I've been thinking about writing this thread for a long time, but I wasn't sure how to do it. I didn't really want to put it in Ramona's voice. She's a character, not an author, and it would be weird for her to discuss the concerns of authors.

So I decided to make a glowfic instance of myself, so I could write in my author voice.

This is probably for the best! Thank you for doing it that way!

You bet. No problem.

There are a bunch of things I want to talk about. Inevitably I'm going to finish writing a section of this and then realize later there was more to say, and there won't be any way to edit it back in. That's okay. I'd still rather write it here in glowfic than in a google doc or something. It's more fun that way, and I think more people will read it.

Here are the things I'm planning to talk about:

• Stage setting: why therapy in glowfic at all?
• Characters: what kinds of characters work well as glowfic clients (and as therapists)
• Doing therapy: the nuts and bolts
• Over the whole arc of therapy
• Microskills within a session
• Storytelling and tension
• What kind of problem are we solving, and how
• Things you can do in glowfic therapy that rarely come up in real life
• Co-author mechanics
• What it's like to write glowfic therapy

If you have questions or things you want to say, I'm open to having Q&A tags in this thread, just ping me on discord (grettazon) to ask and I can add you as a thread author or just quote your question.

Stage setting: why therapy in glowfic at all?

My inspiration for writing therapy in glowfic was Swimmer's medical drama threads. Reading about the adventures of Marian/Merrin is big fun, even though I don't know very much about nursing. Readers seem to enjoy getting a window into the details of a complicated, tricky, thinky, profession, and I had one of those to offer.

Psychotherapy, and relationship therapy in particular, seems to me to be especially well suited to role-playing storytelling. Stories sing when they have emotional weight, high stakes, pathos, caring, and joy -- and relationship therapy can deliver all of those things.

There is a particular type of psychotherapy called narrative therapy. It was probably only 3% of my eclectic bag of tricks when I was a practicing therapist, but as you would expect from the name, it sure dovetails well with telling a story.

In narrative therapy, the therapist helps the client draw out or emphasize the most helpful true elements of their story so far. The client rebuilds the story of their own life into something more hopeful or clever or secure. I have mixed feelings about it as a technique; I'm truth seeking and if, in truth, my client is living in a tragedy, I don't want to spin their story into a romantic comedy instead; that would be doing them a disservice. But often, people have pre-spun their stories to be more tragic than necessary, and telling a different story can be both truth-seeking and helpful at the same time.

Anyway -- the reason I bring up narrative therapy is that I find myself leaning on it a bit more in glowfic than I did in the real therapy room. I'm not so much trying to break my clients' self-limiting stories about themselves, as just inviting the authors of my clients to tell their clients' heroic narratives. In most cases, glowfic characters already have heroic narratives, and we just need to showcase them -- and sometimes help one character see another character's narrative.

I should also note before I go any further that I did not invent glowfic therapy! Other people did it before I did!

The ones that I know about are all set in Velgarth and feature Lancir, Boots, Thellim, and that one character who always blinks owlishly[1], all doing Mindhealing. There are probably other glowfic therapy threads I am unaware of![2]

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[1] It was Melody!

[2] Apparently westwind wrote some too!

I will now pause here and see if any of the other writers who have paired glowfic with therapy liked about it. You are welcome to tag yourself in!

Writing a therapist is a fun way to give a character secrets, and also an interesting frame on the inevitable "summarize the situation of the story so far for the new character" scenes! But I'm usually operating by dropping my character who has lots going on plus being a therapist into novel settings, not just having her keep office hours at home.

"Please don't make me go home."

Nobody asked you.

If you're a writer approaching this from the patient side rather than the therapist side, writing terrible glowfic therapy can be a fun way to process your terrible past therapy experiences! It's very validating to have an audience of livebloggers agreeing that your past therapists were Just Awful.

Characters: what kinds of characters work well as glowfic clients

In therapy, it's important to think about all three points of the "CBT triangle:" cognition, emotion, and behavior. (I say this even though I am not a CBT therapist -- they get the credit for this idea for historical reasons, but virtually every therapeutic school in active practice today addresses all three of these.)

In writing, the same thing is true!

