Updated: Apr 1, 2022
If you’ve ever visited my website, you have likely noticed that I am a volunteer for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, NAMI. I mention it on my About page and I have written several blog articles about mental health-related topics that are posted on my Blog page, but which were originally posted on the websites for NAMI.org and Life At The Intersection, my friend Terri Lyon’s creative activism site.
Like millions of other families in this country, there is mental illness in mine—diagnosed depression and anxiety.
For those who are diagnosed with mental health disorders or syndromes, treatment most often comes in two forms: psychiatric medications and psychotherapy (one-on-one talk therapy and peer support groups).
So, why in a blog for my editing business am I taking you down this road? As an editor, blogger, and writer myself, I wondered how best to merge these two worlds—my advocacy for those with mental health disorders and my skill with words.
That quest inspired me to educate myself about journaling. I found that journaling comes in many flavors—gratitude, art, prayer, dream, travel, and so on. But with a focus on mental health, I’ve chosen these three styles to discuss: therapeutic, reflective, and expressive. Let me share what I’ve learned.
What Is Therapeutic Journaling?
Therapeutic journaling differs from traditional journal or diary writing, which involves recording the details of daily events. Instead, difficult life events and challenges are written about and discussed with a mental health practitioner for the purpose of working through pain and trauma and moving toward self-confidence and recovered mental health.
Therapeutic journaling allows you to come to a deeper understanding of yourself and gain a different perspective on these difficulties. By identifying patterns in thinking, you see your struggles in a new light, allowing you to break the patterns.
Note: Therapeutic journaling sits in the wheelhouse of trained therapists, psychologists, LCSWs, and clinical settings. The type of writing that is done is not dramatically different from expressive or reflective journaling. The distinguishing aspect is that the journal entries are read and analyzed as part of the writer’s mental health treatment.
In summary: Therapeutic journaling is about delving deeper into your life’s experiences to make sense of them, learn from them, and gain new perspectives on your challenges. Writing about your thoughts and emotions provides opportunities for healing and growth.
Expressive vs. Reflective Journaling
I found this description of these two journaling styles in a February 2014 article on a website for the Education Resource Group. It is meant as a classroom writing assignment:
Expressive writing is personal and shows your thoughts, ideas, and feelings about an experience. Reflective writing goes beyond just sharing an experience, requiring the author to look back at the past and apply what he or she has learned to the future.
For some, the distinction between expressive and reflective journaling might be a case of splitting hairs. Let’s see if I can bring the purpose of each into focus.
What is Expressive Journaling?
Expressive journaling was popularized by Dr. James Pennebaker of the University of Texas, Austin. According to Pennebaker in his book Expressive Writing: Words That Heal, expressive writing promotes physical, psychological, and behavioral health.
Expressive writing, explains Pennebaker, is not so much about what happened during your day but how you feel about what happened. By regularly documenting your emotional reactions to life events, you are able to identify problematic thinking patterns that might not be serving you well.
In summary: Expressive writing is not about what happened but how you feel about what happened. Okay, so what’s the difference between expressive writing and therapeutic writing? The primary difference is that expressive writing looks at your current daily life, while therapeutic writing focuses on memories of past trauma or injury and how they detrimentally affect your thinking now.
What is Reflective Journaling?
Reflective journaling is the process of writing down your daily reflections (hence the name) about something positive or negative that happened to you. By thinking back on the day’s events, reflective journaling lets you put into words what you have learned from your experiences.
In summary: A reflective journal encourages you to think about all you experienced in the course of your day and decide what learnings you can come away with. It’s a reflection on your behavior and the behavior of others in relation to you. Whether an experience was good or bad, there are lessons to be learned.
Tips for Journal Writing
Regardless of which type of journaling you choose, follow these guidelines to get the most from the practice:
Choose a quiet, private place with no distractions.
Write at the same time or as close to the same time as possible each day you journal.
Write daily if possible or, at least, several times during the week. The more often you journal, the better you will become at it and the clearer a picture you will get of yourself.
Use whatever writing medium appeals to you: a pencil or pen that feels good in your hand, a special notebook or journal that is yours solely for the purpose of your regular writing practice, a laptop or desktop if you’re firmly rooted in technology. The choice is yours. The medium does not matter, just the practice.
