Hello, I firmly believe that writing, especially a daily writing practice which delves into all the reasons why you drank and all the reasons why you need to stop or have stopped, can be a very powerful tool in sobriety.
It certainly has been for me. I started scribbling things into notebooks as soon as I accidentally stopped drinking permanently, finally.
I began by describing how I was feeling and what I was reading and soon moved on to scribbling down the bare bones of events which I wanted to get off my chest. These were events that had happened in childhood and that I had always planned to write about. I had just had to wait until both my parents had died.
It was sobriety that got me started in writing it all out of my head and my heart. And that writing is part of why I am still joyfully free of alcohol almost five years later.
Here follows a lot of thinking and explaining and enquiring into why sobriety and writing can be a mutual love affair. Writing as therapy, writing for mental clarity and for mental health. This is something I am passionate about and I hope you’ll join me in this adventure.
What is creative writing?
Creative writing goes beyond the totally factual, but it doesn’t have to be completely make up and fictional.
Creative writing is any writing that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of literature, typically identified by an emphasis on narrative craft, character development, and the use of literary tropes or with various traditions of poetry and poetics.
Wikipedia
What is memoir?
Memoir is personal writing, based on the writing’s own life experiences and usually exploring one specific area of life or time of life. The writing tends to be very, very personal and I believe that is what makes it so attractive to readers. Memoir is a deep dive into a specific part or period of life.
The story of a whole person’s life is autobiography when written by the subject of the writing, and biography when written by someone else. An autobiography starts with family, birth and childhood and then tells of the whole life story, and can be a fairly shallow look at a person’s life overall, sometimes with specific periods described in more depth.
What is creative non-fiction?
Memoir can also be described as creative nonfiction, which is a literary genre in which a real, true story is told using the best elements of literary style, such as plot, characterisation, detailed descriptions and settings. There is much discussion about how much must be true, and whether telling truth using the devices of fiction can actually deepen the truths told.
Lily Dunn, Memoirist on Writing For Insight and Healing
“Writing a memoir can be a time for real growth. When you dig into the past, you begin to see your own story from multiple perspectives, and over time it becomes something separate from you.” Lily Dunn, memoirist.
Lily Dunn’s memoir, The Sins of My Father: A Daughter, a Cult, a Wild Unravelling, came out in 2022. In it Lily describes her charismatic, adulterous, father who the family when Lily was six and he joined a cult Rajneesh, setting up his own commune in Italy.
Lily felt there was an absence of children in the reporting of cults in general, they were kept separate and she also wanted to understand her father, who had been so succesful and who collapsed into alcoholism and poverty so suddenly.
Lily’s memoir started as essays, then she got divorced and as she described to fellow memoirist Leah McLaren in an interview:
‘….the whole story started to knit together, the changes that were happening in my life and the connection I was making… the transformative nature of memoir, your life evolves, the writing evolves alongside your life and your writing informs the life and the life informs the writing.’
One her website, Lily writes:
‘I am most interested in the personal narrative when it acts as a springboard for insight…… I have a PhD in creative writing, and my thesis explored questions around the healing potential of literary hybrid memoir, and how it can act as a kind of literary self-help for our times; transformative and generative for the writer and reader, specifically when a narrative has been disrupted by trauma or illness in some way.’
Lily Dunn
Lily Dunn website: https://lilydunn.co.uk
Lily mentors at London Lit Lab.
