The Healing Power of Storytelling

Legend Fiction’s Dominic de Souza recently shared with me his belief that healing storytellers and their imaginations will help heal our wounded culture. The idea rang true to me, and I have been thinking about it ever since. I’ve especially considered the ways modern writers need healing that are unique to our time, and how they may go about being healed.

One conclusion I’ve drawn is that some of the most important culture-healing work will come from writers who use their stories to heal themselves. They will slay the dragons tormenting their souls by putting pen to paper and sharing it with the world. These stories, fueled by the storyteller’s healing journey, will inspire and give hope to anyone who can relate. The creative process will heal writer and reader alike.

Storytelling Can Be Powerful Medicine for the Soul

My Experience

Modern culture is often corrosive, and for many, no aspect of it is more corrosive than the ever-agitated, echo-chamber-riddled online world in which we spend so much time. It’s hard to do anything on the internet without being assaulted by something toxic—and that includes authors trying to cultivate an online presence to share their books with the world. For all the wonderful ways things like social media and online forums help us connect, explore new ideas, and find readers for our masterpieces, the dark side of the internet always lurks a click or comment away. 

I’m particularly vulnerable to this online noise. It’s a primary reason I am so drawn to ideas of silence and retreat. Even just a few minutes of catching up on the latest political or cultural warfare weighs me down—it feels like it strangles the life out of my soul. In short, it leaves me wounded and in need of healing.

As I’ve reflected upon my writing of my novel Fear of the Sky, it’s become clearer and clearer to me that internal dragon-slaying was the driving force behind its creation. When I wrote it, I was deeply troubled by our country’s tribalistic chaos and the loudest voices on the periphery of every political and cultural opinion who dehumanize and humiliate their ideological opponents, especially online. Unfortunately, these loudest voices are the ones we hear most, and their darkness impacts all of us in one way or another. 

Thus, I wrote a novel about two things while only being vaguely aware of how I was using storytelling to process the things that troubled me. First, I wrote about how necessary silence is to a healthy soul, and how toxic voices can strangle the life out of us if we aren’t careful. Second, I wrote about the difficulty we all seem to have overcoming preconceived notions about people who don’t think like us. I reflected upon these ideas, and my characters’ journeys are, in many ways, a deepening and clarifying of my thoughts on them. Readers will be the judge of how well I did that, and I make no claim here about the quality of my writing. But whether or not I did an adequate technical job does not change the fact that I leveraged my story for therapy. Writing it healed me. 

The Truth Will Set You Free

During my discussion with Dominic, he mentioned that he thought modern imaginations sometimes lack direction, and that storytellers sometimes forget the meaning behind their drive to write—they forget their why. My offering to any storyteller who forgets their why is a quote from the great American writer Flannery O’Connor:

“The basis of art is truth, both in matter and mode.”

We write to illuminate things that are true, and I think that’s the key to storytelling that heals creator and consumer alike. When a writer drags the demons and ghouls from the darkest corners of their soul into the light, they uncover truths that may not have been obvious beforehand. The illuminative effect gives people power over things that once haunted them—it’s medicine for the soul—and it deepens their understanding of themselves and humanity in general. That was certainly the case for my writing of Fear of the Sky. The nuanced and complicated truths I processed while writing my story eroded my angst about certain aspects of the world, and the lessons I learned stick with me to this day. Again, putting that on the page may, God willing, be a guide to others troubled by similar darkness.

Have Something to Add? Please do!

What do you think? How would you describe the healing power of writing? Do you have a story about it you’d like to share? If so, I sincerely hope you will consider joining me at this year’s Legend Haven, where I hope to facilitate a fruitful discussion about the healing power of writing. I’ll also be reading the first chapter of Fear of the Sky. I hope to see you there!