Writing Is Therapeutic: A Guest Post by Rachel Griffin

The Nature of Witches author delivers a magical tale where endless winter conceals secrets, and unexpected love blooms amidst the frosty snow. Read on for an exclusive essay from Rachel Griffin on writing The Sun and the Starmaker.

I have always believed that writing is therapeutic, but I never could have imagined how very true that would end up being for me. In December of 2023, I was half-way through writing the first draft of The Sun and the Starmaker when I fell playing tennis and suffered a concussion.

I didn’t know anything about brain injuries at the time, but my doctor told me to rest for a week or two until I was feeling better. A week or two came and went, and I wasn’t feeling better; in fact, I was much, much worse.

Over the course of several days, I had developed an onslaught of devastating symptoms that included losing my ability to read, write, and be on a screen. In the months that followed, I watched myself slip away, my brain now inhabited by a person I didn’t recognize. I have never felt so far away from myself as I did during that time, and losing so many of the things that made me me—reading, writing, moving my body—only compounded that feeling.

Through it all, I kept thinking about the book I’d been working on when I fell—a small village nestled on the peak of the highest mountain, surviving only because of the love the Sun had for a human. I couldn’t let it go, and so I decided to pick it back up again, if only to try and feel like myself.

My first day back, I got forty-one words in before I became so ill I had to stop. The next day was around fifty words, then seventy, then thirty-five. It bounced around like that for a while until one day, I wrote one hundred words; it felt like the biggest win in the world. It was an excruciating process, and most days I didn’t believe I’d ever actually finish, but slowly, I started seeing glimpses of myself, a gentle recognition that assured me that I was still in there, somewhere.

Because the process of writing was so physically difficult for me, I filled the book with things that made me happy. I leaned into whimsy, adding elements that weren’t part of the original idea, like a singing lamppost and a snow angel come to life. So much of the world is a direct result of my injury and the things that brought me joy during that time.

Writing gave me back my hope when I’d entirely lost it. It showed me that I was making progress, no matter how small. It gave me something to be excited about when I woke up every morning with a brutal headache, and it was patient with me as I relearned basic sentence structure and grammar rules.

I’ve never been as proud of anything as I am of The Sun and the Starmaker, and I believe now more than ever that art and words and creativity and imagination are absolutely vital to who we are.

I’m proof of that.