On Writing as the Antithesis of Therapy

"I did not look on my work as therapy, and still don’t. . . it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate if from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain. (158)" 

From "Notes" by Tim O'Brien in The Things They Carried