Even if you don't print out a character's thoughts and feelings, you still have to model them, and then make sure their behavior (which includes their speech) tracks with the hidden thoughts and feelings.

I really like that parallelism and find it fun to play with in therapy threads.

I bring this up first because it's going to play into what kinds of characters work well in glowfic therapy.

When it comes to glowfic therapy clients, the first point is obvious, but I'll say it out loud anyway.

It helps for the client characters to be fully fleshed out as people, to have a lot of rich history, and for the authors to have really detailed character models. The richer the characters are, the more you are rewarded for digging into their psyches, and the more coherent and realistic it feels when you ask them what they think and feel about an awkward situation.

I think Iarwain and I ran into some trouble with this in our first thread, the one with the not-actually-Romulan princess and the average Earth dude. Those client characters were spun up on the spot just for that thread, and most places that Ramona dug, she didn't find very much. That is not Iarwain's fault! That was pretty much inevitable under the circumstances. But I wouldn't do it that way again.

By contrast, working with Iomedae and Alfirin has been amazing, not just because their authors are great, but also because these characters are more real than some real live people I know. They have incredible depth and history. I am probably getting spoiled by working with them and should never write another therapy thread ever again when this one is done.

So putting those two ideas together, when you have deep, rich, characters, you have the opportunity for those characters to demonstrate interesting and coherent thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that sound and feel true to the reader. Magic.

Just one snag, though.

In my years as a real-life therapist, I got more than half my input data from nonverbal cues: tightness around the mouth, someone shifting in their seat, a little crack in a client's voice, a softening of the shoulders. There was a torrent of information that told me how regulated the client was, whether they were taking in what their partner said, whether they were holding something back, whether they needed a break.

The glowfic writers I've worked with so far -- and these are among the very best glowfic writers there are, I'm incredibly lucky, how did I get this lucky as a noob writer -- mostly do not write all three points of the triangle habitually. They don't write that rich stream of nonverbal data into their tags!

In my thread with Alicorn, she only wrote dialogue, no thoughts or feelings, and very little body language! Which I think works just fine in plenty of glowfic situations but really left me stumped as the writer of the therapist. There was so little to go on! (Also, to be fair to Alicorn, I don't think those particular clients were ever intended to be fully fleshed out as whole people, they were sort of the Embodiment of Amenta. And they absolutely did have feelings, that they showed with their words when they got upset enough, and when that happened it was delightfully awkward.)

And in the Iomedae / Alfirin thread, there were very few nonverbal cues until I asked Lintamande and Lantalótë to add some in. The facecasts have been pulling a lot of weight, and I'm lucky to get to read their thoughts, which therapists don't usually get to do! But Iomedae and Alfirin are mostly creatures of dialogue; they don't visibly leak emotion onto the page very much.

So I guess my gentle request is, if I write more of these threads in the future, if you want to send Ramona your characters as clients, would you be open to trying to write plenty of emotion into the bodies of your characters, even if that's not the way you typically write? I think it'd help, and it might be a fun writing challenge.

(I'll move on to talking about how to write the therapist character in a bit, but I'll leave a space here for authors of clients to weigh in, sass me back, etc.)

"It says here that I am supposed to say that I'm an interesting therapeutic client because I have very little insight. Why am I supposed to say that?"

"I think calling being gay a philosophical malady is probably dinging you there."

"I don't understand."

"Don't worry about it."

If he wanted his feelings to be easier to read, he could have more than one facecast image, sure.

How exactly is she supposed to HAVE body language?  Visibly twitch whenever somebody says something surprising?  This sure is a whole field of knowledge she'd have to study.

This "therapy" concept is not wholly unfamiliar to her, but in her experience it works better with Detect Thoughts, Detect Desires, and Detect Anxieties.  This also helps force your coauthor to make their character have visible thoughts and emotions.

Characters: what about the therapist?

So obviously I have a point of view, here, there's a way I like to write Ramona, and I'll mostly be writing about that. But of course there is probably more than one way to write a glowfic therapist, and there is prior art, and I think some of the other attempts have been quite successful even though they are different.

