Breaking New Ground: How Writing Fiction Can Make Life Better
14th September 2025, time tba. I'm delighted to be running a workshop for Lapidus International, the worldwide organisation dedicated to writing for wellbeing, at their Creative Bridges Conference.
Lapidus is one of my favourite writing communities. It’s a very welcoming creative space for anyone interested in writing for wellbeing and self-development. Members may be therapists using writing in their clinical practice or authors teaching workshops with a wellbeing element, or indeed anyone who is interested in the life-enhancing benefits of writing. They offer loads of interesting events and workshops, often open to both members and non-members.
I’ve been a member almost from the beginning and posted details of any workshops I’m running that have a wellbeing angle but for the first time recently I had a posting turned down because it was a fiction course exploring the Tarot through writing. That got me wondering why writing for wellbeing is almost always focused on personal writing such as therapeutic journalling and poetry. It made me want to speak up for the specific wellbeing benefits of writing fiction.
So here is my workshop description:
This taster session explores the therapeutic potential of fiction writing, showing how it can offer comfort, escape, and fresh perspectives. Unlike more traditional approaches to therapeutic writing, fiction lifts us out of our own experiences and into imaginative worlds, but the stories we make in imagination are not random; they are related to our everyday life in the same way as dreams. This session will explore how writing fiction can help us think more creatively about whatever is worrying or preoccupying us and find creative solutions. It is suitable for all writers, even those who have never written fiction before.