Writing Activities to Help You Write About Pain

Hello, everyone. I recently realized that, even though I encourage others to write about their pain, I have not previously discussed ideas or activities to help with these endeavors. Below, you will find some resources with ideas to get you started.

1.Five Tips to Help People Achieve Better Results While Writing with Pain.

Link: http://www.writetosellyourbook.com/writing-advice/how-to-write-the-pain

This useful website provides tips to help people achieve better results while writing about their pain. Actually, these tips may prove useful for many different types of writing, but I find them especially useful when I write about my pain. Personally, I think the most valuable tip is to take breaks when the I feel overcome with emotion--I find it important for me to write about my pain, but I also know that it does not work well if I push myself to write about something I'm not ready to address. Beaks help
me find a balance. Also, please note that, if you click on the word "prompts" (hyperlinked in the description of the second tip) the website provides some useful ideas for activities, such as rewriting a scene from a different point of view.

2. Fast Writing Technique

This blog post describes an interesting study in which the researchers concluded that writing about emotions can help people cope with trauma. It also includes a description of a fast writing technique, in which the writer begins by completing a fill in the blank sentence about his or her feelings and writes about it as fast as he or she can for twenty minutes. This activity could serve as a way to help chronic pain patients start writing about their pain, or as a way to help people get in the habit of writing frequently.

https://thebodysays.wordpress.com/2013/07/17/writing-away-the-pain/

In addition to these two resources, I would also like to add some advice of my own: It is often helpful to return to your writing and revise it after the initial draft. I believe their are many real benefits of expressing pain in writing, but I also believe these benefits are greatly increased upon during revision. I have noticed that revising my writing about my pain forces me to see beyond my feelings of discouragement and consider the situation from a different perspective. This practice, in turn, helps me make new discoveries.

Good luck writing, and if any of my readers have other writing activities they find helpful, please let me know in the comments!