Moving Your Story from Inside to Out: On the Power of Writing to Feel

By Steve Mathias

A half-century back the essayist Joan Didion memorably said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” In a similar vein and preceding Joan by more than a decade the novelist Flannery O’Connor, writing to a friend, confessed that “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

Both reflections ring true for me, each laying claim to the idea that writing leads to a path of self-discovery. But...