Writing is good for your mind and soul. Writing stories and composing texts improve your grammar skills and cognitive skills. You learn how to concentrate on a task for a long period of time, how to keep data in mind, how to arrange information, how to select important details. However, writing has another good effect on you. It is a great therapy for your soul. Good and honest writing can be an effective way of self-improvement and self-motivation. It may help you become a better, more put-together, more balanced person.
Most people are not aware of the feelings and emotions that are hidden in their subconscious. Most of us suppress these emotions and instincts into the deepest corners of our unconscious mind, and we cannot get hold of them in a conscious state. Probably they can emerge into the conscious mind from our dreams or from our unexplainable fears or phobias.
You can write about things that disquiet you, and you may feel relieved afterward. This is how Stephen King writes his amazing horror stories. He writes about his worst fears. Writing about your fears helps you face them and overcome them. In your writings, you can reveal your innermost secrets and thoughts without taking any risk, since you cannot get hurt throughout the pages of a book or the screen of your computer.
It is not hard to find out what is hidden in your subconscious. Just see what your characters desire from the bottom of their hearts. When you write a story, it reflects your persona. If you write about your innermost thoughts and feelings – things that you truly love, things that you want to achieve in life, events that you dread, things or persons that you hate from the bottom of your heart –, your story will be credible and true.
All you have to do is being honest with yourself. You cannot write an authentic story about action heroes when you find action movies boring and you love subtle psychological horror. Do not pretend anything. Do not write a story about forgiveness and good feelings while on the inside you are full of resentment. Write about this resentment. Your characters do not have to be Mary Sues, they have negative emotions, it is natural. Humans do have negative emotions.
While you are writing honestly, you get closer to the deeper layers of your subconscious. You can learn important things about yourself. It can be a part of self-development. You may notice traits that you want to get rid of, and you may start working on changing them.
On the other hand, using wishful thinking in your stories may stimulate your subconscious mind to concentrate on these things.
If you write about things that you want to have in life – you want to be cleverer, stronger, richer, more successful, you want to go to college, you want to buy a new home –, concentrating on these things help your subconscious mind focus on them and accomplish them in real life.
While you write stories, you often need to imagine that you are in someone else’s shoes. You need to understand your characters, their motives, their memories, their feelings, so that to make them real. While doing so, you can develop traits like empathy and understanding of others. You may become a more sensitive and considerate person.