Write quickly and don’t stop to edit or correct. Don’t over-think it. Just let the words spill out.
Pitfalls of Journaling
At the risk of sounding like a silly fuddy-duddy, journaling can have its downsides. Here are a few behaviors to be on the alert for.
Journaling can dredge up all kinds of emotions and might cause an outpouring of negative feelings and memories. It should never drive someone to a place of despair. Sharing your journals with a mental health practitioner, a journal writing group, or even just friends can keep you balanced and keep your memories and feelings in perspective.
Don’t write excessively, to the exclusion of other activities. Journaling should add insight and growth to your life, not rob you of other life experiences.
Over-analyzing your journal entries will not lead to improving your life. You can analyze your words to death. Read your entries a day or more after you’ve written them with an eye toward planning, problem-solving, and decision-making. Journaling is meant to be a complement to your life’s activities.
Benefits of Journaling
Journalist and therapist Kara Mayer Robinson, in an article for WebMD, summarized the many reasons that journaling is beneficial. Journaling…
Promotes self-awareness. You will get to know yourself better.
Lets you take charge of your emotions and worries. See them. Name them. Take control of them.
Shifts your viewpoint about yourself and those around you. You will gain a broader perspective.
Creates a positive opportunity for healing and recovering self-worth. Whether you write in a journal about problems or gratitude, a healing process happens.
Your Comments and Stories, Please
I welcome comments about my descriptions of these journal writing styles and the usefulness of one form of journaling over the other. If journaling in any form has improved your life, I’d love to hear about it.
In addition to working as a nonfiction and creative nonfiction editor and writing coach, I am co-author, with Dr. Terri Lyon, of the book Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism: No activism degree required—use your unique skills to change the world. Visit my website page Make a Difference and Dr. Lyon’s activism website Life At The Intersection to learn more about Make a Difference, including how to place bulk orders.
Updated: Apr 1, 2022
Don’t believe the naysayers. The long-form essay is not dead. It is alive and well, but you have to know where to find it. Long-form personal essays are a mainstay of publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Sun Magazine, Creative Nonfiction Magazine, Dame Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, Slate, newspapers such as The New York Times and The Boston Globe, and too many other publications and websites to mention.
Reading long-form personal essays requires a patience and time commitment that stands in direct contrast to the itty-bitty nibbles we are served on social media and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sounds bites of 24-hour television newscasts.
What is a Personal Essay?
I have written about personal essays before, in my blog article of July 23, 2019, “With Creative Nonfiction, Reality Meets Great Storytelling.” Truthfully, I dedicated one paragraph to talking about personal essays, because the article was kind of a scatter-shot look at the genres within CNF.
So then, what is a personal essay? It is notoriously difficult to nail down but here goes: a personal essay is a combination of a super-short memoir, a touch of biography or autobiography, a pinch of journalism, and a slice of compelling nonfiction storytelling. Got that? No? Alright, how about this—
A personal essay is about a topical subject discussed from a personal perspective, yours or someone else’s. A personal essay must have, at its core, a discussion of an event, person, or situation to which the essayist adds personal experience and a unique point of view.
Personal essay is related to the op-ed, too. I’ll go into that in another article.
Examples of Great Personal Essays
In the event that this definition has only muddied the waters, it might be best to direct you to some great essays written by some great essayists. These are in no particular order, no particular category.
After the Shooting: A Year in the Life of Gwen Woods, by Jaeah Lee, The California Sunday Magazine, August 3, 2017
My Family’s Slave, by Alex Tizon, The Atlantic, June 2017
A Rattle with Death in Yosemite, by Kyle Dickman, Outside magazine, June 20,2018
Everything You Know About Obesity is Wrong, by Michael Hobbes, Highline, September 19, 2018
I’ve randomly chosen essays that have been recognized for their outstanding quality. If you want to read others, visit longform.org. There you will find hundreds of quality personal essays. Categories include Health, Crime, Science, Politics, Arts, Business, Tech, and Sports. Don’t be intimidated. Get a feel for the purpose and intent of the long-form essay and give it a go.
A Good Length
The word count of the essay varies depending upon the publication. Suggested word counts for the top 20 magazines, newspapers, and websites that use personal essays span 800 to 15,000 words. The average is 800–1,200 words. Review the submission criteria of your target publications before you write. No need to construct a brilliant 3,000-word essay if the publication you have written for has a word-count limit of 1,000.
