Writing In Pain

This book argues that while pain is an irreducible neuro-physiological phenomenon, how pain is experienced is powerfully inflected by language and culture. Using Second Empire France after Napoleon III's seizure of power as a particularly revealing time of re-acculturation, it elaborates on the "culture of denial."

"Expressing painful emotions is hard--yet it can actually improve our mental and physical health. Distinguished psychologist James W. Pennebaker has spent decades studying what happens when people take just a few minutes to write about deeply felt personal experiences or problems. This lucid, compassionate book has introduced tens of thousands of readers to an easy to use self help technique that has been proven to heal old emotional wounds, promote a sense of well being, decrease stress, improve relationships, and boost the immune system. Updated with findings from hundreds of new studies, the significantly revised second edition now contains practical exercises to help readers try out expressive writing. It features extensive new information on specific health benefits, as well as when the approach may not be helpful"--

Readers connect to characters with depth, ones who have experienced life’s ups and downs. To deliver key players that are both realistic and compelling, writers must know them intimately—not only who they are in the present story, but also what made them that way. Of all the formative experiences in a character’s past, none are more destructive than emotional wounds. The aftershocks of trauma can change who they are, alter what they believe, and sabotage their ability to achieve meaningful goals, all of which will affect the trajectory of your story. Identifying the backstory wound is crucial to understanding how it will shape your character’s behavior, and The Emotional Wound Thesaurus can help. Inside, you’ll find: * A database of traumatic situations common to the human experience * An in-depth study on a wound’s impact, including the fears, lies, personality shifts, and dysfunctional behaviors that can arise from different painful events * An extensive analysis of character arc and how the wound and any resulting unmet needs fit into it * Techniques on how to show the past experience to readers in a way that is both engaging and revelatory while avoiding the pitfalls of info dumps and telling * A showcase of popular characters and how their traumatic experiences reshaped them, leading to very specific story goals * A Backstory Wound Profile tool that will enable you to document your characters’ negative past experiences and the aftereffects Root your characters in reality by giving them an authentic wound that causes difficulties and prompts them to strive for inner growth to overcome it. With its easy-to-read format and over 100 entries packed with information, The Emotional Wound Thesaurus is a crash course in psychology for creating characters that feel incredibly real to readers.

Making readers care and feel like they’re part of the story should be the number one goal of all writers. Ironically, many storytellers fail to maximize one of fiction’s most powerful elements to achieve this: the setting. Rather than being a simple backdrop against which events unfold, every location has the potential to become a conduit for conveying emotion, characterizing the cast, providing opportunities for deep point of view, and revealing significant backstory. Inside this volume, you will find: • A list of the sights, smells, tastes, textures, and sounds for over 120 urban settings • Possible sources of conflict for each location to help you brainstorm ways to naturally complicate matters for your characters • Advice on how to make every piece of description count so you can maintain the right pace and keep readers engaged • Tips on utilizing the five senses to encourage readers to more fully experience each moment by triggering their own emotional memories • Information on how to use the setting to characterize a story’s cast through personalization and emotional values while using emotional triggers to steer their decisions • A review of specific challenges that arise when choosing an urban location, along with common descriptive pitfalls that should be avoided The Urban Setting Thesaurus helps you tailor each setting to your characters while creating a realistic, textured world your readers will long to return to, even after the book closes.

“A fascinating, totally seductive read!” —Eula Biss, author of Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays and On Immunity: An Inoculation “A book built of brain and nerve and blood and heart. . . . Irreverent and astute. . . . Pain Studies will change how you think about living with a body.” —Elizabeth McCracken, author of Thunderstruck and Bowlaway “A thrilling investigation into pain, language, and Olstein’s own exile from what Woolf called ‘the army of the upright.’ On a search path through art, science, poetry, and prime-time television, Olstein aims her knife-bright compassion at the very thing we’re all running from. Pain Studies is a masterpiece.” —Leni Zumas, author of The Listeners and Red Clocks In this extended lyric essay, a poet mines her lifelong experience with migraine to deliver a marvelously idiosyncratic cultural history of pain—how we experience, express, treat, and mistreat it. Her sources range from the trial of Joan of Arc to the essays of Virginia Woolf and Elaine Scarry to Hugh Laurie’s portrayal of Gregory House on House M.D. As she engages with science, philosophy, visual art, rock lyrics, and field notes from her own medical adventures (both mainstream and alternative), she finds a way to express the often-indescribable experience of living with pain. Eschewing simple epiphanies, Olstein instead gives us a new language to contemplate and empathize with a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Lisa Olstein teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and is the author of four poetry collections published by Copper Canyon Press. Pain Studies is her first book of creative nonfiction.

