We read to know we are not alone.

The patient has to start by treating his illness not as a disaster, an occasion for depression or panic, but as a narrative, a story. Stories are antibodies against illness and pain.

The idea for this book began in a writing workshop I started four years ago at The Wellness Community in Los Angeles. People in the workshop ranged in age from early thirties to mid-eighties, and everyone, including me, had either recovered from cancer, was currently in treatment for it, or was a caregiver.

At the first session I began to expound on different genres of creative writing -- how to transform experience and craft stories of having cancer into personal essays, fiction, or poems. I went on to the structure of a personal essay, the main elements of fiction, how to overcome the fear of writing. Everyone listened patiently and politely, but they all had the glazed look of people waiting for an overdue bus.

Finally, it dawned on me that I couldn't conduct the workshop the way I teach my regular creative writing classes. No one here cared about genre guidelines, no one needed or wanted pep talks for becoming a writer or advice on how to get published. They were here for writing as therapy, a way to deal emotionally with a life-threatening illness, a tool for finding a voice in a situation that leaves you feeling as if you have no control, no voice.

But how do you guide nonwriters into translating their feelings into words and going deeper into their own souls with language? You can't just say: Write about your fear of death, write about cancer, write about feeling desperate and crazy. You need a way in, you need to hear other voices telling their stories, you need guides and inspiration.

We finally found our guides, as well as inspiration, in poetry, memoir, and fiction. Writers like Raymond Carver, Alice Hoffman, Andre Dubus, Reynolds Price, to name just a few, who wrote about how they got through their illnesses and accidents, how it felt, what they discovered. Also nonwriters with high-profile stories of physical disaster and courage, like Christopher Reeve and Lance Armstrong. No simple slogans or platitudes, but deeply felt, eloquent renderings of emotions and situations we all knew to be true.

This book is an invitation for you to start writing, and it follows what we do in the workshop: Before each exercise I talk briefly about some aspect of my own experience with breast cancer, then we read aloud a poem or an excerpt from fiction or a memoir, and out of the reading, a word or a phrase or idea acts as a springboard for a five-minute writing exercise. After each exercise everyone reads their work aloud.

Why write? Because dealing with your emotions on paper can be a safe and private way to expose your feelings. Because the details of your life are precious and important and not to be lost. Because writing out painful emotions can also be good for your health.

In 1999 a study was reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that linked writing to improved health for patients with asthma and rheumatoid arthritis. One group of patients wrote for twenty minutes over three consecutive days about the most stressful experience they ever had. A control group wrote about their plans for the day. When both groups were tested two weeks later, and then again at two and four months, those patients who were writing about painful events in their lives showed clinically relevant changes in their health compared to the control group. At the end of the article, the authors wrote: "This is the first study to demonstrate that writing about stressful life experiences improves physician ratings of disease severity and objective indices of disease severity in chronically ill patients."

The study was based on a method developed by psychologist James W. Pennebaker. In his book, Opening Up, Dr. Pennebaker reports testing the immune systems of two groups of students who wrote twenty minutes a day for four consecutive days. Like the study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, one group was told to write about superficial subjects, the other group to write about an extremely stressful event in their life. Blood samples from both groups were tested the day before writing, after the last writing session, then six weeks later. Dr. Pennebaker found that the students who wrote about painful, traumatic events showed heightened immune function and also paid fewer visits to the university's health center in the following weeks. "Writing helps to keep our psychological compass oriented," he says at the end of Opening Up. "Although not a panacea, writing can be an inexpensive, simple and sometimes painful way to help maintain our health."