If you are an accomplished writer with name recognition, magazines and big-city newspapers will snatch up your essays. But if this is your first foray into getting published, Writer’s Digest suggests your chances of success are better if you submit essays in the 500- to 900-word range. A word count of 800–850 seems like the sweet spot for a newbie essayist.
Define to Impress
Tell your friends and colleagues that you hope to be a published long-form essayist. When they inevitably ask, “What is a long-form essay?” impress with the reply, “A universal truth with a personal perspective.” That’ll get their attention. Now, write!
In addition to working as a nonfiction and creative nonfiction editor and writing coach, I am co-author, with Dr. Terri Lyon, of the book Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism: No activism degree required—use your unique skills to change the world. Visit my website page Make a Difference and Dr. Lyon’s activism website Life At The Intersection to learn more about Make a Difference, including how to place bulk orders.
Updated: Oct 12, 2019
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I want to talk about this issue of self-editing and the necessity of hiring a professional editor. Yes, I know! I have already touched on these topics at least twice in my blog, but honest to gosh, the writers’ pages on social media are still awash with writers fretting over how they can’t afford to hire a pro editor for their manuscripts. I always give them the same polite advice: if you don’t have the money right now to pay a professional editor, wait until you do.
That’s great advice, but it is unappreciated. Some bad advice I see offered includes:
“If you’re smart enough to write a book, you’re smart enough to edit it.”
“Just use lots of beta readers and let them catch the typos and mistakes.”
“Grammarly and spell checkers are all you need.”
Let a Pro Editor Read Your Work
I’ll stop here, because my head is starting to pound. Now look, I’m not saying that self-editing, beta readers, and automated grammar and spelling programs are bad. They’re great. Writers should self-edit, find beta readers, and use the latest writing-assistance technologies. But these are not replacements for experienced human editors.
And it’s tough to be in a profession where people are often telling you that you charge too much for what you do or “Your work could be done just as well by my next-door neighbor Charlie who reads a lot and my Aunt Margaret who was a substitute school teacher for 10 years.”
Even Editors Get the Blues
Everyone who writes needs editors and proofreaders. Editors and proofreaders need editors and proofreaders. I will give you a real-life, personal example I should be ashamed to share.
I sent an email to a small business in my town last week, noting that it creates training manuals and policy and procedure handbooks for its clients. When my career started, I did that work, I tell them. I’m an experienced writer, editor, and proofreader, I tell them. I crafted a compelling case for them to consider me for freelance writing, editing, and training. I read through it three times, tweaked it a bit each time, read it one final time, and clicked SEND. Immediately after I did, I stared at it as if for the first time and saw this:
My resume is attached but here some highlights that might interest you.
Holy s**t. Are you kidding me? Do you see it? I left out the word “are” after “here.” Each time I had re-read it before sending, I swear that word was there. Well, it was there—in my mind.
And that’s what happens with self-editing. You see what you think you wrote, not what you actually wrote.
I debated how to handle it and decided to acknowledge my faux pas in a follow-up email. I went for a humble, self-effacing approach and hoped I would get points for noticing the mistake and having the courage to point it out.
Face it, I’ll never hear from them. And I probably shouldn’t. I didn’t follow one of my own pieces of advice: step away from what you’ve written for a day or an hour or even a few minutes and come back to it with fresh eyes.
You Need an Editor? Hey, That's What I Am.
Like any area of business, editors have best practices and standard pricing. I can assure you, my rates are comfortably in line with other editors doing the same kind of editing and with the same amount of experience. I’m not the most expensive and I’m not the least. So it pains me when someone tells me that I get too much money for what I do, the implication being, editing and proofing are skills that can be done just as well by the average man or woman who can read and write.
Low water pressure, high water pressure, leaky pipes, clogged shower or toilet drains, and corroded pipes—these are the most common reasons people call a plumber. The cost of a plumber ranges from $175 to $450 for a typical job, with the average cost per hour ranging from $45 to $200. We have all complained about the cost of hiring plumbers. Yet we hire them anyway. Why? Because they can do something we can’t do that needs to be done.
I submit that editors are the plumbers of the written word. I might even have a bumper sticker made:
Clean the clogged pipes of your manuscript. Hire an editor.
I like it. What do you think?