The Week in Writing: 5 great stories to inspire writers

Step away from that Word doc you’re editing, grab your favorite hot beverage (or cold one, it’s going to be a scorcher in some parts of the country today), and read some of the best writing the Web had to offer this week about your craft.

Here are five great stories about writing you may have missed this week:

How Words Have the Power to Heal. Breast cancer survivor Amanda Enayati writes at CNNHealth.com that one of the first things she did after hearing her terrifying diagnosis was open a Word document and start writing. Turns out some psychological studies prove that writing helps patients cope better and heal faster. As author Colum McCann asks in the story, “What is therapy but a form of storytelling?”

Lessons of a Frontier Letter Writer. New Yorker Executive Editor Dorothy Wickenden writes in The Wall Street Journal about the lesson she learned from reading letters her grandmother wrote in 1916, and what inspired her to turn those letters into a book. These letters, she writes, were brilliantly composed in part because they were not written for a large audience. Her grandmother’s letters “didn’t use complicated syntax or indulge in eye-glazing digressions. Her only goal was to entertain her family.” The lesson here? Next time you are tripping over prose, pretend you are writing a letter.