Writing as therapy? Only lie on the couch if you want to read a good book, not write one

There's a blurry old line between writing and therapy.  I've taught classes where people were unable to finish reading their work because they were crying and in many ways both reading and writing highly-charged literature can be cathartic.

If it's catharsis you are after -- that purging release of emotion, then using your work as a kind of therapy may be a good idea.  If your aim is to write to the very best of your ability, it might be better to do your therapy elsewhere.

I suspect I'm on potentially controversial ground here.  Many feel that their inner demons drive their creativity and provide the passion to write in the first place. I know from my own work that my experience informs the subjects I choose and how I tackle them.  However, my hunch is that unless you confront major personal issues and come to terms with what they have to tell you in some forum other than your story or novel, you will be the servant of them in your writing, rather than the master.  You also risk writing and rewriting the same stuff, because unless you lay your ghosts they keep coming back to haunt you.

Perhaps an added bonus of doing therapy before you write, rather than as part of the process, is that you will have already visited dark places, fascinating, uncomfortable places, but will be (hopefully) be healed enough to write about them, a kind of reporting from the interior, without coming to further harm.

In Memoriam

Some breathtaking works of literature have been inspired by loss and grief -- Tennyson's In Memoriam, Grey's Elegy - and it can be a great way of turning feelings of  bereavement into something positive and creative - an exercise that blurs with the notion of writing as therapy.

If you want to write for comfort, because it is a way of conjuring up or even communing with the person you have lost, then do it straight away, while you are still raw and sore. What you produce will probably be messy and passionate, with an intensity you are unlikely to be able to reproduce again; the kind of writing that has urgency and immediacy but maybe lacks craft. If you want to write a rounder, fuller portrait of someone, or use them as the inspiration for a character in a piece of work, it might be best to wait a little bit until you are able to write more objectively.

Either way, it's an incredibly salving means of spending time with someone you have loved.  It's a way of paying tribute to them, of preserving their memory, of keeping yourself sane.  As Hilary Mantel said, "what's to be done with the lost, the dead, but write them into being?"

The door is closed, but not entirely...