(Successful at something, anyway! When Iarwain writes Thellim as a therapist, I think he has entirely different goals than I have for Ramona, and he writes her accordingly.)

The most important thing, it turns out, is to write the thoughts of the therapist.

Swimmer does a fantastic job of writing Merrin/Marian's thought processes, and that's a huge part of what makes her medical drama threads so compelling to me. I get to ride along inside the nurse's head as she tracks several dozen things, picks out the three that matter, and then executes some very specific, tricky maneuver to fix the medical-crisis-of-the-moment. This is so fun to read.

But even though I wanted to write Swimmer-like threads, that is not how I started out writing Ramona. I was just writing the dialogue. And sure, I had reasons for making Ramona say the words that I wrote on the page, but my readers could not guess those reasons because most of my readers are not therapists. I had left out the most juicy part, the ride-along part.

Credit to Iarwain for pointing this out and then pointing it out several more times until I got better. (There may still be more room.)

The next conundrum is: who is the main character of a glowfic therapy thread?

Or to put it another way: many, many glowfic threads have a concept of "the setting" and "the character(s)." How those things are parceled out to the authors involved varies, but it's not unusual for author A to write the setting and some possibly-less-agentic characters while author B writes the main character: the protagonist, the mover-and-shaker, the person who's going to make things happen. (There are, of course, so very many exceptions, but I think I'm pointing at a real thing here.)

If therapy threads were like medical drama threads, then the therapist should be the main character, the person trying to make things happen -- right?

But wait! That doesn't actually work!

In real life, therapists are pretty careful not to be too agentic with respect to their clients! (Or at least, this is how I was trained and how I practiced, and I believe in this as a philosophy of good therapy.)

This is very very important!

In my opinion, a good therapist doesn't solve your problems for you; they help you learn to solve your own problems. They listen, they reflect back, they help you see things from different angles, they teach skills, they offer domain expertise when they have it. But they don't tell you what to do. This is actually built right into the ethical codes that most trained therapists adopt: respect for the autonomy of the client.

So given this, I claim that the best way to think about a therapy thread is that the client(s) are the protagonists and that the therapist is actually more like part of the setting. The setting is Going to Therapy and the therapist is there to showcase the clients, to ask them awkward questions, to make them confront their shit --

But it's up to the clients to provide the problems and, ultimately, to enact the solutions.

This was a major point of confusion in that first thread with Iarwain! We each thought of ourselves as the setting, and got frustrated by the passivity of the other writer's characters!

(I think he had a concept that a therapy thread would be more like a detective story, in which Ramona would ask enough questions that she would "figure the case out" and then provide the solution to the clients -- but I steadfastly kept writing Ramona as asking the clients to take responsibility for their own lives. Whoops -- we noticed the problem eventually and abandoned ship.)

It could be fine to write an entirely different kind of story, in which clients go to some kind of consultant and the consultant is the main character and does try to solve the clients' problems. That would be an entirely valid structure for a story -- but I claim it woud not be a therapy thread.

(For a while Iarwain tried to convince me that Ramona should evolve into a more cynical, less ethical, more agentic, more problem-solve-y kind of "helper," but I found it very difficult to write while still occupying the therapist frame. I think I would need to start over with a brand new character and never call that character a therapist in the first place.)

A few other quick notes on what you can do with a therapist character.

Ramona is from Earth and she thinks like an Earthling. (Well, she thinks like a smart autistic weirdo Earthling, but still.)

Thellim is from dath ilan and has (to me) completely wackadoodle notions of what is supposed to happen in therapy, and it's delightful! That makes the Going to Therapy setting more vibrant and salient, and shifts the spotlight a bit away from the clients' problems and toward the culture of dath ilan. I enjoy that a lot, and would like to see more offworld therapists!

Last note, and this may be obvious, but you can show the characters in settings other than the therapy room. Ramona went to a bar to consult with a friend. The clients go talk to their confidants between sessions. I find this to be a nice way to add some character and plot development outside the structure of the therapy session.

And now I'll open it up again to co-author (and character!) reactions!

A thing I appreciate about this way of running a therapy thread is that it allows for authors to explore characters who already have a lot of plot and backstory associated with them but have never had a chance to process it and might not know how to.