By Elaine Jinto
Since time immemorial, humans have been writing as a method to communicate ideas and preserve memories. However, creative writing does more than help us communicate. It helps us regulate complex emotions, think, and create meaning. When you write a to-do list, for example, you are dealing with various demands on your time and prioritizing what’s important for you.
Creative writing helps us process information, retain memories, and deal with stress. In the 1980s, psychologist James Pennebaker used a therapeutic technique called expressive writing, which he developed, on patients with trauma and psychological challenges. This technique involves continuously journaling about painful experiences to reduce their cognitive load.
Creativity in itself is studied from different perspectives, but from a neuroscientific context, it’s considered to be a cognitive process. Creative writing involves the simplification of complex emotions and thoughts on paper, which is a complex mental task involving retrieving memories and engaging parts of the brain associated with memory and decision making.
Formulating complex thoughts and emotions into words further engages various parts of the brain. According to a model called parallel distributed processing, a large network of neurons across the brain comes together to bring about word knowledge.
If I say the word “pen,” for example, you might be thinking (perhaps unconsciously) of your favorite pen, the color of the ink, and what the grip feels like. All the different aspects of the “pen” are processed in various parts of your brain.
Writing for a few minutes every day will be really helpful. It could be a story, a poem, or even a diary entry. Writing by hand, specifically, enables you to process information even better, filter out unwanted information, and retain your memories for longer.
The latter happens because our motor systems are engaged along with our visual systems. The heightened brain activation means that it’s more probable that you will remember what you are writing and make connections between ideas.
Maybe start by taking class notes by hand, or describing your day in fifty words in a diary. You don’t have to spend a lot of time writing; just create something tangible from your thoughts and emotions.
References
Castro, N. (2023, November 7). Your mental dictionary is part of what makes you unique − here's how your brain stores and retrieves words. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/your-mental-dictionary-is-part-of-what-makes-you-unique-heres-how-your-brain-stores-and-retrieves-words-212751.
Johnston, E. R. (2025, November 24). Writing builds resilience by changing your brain, helping you face everyday challenges. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/writing-builds-resilience-by-changing-your-brain-helping-you-face-everyday-challenges-265188
Author's Note
Elaine Elizabeth Jinto is a 16-year-old writer and editor. She is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Blue Bell Review and serves as an editor for Phosphorescent Lit and In the Margins. She was Editor-in-Chief of her school magazine in 2023 and a member of the Inklings Members Advisory Team (IMAT) at the Society of Young Inklings. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Stone Soup, Skipping Stones, Bookosmia, Kingfisher Quarterly, Wildfire Weekly and STEM Chronicles, among others. She is a blog writer for The Trailblazer Literary Magazine. She has been recognized at the GetLit Poetry Fest and the Metaphoria Poetry Writing Contest. She is currently a member of the prestigious Ingenium journalism club at school. She is passionate about Model UN, recently winning Commendable Reporter at TSA Model United Nations.
