Two Friends Talk About Writing and the Brain

…opening a new window onto the writing experience — and beyond.

Welcome to the conversation!

Our Story:

We are two longtime friends, Elizabeth and Barbara (an essayist and a neuro-psychiatrist/author), who love to talk about writing. Although the subjects we write about are very different, we often learn from one another.

So Elizabeth naturally turned to Barbara with an experience she was wrestling with. To her astonishment, writing and publishing her memoir, Don’t Say a Word!: A Daughter’s Two Cents, had proved to be personally transformative. Gone were the negative, undermining thought patterns that had always plagued her! Why had writing accomplished what therapy with excellent therapists had failed to do? That is, what had made the writing such an effective “therapy”? So, as we always do, we launched into a wide-ranging conversation about the question at hand.

But this time was different. Each intriguing topic led to yet another, many of which we realized hadn’t previously been explored in the light of brain science. How do solutions to a problem pop into mind, seemingly “out of nowhere”? How is it that traumatic memories often feel more “re-lived” than “remembered”? What is writer’s block, really? As the answer to Elizabeth’s original question took shape, so did the answers to many other questions. 

We continued talking, Elizabeth bringing her curious writing experiences (including three powerful aha moments, as well as a weeks-long period of complete stasis that ended in a flash), and Barbara bringing her understanding of psychology and the brain. Soon a new way of approaching the process of writing began to emerge. We hope you will learn from these conversations, as we did, that brain science can illuminate and aid the writing process and be of interest and use to non-writers, as well.

After all, each of us has a brain that is generating our thoughts, feelings, and actions but whose workings are mysterious to us. Writing offers a particularly good pathway into these investigations, because — alone at the computer, in conversation only with ourselves — attention is focused on what is going on in our thoughts and feelings as they emerge into awareness. But, in an effort to put these edge-of-consciousness experiences into words, writers are going through a process that offers insight into mental dynamics that are universal.

We hope that you will join our ongoing conversations. We want to know what has worked for you in your writing life and what hasn’t. We want to hear your reactions to what we are saying, to hear what makes sense to you and what doesn’t. It’s our hope that together we can find a new, more empowering way of approaching problems that writers and other creative individuals encounter. For all of us — writers and non-writers alike — we hope that the insights about writing that emerge from these discussions will lead to a deeper understanding of our mental lives.

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Who we are:

Elizabeth Roper Marcus is a former architect and current essay-writer who tends to see the world through a psychological lens. No wonder. She is married to a psychiatrist, has many friends who are psychotherapists, and has had personal experience with therapy, herself. She and her husband even live in the building that was the original home of the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. She likes to say she's been “pickled in psychotherapy.”

All of Elizabeth’s writing is driven by one or another bedeviling questions she feels compelled to answer. As a result, her essays cover a curiously wide range of topics, many of which have been published in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Cognoscenti and in essay anthologies. You can read them at eLizWrites.com and follow her on Instagram @elizabethmarcus5503. She also currently writes for Psychology Today and Next Avenue.

Barbara Schildkrout is a psychiatrist who does psychotherapy. She has a special interest and expertise in neuropsychiatry. She is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and is on the faculty of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where she supervises psychiatric residents and neuropsychiatric fellows. She is a Fellow of the American Neuropsychiatric Association, the Chair of the Neuropsychiatry Committee of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, and more. 

She also is the author of two books on medical diseases that can look like mental disorders and writes extensively on a wide range of neuropsychiatric topics for professional journals — following her curiosity wherever it leads. And, Barbara, too, has had personal experience with psychotherapy. She feels that curiosity is perhaps her most valuable trait and is particularly drawn to innovative ideas and new ways of seeing the familiar. 

Please join us. There is so much to talk about!