Writing Is My Medicine

Protecting the Storyteller Within

Writing is my medicine.

I was reminded of that today.

It was still early in the day, and somehow I had already managed to walk through enough drama, frustration, and emotion to fill several days. You know those mornings. One thing happens, then another, and before you realize it, you are standing dangerously close to that doom hole where one more push could send you spiraling straight down.

I could feel it.

I could have gone there.

Instead, I sat down and followed the prescription that has worked for me again and again.

I wrote.

I Wrote a Hunter

Today's Telling Stories exercise took me somewhere interesting.

I wrote about a mysterious woman named Mara Vale.

She's a hunter.

But she isn't the kind of hunter we usually encounter in fantasy stories.

She doesn't hunt supernatural creatures to destroy them. She doesn't track them so she can eliminate them, capture them, or send them into oblivion.

Mara hunts to find them.

She finds them so she can save them.

Protect them.

Return them to the places where they can survive.

In today's story, Another Story Saved, Mara discovers a young merman who has nearly died in our modern world. The people around him don't understand what he is. To them, he's simply another young man pulled dead from a swimming pool.

Mara knows differently.

She recognizes something precious that everyone else has overlooked.

And she protects it.

I finished the story and sat with that for a moment.

Because sometimes we write the story.

And sometimes the story tells us something about ourselves.

Protect What Is Precious

I realized that Mara had spent the entire story doing exactly what I needed to do today.

Protecting something precious.

For me, that something was the writer inside me.

There will always be things happening around us.

Family.

Work.

Money.

Relationships.

Responsibilities.

Disappointments.

Fear.

People needing things.

People doing things we don't understand.

Problems that need to be solved and problems that aren't ours to solve but somehow still manage to knock on the door.

Life does not politely wait outside while we create.

And when enough of those things happen at once, they can consume every bit of space we have.

That's when I have to protect my writing.

Not because the things happening in my life aren't important.

Not because writing allows me to pretend they aren't happening.

Writing isn't where I go to deny my feelings.

It is one of the places where I learn how to carry them.

When I sit down and apply writing to my soul, something happens.

The chaos begins to settle.

Clarity comes.

Sometimes healing comes.

Hope comes.

Joy comes.

And sometimes a mermaid shows up.

I wasn't writing about my morning when I created Mara.

There was no mermaid involved in my morning.

At least I don't think there was.

But somewhere inside me, apparently, was the need to tell a story about someone whose entire purpose was to find something vulnerable and make sure it survived.

Maybe that wasn't an accident.

Maybe some part of me knew exactly what I needed before I did.

Protect the writer.

Protect the storyteller.

Protect the part of yourself that still knows how to imagine.

The Storyteller Is Still Here

I've also been thinking about storytelling itself.

We live in an extraordinary technological age.

The image of the storyteller has changed.

Once, we might imagine someone sitting at a table with parchment and a quill, scratching words beneath candlelight. Go farther back and perhaps we see people gathered around a fire, listening while someone tells of a hunt, an ancestor, a god, a monster, or something mysterious beyond the mountains.

Today, the tools look very different.

We have computers.

Phones.

Digital publishing.

Cloud storage.

Streaming platforms.

Social media.

And now we have artificial intelligence.

Skynet may or may not be waiting around the corner.

But the tools have always changed.

The storyteller hasn't.

There is still a human being somewhere asking:

What if?

What if the monster isn't the monster?

What if the person doing the hunting is actually trying to save what she finds?

What if an ordinary object in an attic contains someone's entire forgotten life?

What if an old dog doesn't understand that the little boy he loved didn't abandon him, but simply grew up?

Those questions come from somewhere profoundly human.

They come from curiosity.

Experience.

Pain.

Joy.

Memory.

Fear.

Love.

And imagination.

Technology can change how we write a story, publish a story, film a story, distribute a story, or discover a story.

But we cannot allow ourselves to lose the storyteller.

Storytelling Is Older Than All of This

Storytelling did not begin with publishing.

It did not begin with Hollywood.

It didn't begin with television, books, or even written language.

Long before any of those things existed, human beings told stories.

We used stories to explain the world.

We used them to remember people.

We used them to warn our children.

We used them to preserve history and culture.

We used them to understand things that frightened us.

We used them to imagine things that didn't exist yet.

Somewhere near the beginning of human civilization, someone sat beside someone else and essentially said:

Let me tell you a story.

And we've been doing it ever since.

That matters to me.

Maybe especially now.

Because there is so much competing for our attention. Everything moves quickly. We scroll. We swipe. We consume something and immediately move on to the next thing.

A good story asks us to do something different.

Stay.

Listen.

Imagine.

Feel.

Remember.

Support Your Storytellers

So today I want to say something to those of you who follow Telling Stories, read these little adventures with me, comment on them, share them, or simply stop for a few minutes to see where my imagination wandered that day.

Thank you.

I mean that.

You are participating in something humans have been doing for thousands of years.

You are listening to a storyteller.

And I hope you'll listen to others too.

Find writers whose work moves you.

Read their stories.

Buy their books when you can.

Leave the review.

Press the like button.

Share the post.

Tell somebody else about the writer you discovered.

Recommend the strange little story that stayed with you longer than you expected.

Support the people who are still sitting down, day after day, trying to make something out of nothing but words and imagination.

Help us keep stories alive.

Because writing is more than something I do.

Some days, writing is how I find my way home to myself.

Today was one of those days.

Life got loud.

I sat down.

I wrote about a woman who protects creatures the rest of the world has forgotten how to see.

And somewhere along the way, she reminded me to protect something too.

The writer inside me.

Writing is my medicine.

Today, I remembered to take it.

**

Thank you for joining me around the fire today.

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Until our paths cross again...

May your stories be many, your imagination endless, and your light never fade.

— Dr. AY Heath (Angel)

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