, so I think for academics to be able to separate, even to just know that not every word you write has to be publishable. You know, if you think that every word you write, even if it's in a notebook, even if it's process writing, it's got to somehow, in some form, end up in your article. It's quite an impoverished way then of thinking about what you're doing, isn't it?

Sophie: It is. I think there's a really interesting concept here that people find helpful. I don't know, some of you might be aware of this idea of the implied reader, that everything that we write, in a sense, we are writing to someone, whether that someone is a part of ourselves or whether in our heads. We have a very strong sense of who our readership is. And some of the exercises that I encourage people to do are about slowing down and really becoming consciously aware of who all those people are that you're writing to inside your mind. And people have had real moments. I've done this with PhD students who've been really stuck.

They're like, ‘oh, my word. Now I know who those readers are in my head that are preventing me from writing.’ Because they're so critical, and they're so unkind. And it's, you know, and it's this teacher who told me 20 years ago that I was really rubbish. Or, you know, this great academic who I aspire to be, who I could never possibly come close to writing in the style of…all kinds of things happen. So I think just becoming aware of who we're writing to, even in our own minds. When I was maybe 11 or 12, I used to write my journal in italic handwriting. And I go back now and I feel so much tenderness to this young woman, not even young girl, who was madly in love with the Bronte sisters and probably wanted to be one. You know, I grew up near the Howarth Parsonage. And in this sense of a readership, in this supposedly journal or diary where I was writing about my worries and boys and stuff like body image and all that…in italic handwriting! Painstakingly! I think that's a great metaphor for what we all do. We're probably all still doing that now.

Helen: Is that true for everyone? Do you think everyone who writes or journals is writing for an implied reader? A reader who's other or for a future? Well, that's an interesting way of thinking.

Sophie: It's a good question for everybody here. Next time you're writing just for yourself in your journal, you know, maybe just really try to notice what's going on in your mind because I think it's very difficult to not do that even if we think that we're writing just for ourselves. Is there a part of ourselves listening to that other part writing? And already just… maybe not editing, perhaps we get good at letting go of that critical editor. But I think it's almost impossible to get past a sense of a part of you listening to another part writing as you write, particularly if you're interested in writing.

So then, I think the challenge is to cultivate a very kind, compassionate, supportive, constructive reader of yourself inside your mind and on the page. That, to me, seems more achievable than trying to imagine not having that sense of a reader of oneself.

Helen: Yeah, that's so interesting. I'm just thinking about my own journaling practice in this context. You know, at 14 or whatever, it was definitely, you know, dumping all the big emotions. And I'm sure there was something performative about it. I imagine there was something performative about it. And then, over the years as I had children, I realized that, you know, it's a very real possibility in a house with children that somebody is going to actually pick up your journal at some point and read it. And so I made a decision to — I wouldn't quite say that I edit for that reader, but it's more like I try to make it really boring for that reader.

So I don't actually write about my family members and the fight I had or something. I just write about stuff I want to remember a few years from now. But then when I go and I look back at things, the journal itself is so long and so boring that I think it's more of an aide de memoir, you know. It’s processing the emotions, but in, I suppose, a slightly redacted way. So maybe that is my implied reader, is that person who's reading my journal and I don't really want to give anything away.

Sophie: Isn't it interesting? You know, it's so... To me, this idea is so simple and yet so profound, this distinction between private and public writing. Another thing I've seen happening in academia is this idea of a learning journal. You know, when you do a course or when you qualify as a doctor or when you're training as a teacher or a nurse—so many professions now require students or professionals as part of their continuing development to keep these “journals” in inverted commas. And I say in inverted commas because when people are asked to keep them, they know that they are going to be read by somebody else.

So how can this possibly be a value to our own development? I mean, it could be of some value, but not in my opinion of true value if it's not private. So, you know, I did some work with a colleague, Joe Irving Walton at Teesside, where we took students on our teacher training courses and we said to them, ‘okay, you're going to keep a journal that is private, totally private for you. You're not going to be asked to share it with anyone else. At the end of the course, the reflective pieces that you have to submit, you can take from that journal and edit and shape if you like, or you can write something else.’ And we followed up with them. We evaluated that, and it was fascinating. They had such a transformation in the way that they felt about their own learning. Just by being given this private space in which we said, you know, ‘you have permission to write privately knowing that nobody else will ever read this about your journey through training to be a teacher.’ I mean, it's fascinating.

Helen: Yeah, well, it says a lot about how we evaluate and grade and all those sorts of things too. We're so untrusting, aren't we? You know, as a kind of teaching culture.

Sophie: But then, you know, as academics writing, we're doing that to ourselves, I would argue. You know, because we're part of that machine, part of that culture, we're actually depriving ourselves of that space to reflect and to really allow what we're feeling to surface.

And I think that so many of us actually really need the space to do that in order to then produce the beautiful outputs and the fantastic work. And, you know, I think they're interconnected.

Helen: Well, I've been fascinated in your newsletter how pretty much since the beginning of this year, I think, when you kind of came back after a really difficult year and started doing a weekly newsletter again, your fascination with writing in spirals. If you go to Sophie's Substack, there's a kind of gallery of all the images and, you know, an archive of all of these.

