Writing Through Illness & Injury

September 11, 2023 | 2 min read

Sometimes, when we encounter a difficult period in life, writing practice and our creative self can both fall by the wayside. And other times, writing is the very thing that gets us through.

Writer Danielle Christopher joins us from her home on the west coast of Canada to talk about how writing carries her through periods of illness and injury.

What does your writing life look like?

After being injured in a car accident, I'm currently on medical leave from the general contracting business I run with my husband.

After surviving cancer and a car accident, writing has been cathartic for me while in recovery.

That's a lot to survive. What are you working on right now?

I just completed the first draft of a memoir that deals with grief, raising one neurotypical and one neurodivergent child, and accepting that my mom's story is not my own.

I started the book in October 2019, just months after being diagnosed with stage 2 colon cancer.

Then, in February 2020, I had to stop working on the book when I was in a car accident. Since then, I've been dealing with postconcussive syndrome (PCS).

Pictured here is Danielle's Traveler, which is adorned with a sticker that says: "Write like you're running out of time."

Writing while battling cancer and recovering from a concussion doesn't sound easy. How do you write through obstacles like that, emotionally and technically speaking?

Writing is my self-care. And like I said, it's been cathartic for me while in recovery. Another motivation to write is that my mother died when I was ten years old. And because I don't have her stories, that motivates me to write mine down for my own children.

Writing is my self-care.

Technically speaking, my writing day is all over the place — all over the house, in the car, in waiting rooms, at coffee shops. Sometimes I use Siri to dictate, sometimes I use pen and paper, and of course I use my Freewrite Traveler the most to mold my thoughts into chapters.

Traveler is very gentle on my eyes. Bright lights can trigger migraines and vision troubles due to the concussion, so computers aren't the best option. But on Freewrite, I can type 100-800 words per session.

I also love the ease of emailing myself pieces and syncing to my Dropbox!

What's next for you?

Once I finish my memoir, I'm thinking of using my work in film and TV from the 80s to early 2000s to explore fiction. That era was pre-social media, and I have a lot of material!

--

Danielle Christopher lives and writes in Langley, in the Fraser Valley, BC, Canada. She is an alum of SFU's The Writer's Studio 2022 and 2023. Follow her writing journey on Instagram and Facebook.

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January 09, 2026 • 2 min read

2026 Public Domain Introductions

A new year means a whole new crop of work is entering the public domain. And that means endless opportunities for retellings, spoofs, adaptations, and fan fiction.

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December 30, 2025 • 3 min read

The 2025 Word of the Year

It’s Freewrite’s favorite time of year. When dictionaries around the world examine language use of the previous year and select a “Word of the Year.”

Of course, there are many different dictionaries in use in the English language, and they all have different ideas about what word was the most influential or saw the most growth in the previous year. They individually review new slang and culturally relevant vocabulary, examine spikes or dips in usage, and pour over internet trend data.

Let’s see what some of the biggest dictionaries decided for 2025. And read to the end for a chance to submit your own Word of the Year — and win a Freewrite gift card.

[SUBMIT YOUR WORD OF THE YEAR]

Merriam-Webster: "slop"

Merriam-Webster chose "slop" as its Word of the Year for 2025 to describe "all that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters."

The dictionary lists "absurd videos, off-kilter advertising images, cheesy propaganda, fake news that looks pretty real, junky AI-written books, 'workslop' reports that waste coworkers’ time … and lots of talking cats" as examples of slop.

The original sense of the word "slop" from the 1700s was “soft mud” and eventually evolved to mean "food waste" and "rubbish." 2025 linked the term to AI, and the rest is history.

Honorable mentions: conclave, gerrymander, touch grass, performative, tariff, 67.

Dictionary.com: "67"

The team at Dictionary.com likes to pick a word that serves as “a linguistic time capsule, reflecting social trends and global events that defined the year.”

For 2025, they decided that “word” was actually a number. Or two numbers, to be exact.

If you’re an old, like me, and don’t know many school-age children, you may not have heard “67” in use. (Note that this is not “sixty-seven,” but “six, seven.”)

Dictionary.com claims the origin of “67” is a song called “Doot Doot (6 7)” by Skrilla, quickly made infamous by viral TikTok videos, most notably featuring a child who will for the rest of his life be known as the “6-7 Kid.” But according to my nine-year-old cousin, the origins of something so mystical can’t ever truly be known.

(My third grade expert also demonstrated the accompanying signature hand gesture, where you place both hands palms up and alternately move up and down.)

And if you happen to find yourself in a fourth-grade classroom, watch your mouth, because there’s a good chance this term has been banned for the teacher’s sanity.

Annoyed yet? Don’t be. As Dictionary.com points out, 6-7 is a rather delightful example at how fast language can develop as a new generation joins the conversation.

Dictionary.com honorable mentions: agentic, aura farming, broligarchy, clanker, Gen Z stare, kiss cam, overtourism, tariff, tradwife.

Oxford Dictionary: "rage bait"

With input from more than 30,000 users and expert analysis, Oxford Dictionary chose "rage bait" for their word of the year.

Specifically, the dictionary pointed to 2025’s news cycle, online manipulation tactics, and growing awareness of where we spend our time and attention online.

While closely paralleling its etymological cousin "clickbait," rage bait more specifically denotes content that evokes anger, discord, or polarization.

Oxford's experts report that use of the term has tripled in the last 12 months.

Oxford Dictionary's honorable mentions:aura farming, biohack.

Cambridge Dictionary: "parasocial"

The Cambridge Dictionary examined a sustained trend of increased searches to choose "parasocial" as its Word of the Year.

Believe it or not, this term was coined by sociologists in 1956, combining “social” with the Greek-derived prefix para-, which in this case means “similar to or parallel to, but separate from.”

But interest in and use of the term exploded this year, finally moving from a mainly academic context to the mainstream.

Cambridge Dictionary's honorable mentions: slop, delulu, skibidi, tradwife