Daily Archives: February 16, 2019

The Word

The Word: Writing Can Be Therapy…Truth!

I’ve said it many times before, too much perhaps, how writing began as a therapy for me. I came across a blog post that made many good points toward the subject of writing and therapy. I’ve never hidden that I have been in therapy, I call it mental maintenance, and it was suggested to me and others have shared they were suggested to write as well. It’s an emotional purging.

I began writing in my youth as an attempt to control a world I had no control in. I wrote about famous people liking me and thus those around me would too. I know, it’s almost sad, but I was little and in all honesty, I can’t hide my roots, I’ve chosen to embrace them. It’s where my writing began, my trying to help myself began, and it really did a lot for me at the time that has trickled through even to this day.

Some of our best ideas, as writers, come in those moments as our eyes are drifting and we’re about to fall asleep. BAM! The muse has hit us and we scramble for the nearest writing anything to scribble it down. It can be a bit of dialogue or merely a concept, but it must be written down. We have also felt that horrible gut feeling of forgetting if we haven’t written it down as well.

I’ve written about a purging method (check it out at Horror Tree) toward writing that has helped me. I’ve never been an ‘outliner’ type of writer. I have come to learn that I’m not alone with that when I took the workshop held by James Patterson (read the post here).

My best tips are:

  • Always park a notebook and pen/pencil for emergency muse wallops.
  • Writing can be therapeutic, write down EVERYTHING! You never know what could be used.
  • If you want to organize, keep a notebook separately for your thoughts, dreams, and story ideas. Even though at the moment they may seem different you just can never tell where and when inspiration may come to you. Lots of nightmares have helped me fill in the gaps of plots and stories.
  • Don’t force anything (unless you’re on a deadline then get that shit done!)
  • Keep private thoughts as private as you want if you’re doing it to work out some things in your life. Remember you DON’T have to share anything with anyone, you don’t even have to tell someone if you’re in therapy. Heck, if you don’t want to you don’t have to even publish something if you don’t feel its to the best you can.
Recommendations

28 DoBR: The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime by Judith Flanders

I was already aware of Victorian post-mortem photography. I was also aware of how dangerous Victorian homes could be, thanks to the internet and its many television shows, but I wasn’t aware of many cases. I had already read Portrait of a Killer by Patricia Cornwell, so the synopsis mentioning this author helped me make my choice.

Coming across this at my local bookstore I wanted to give it a try. I’m glad I purchased it It covers many interesting cases like Jack the Ripper and the body stealing duo Burke and Hare. It delved into the most famous cases and crimes of the time period giving another look at them. 

As a person that enjoys watching true crimes getting solved and learning more about the things that would make someone ‘tick’ in this way this book fed this interest. I’m not sure why others read or watch true crime, other than the fascination we may share, but I look and learn on a psychology and sociological angle. I have been interested in these two subjects for years trying to understand why people do what they do where as other people in similar situations or raising just wouldn’t.

Synopsis:

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“Wonderful… [Flanders] shines in her readings of literary novels containing criminal and detective elements, such as Oliver Twist, Mary Barton and Tess of the D’Urbervilles, but can be sharp and very funny about the vagaries of melodramatic and sensational plotting.” –Wall Street Journal

In this fascinating exploration of murder in the nineteenth century, Judith Flanders examines some of the most gripping cases that captivated the Victorians and gave rise to the first detective fiction

Murder in Britain in the nineteenth century was rare. But murder as sensation and entertainment became ubiquitous, transformed into novels, into broadsides and ballads, into theatre and melodrama and opera―even into puppet shows and performing dog-acts. Detective fiction and England’s new police force developed in parallel, each imitating the other―the pioneers of Scotland Yard gave rise to Dickens’s Inspector Bucket, the first fictional police detective, who in turn influenced Sherlock Holmes and, ultimately, even P.D. James and Patricia Cornwell.

In this fascinating book, Judith Flanders retells the gruesome stories of many different types of murder―both famous and obscure―from the crimes (and myths) of Sweeney Todd and Jack the Ripper to the tragedies of the murdered Marr family in London’s East End; Burke and Hare and their bodysnatching business in Edinburgh; and Greenacre, who transported his dismembered fiancée around town by omnibus. With an irresistible cast of swindlers, forgers, and poisoners, the mad, the bad and the dangerous to know, The Invention of Murder is both a gripping tale of crime and punishment, and history at its most readable.

Buy on Amazon