Sophie: It's just an interesting way of letting go.

Helen: Yeah, let yourself go into creativity, which feels like something a little bit different than letting yourself go into deep emotions. The two can, of course, work together, but the letting yourself go into creativity can also be incredibly just playful.

Sophie: Yeah, that's a good point too, Helen, because so you say letting go. So this is something I just started doing. So it's an unravelling spiral, which I find interesting. That kind of happened organically as I am letting go of things. So letting go versus letting go into creativity, so important because we have to have a container for this. So a notebook is a container or a course or a group could be a container. I really think we have to try to create containers inside our minds and externally in order to hold some of this process, because otherwise it just feels like we're falling apart.

The danger is that it's too scary for us to let go. It's too fragmented. It's too risky. So creating those containers both inside our minds and outside. And I can see some I can see people nodding, actually. So hopefully this is resonating for you.

Helen: Yeah, these playful containers. It's certainly something that any poetry teacher knows, you know, that it's almost the more structure you give your students, the more creative they become. It's this really bizarre paradox that there's some kind of release that happens, that anxiety of the blank page fades a bit. So the spirals, the kind of visual container, the creative container, I guess, the kind of assignment that allows you to do something fun. That feels quite different to me than the diving-deep in your writing to discover what we think of often as ‘therapeutic writing’ where I have to descend to the depths and really write about what I was feeling or whatever and come back out of that in a way that is often very sort of unstructured.

So do you see... I guess the playfulness and the really serious plumbing of the depths. Are there times when those two things are happening simultaneously or are they different processes?

Sophie: That's a great question. And my answer would probably be quite long. So I'll try to be succinct. Two things. First of all, the process takes time. So if you're actually working on things that are really about your felt, your lived experience, things you've been carrying for a long time, things you want to explore safely.

I think you have to give yourself time to do that. And there's moments where you let go into those containers and you might kind of just splurge some of your feelings and you might do some free writing and some things might come up for you.

And there are times when you take that and you shape it and you edit it and you craft it and you develop a helpful distance from that felt material. So the crafting and the editing is all part of this process too.

Helen: This is part of the book that I've been trying to finish for a long time now, because I see that a lot of the conversation about writing and wellbeing is about that initial splurging, that initial kind of, but I really believe that when we take kind of more writerly view of what we've done. And we say, ‘oh, this is what we've done’ with kindness, with compassion, but constructively reshaping it.

That too is part of that very helpful process because we gain new insights into it. We might change the narrative point of view. We might say, ‘oh, I'll bring in another character here who will write about this thing that I've just written about in the first person and find out how that changes it.’ You know, a memoir may become a piece of fictional autobiography, a piece of auto-fiction, I really see the psychodynamic therapist and the creative writing teacher who's also a novelist and a poet really working together in here. Because so much of what you're saying really resonates with the way that people teach poetry for example. A lot of the kinds of assignments in a let's say an undergraduate poetry course. And I do some of these kinds of things in my creativity catalyst. So it's trying to give mostly academic writers a different way of seeing their academic work through this different lens. And so it will be things like write a poem to frustration. Make your frustration as a writer into a character and write a poem “to my darling frustration.” And so I can see how it's both a really creative exercise. The poem itself, it's quite fun, you know, as a product, but yeah, really, the purpose of it was not to write a great or really resonant poem.

The purpose of it was for her own self-discovery of ‘what does my frustration as a writer look like and how can I conquer it?’, which is ultimately a well-being exercise, isn't it?

Helen: Absolutely, yes. Writing a love letter to your PhD thesis, you know, or writing any kind of letter. And then what's fun is having it reply to you. So, you know, you complete the dialogue. That's a fun one.

Sophie: Yeah, there are lots of those.

I think, you know, we don't have to write about the great trauma or difficulty in our lives. Sometimes that's absolutely not the right thing for us to do. Sometimes we can use writing as an escape. I mean, just in terms of, you know, when I wrote this [gestures to novel] yes, I read it back now and I see all the things that were going on for me at the time that got fictionalized and put into that novel. But actually, I was going through quite a difficult, scary time and sitting down and escaping into that world, that fictional world gave me joy, gave me pleasure.

It helped me to feel so much better. And just, you know, writing my spirals every morning…you know that has been so helpful for me since I lost my dad in September last year. It's been something of a ritual that I got up and did every morning that made me feel hopeful. So yes, absolutely, it's about the process.

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That's the end of today's podcast episode. I hope that both your body and your mind have moved to someplace new since we started and that you feel restored and refreshed.

You can watch the full version of my conversation with Sophie Nicholls, including the workshop that she ran after, in the video section of the WriteSpace Library. That's my online membership community, where members can also find my full series of Swordswing podcasts and transcripts. Simply go to helensword.com and follow the links to the WriteSpace sign-up page. Then use the discount code FREEWRITE to try free for 30 days. I'd love to see you there.

Thanks for listening, and I look forward to walking and writing with you again soon.