“[A] powerful account of the sexism cooked into medical care ... will motivate readers to advocate for themselves.”—Publishers Weekly STARRED Review A groundbreaking and feminist work of investigative reporting: Explains why women experience healthcare differently than men Shares the author’s journey of fighting for an endometriosis diagnosis In Pain and Prejudice, acclaimed investigative reporter Gabrielle Jackson takes readers behind the scenes of doctor’s offices, pharmaceutical companies, and research labs to show that—at nearly every level of healthcare—men’s health claims are treated as default, whereas women’s are often viewed as a-typical, exaggerated, and even completely fabricated. The impacts of this bias? Women are losing time, money, and their lives trying to navigate a healthcare system designed for men. Almost all medical research today is performed on men or male mice, making most treatments tailored to male bodies only. Even conditions that are overwhelmingly more common in women, such as chronic pain, are researched on mostly male bodies. Doctors and researchers who do specialize in women’s healthcare are penalized financially, as procedures performed on men pay higher. Meanwhile, women are reporting feeling ignored and dismissed at their doctor’s offices on a regular basis. Jackson interweaves these and more stunning revelations in the book with her own story of suffering from endometriosis, a condition that affects up to 20% of American women but is poorly understood and frequently misdiagnosed. She also includes an up-to-the-minute epilogue on the ways that Covid-19 are impacting women in different and sometimes more long-lasting ways than men. A rich combination of journalism and personal narrative, Pain and Prejudice reveals a dangerously flawed system and offers solutions for a safer, more equitable future.

Do you suffer from physical pain relating to your writing life? Are you struggling with back pain, weight gain related to sedentary working, anxiety, depression, sleep problems, neck pain, eye strain, stress, loneliness, digestive issues, or Repetitive Strain Injury? These are the most common issues reported by writers and if you struggle with any of them, you are not alone. Writing is not a physically healthy job, but if you want a long-term writing career, then you need to look after your body. I've been through my own pain journey over the last six years. I used to get crippling migraines that sent me to a dark room, and back pain so bad that I couldn't sleep, as well as stress levels so high that I wasn't able to breathe normally. Now, my back pain, migraines and RSI have almost gone completely, and I manage my writing life in a far healthier way than ever before. I share my personal journey and insights with you in this book. My co-author is Dr Euan Lawson, who shares his insights into how we can reduce pain, improve health and build a writing career for the long term. The book covers: Introduction and survey results from 1200 writers 7 Reasons why writing is great for your health Part 1: The Unhealthy Writer Stress, anxiety, burnout Back, neck and shoulder pain Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) A personal journey to a pain-free back Writing with chronic pain Sedentary life and inactivity Sleep problems/ insomnia Eye strain, headaches, and migraine A personal story of headaches and migraine Loneliness and isolation Weight gain or weight loss Joanna's Letter to Sugar Digestive issues and IBS A personal journey through IBS with FODMAP Mood and mental health Riding the Waves: Writing with depression Alcohol - the good, the bad, and the ugly Coffee and caffeine Supplements, substances, and nootropics Part 2: The Healthy Writer Improve your workspace Sort out your sleep Sort out your diet From fat to fit Sort out your back Lessons learned about writing from yoga How to use dictation for a healthier writing life The active writer mindset Strategies for the sofa-bound The active writer: Three golden rules The running writer: Three rookie mistakes Lessons learned about writing from walking a double ultra-marathon Find a community Build wellbeing with mindfulness Develop healthy habits for the long-term Conclusion: It's your turn. Choose life! It's time to be a healthy writer!

In the vein of Mary Karr’s Lit, Augusten Burroughs’ Dry and Sarah Hepola’s Blackout, As Needed for Pain is a raw and riveting—and often wryly funny—addiction memoir from one of New York media’s most accomplished editors which explores his never-before-told story of opioid addiction and the drastic impact it had on his life and career. Dan Peres wasn’t born to be a media insider. As an awkward, magic-obsessed adolescent, nothing was further from his reality than the catwalks of Paris or the hallways of glossy magazine publishers. A gifted writer and shrewd cultural observer, Peres eventually took the leap—even when it meant he had to fake a sense of belonging in a new world of famed fashion designers, celebrities, and some of media’s biggest names. But he had a secret: opiates. Peres’s career as an editor at W magazine and Details is well known, but little is known about his private life as a high-functioning drug addict. In As Needed for Pain, Peres lays bare for the first time the extent of his drug use—at one point a 60-pill-a-day habit. By turns humorous and gripping, Peres’s story is a cautionary coming-of-age tale filled with unforgettable characters and breathtaking brushes with disaster. But the heart of the book is his journey from outsider to insecure insider, what it took to get him there, and how he found his way back from a killing addiction. As Needed for Pain offers a rare glimpse into New York media’s past—a time when print magazines mattered—and a rarefied world of wealth, power, and influence. It is also a brilliant, shocking dissection of a life teetering on the edge of destruction, and what it took to pull back from the brink.

This is a book about the meanings we make out of pain. The greatest surprise I encountered in discussing this topic over the past ten years was the consistency with which I was asked a single unvarying question: Are you writing about physical pain or mental pain? The overwhelming consistency of this response convinces me that modern culture rests upon and underlying belief so strong that it grips us with the force of a founding myth. Call it the Myth of Two Pains. We live in an era when many people believe--as a basic, unexamined foundation of thought--that pain comes divided into separate types: physical and mental. These two types of pain, so the myth goes, are as different as land and sea. You feel physical pain if your arm breaks, and you feel mental pain if your heart breaks. Between these two different events we seem to imagine a gulf so wide and deep that it might as well be filled by a sea that is impossible to navigate.

The story of pain and suffering since the eighteenth century. Prize-winning historian Joanna Bourke charts how our understanding of pain (and how to cope with it) has changed completely over the last three centuries.