What do neurodiverse/neurodivergent writers need in order to flourish? As teachers, colleagues, and mentors, how can we best support them? And if you identify as neurodiverse/neurodivergent yourself, what strategies can help you cope with the demands of mainstream academic writing?

On April 18, I invited Eirini Tzouma for a lively conversation on "Supporting Neurodiverse Writers".  Eirini Tzouma is an Academic Development Advisor at the University of Durham and the author of a recent guest post in the Thesis Whisperer blog about the many challenges faced by neurodiverse writers in academe. As Eirini reminds us, "Neurodiversity/divergence isn't a problem to be fixed; it's a vital part of the mosaic of who we are."

In the first hour of this free WriteSPACE Special Event, Eirini and I discussed neurodiversity and neurodivergence in scholarly writing. In the second hour, we led a hands-on workshop for paid subscribers in which we responded to questions from participants and led a brief writing experiment.

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the live event:

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Some memorable quotes from the conversation:

• “Curiosity and learning are always the best starting place.”

• On terminology: “Neurodiversity can describe the diversity that exists in a room full of people that are ‘neurotypical’ (if such a thing exists) and ‘neurodivergent’…Some people, because they find that this is hard language and can be stigmatizing, prefer the term neurodiverse. Others want to claim it and say ‘Indeed there are neurotypical assumptions, and that’s why we need systematic change’ — these people often prefer the term neurodivergence.”

• “Most senior academics don’t realise that what works for them won’t work for everyone… In fact, life’s a bit like that! Nothing new is going to work for everyone.”

I found the discussion between Helen Sword and Eirini Tzouma insightful and supportive. We all think, learn, and process and perceive information differently from person to person, so neurodiversity is a matter that concerns us all. Traditional approaches to education have not always recognised that diversity; but, thankfully, the tides are beginning to turn with conversations like this one!

As a teacher, Eirini advocates for encouraging dialogue about neurodiversity/neurodivergence in the classroom or workplace and inviting people to express any specific needs. As students become more articulate about expressing their needs, a teacher may begin to worry that their workload will be weighed down by requests. However, Eirini counters this concern with the Theory of Universal Design, which focuses on improving accessibility across all factors. Overall, it is far more helpful to have students express their concerns directly to you than to fill in the gaps with assumptions and judgments.

Many of the 40 participants at the live event had a direct connection to the topic of writing with neurodiversity and wanted to share their stories. What struck me profoundly was the overwhelming similarity of their experiences. The story often begins with feeling misunderstood or being told you are doing things wrong in your early years. Then you embark on a journey of higher education and stumble across a diagnosis of dyslexia/ADHD/autism/or another form of neurodiversity in your late twenties or even early thirties. You may have been told that ‘you’re just not cut out for academe’, your supervisor may not be equipped with resources to help you, and you find yourself elbows deep in it all. Versions of this experience were repeated many times in our Special Event chat. This is also the story of my brother, who was diagnosed with ADHD just last year at 26 years old, during the third year of his PhD. My brother struggled with writing in school but now consistently receives grades of A+. I’m always impressed by him—he really has the traits of a successful PhD student: amazing attention to detail, unwavering commitment and passion (aka a kind of beautiful nerdiness for a really niche area), out-of-the-box thinking, and deep creativity.

While there are many positive aspects to neurodivergence, some participants at the Special Event were wary of calling it “a superpower,” a term that can sound dismissive of the very real challenges faced by neurodiverse/neurodivergent writers in mainstream academic environments: skill regression, burnout, juggling many things at once, cycles of re-learning and re-adjusting, and avoiding tangential rabbit warrens in your research, among other things. From the discussion, I concluded that it’s useful to frame neurodiversity, especially ADHD, as neither a gift nor a disability, but rather a condition that requires management in non-stimulating (or specific) contexts. When you’re interested in a task, the ADHD brain will be highly motivated and may hyperfixate, which can keep you writing for hours on end. But if you find the task non-stimulating, your focus withers, writing flow dies up, and procrastination creeps in. By the same token, hyperfixation for long periods can often be overwhelming. Overall, checking in regularly with yourself and your motivation for the topic is key.

Eirini explained that, as yet, relatively few research-based articles have been published about the challenges of helping teachers, colleagues, and mentors support neurodiverse students, and fewer still offer strategies for cope with the demands of mainstream academic writing if you identify as neurodiverse/neurodivergent yourself. But don’t despair! I collected a few gems of wisdom from the Special Event participants, which I added to Eirini’s own reference list to create a Supporting Neurodiverse Writers toolkit.

Teachers and students alike can benefit from Erini’s strategy ‘Starting on the Right Foot’, which she developed to help those with neurodiversity/neurodivergence engage in professional writing or working relationships. The strategy involves reflecting on your responsibilities, working style, and expectations, and it encourages you to communicate these openly with your working partner during what Eirini calls the “contractual stage.” Her resource is generously provided below so that you, too, can start on the right foot in conversations about writing with your students or colleagues.

A big thanks to Helen and Eirini for sharing their time, expertise and ideas so generously. If you did not attend or have not yet watched the recording, I hope you’ll make a cup of tea, get comfortable, and enjoy this wonderful discussion.

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can watch the recording of the full two-hour event in their Video library.  

Not a member? Register to receive an email with a link to the video of the first hour.

Better yet, join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them [. . .]
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

When we stand outside and look up at the stars, we cannot help feeling that we are a part of something much greater than ourselves, a mysterious cosmic dance that cannot be fully captured in human language or explained by the charts of the learned astronomer. At the same time, that “mystical moist night-air” touches our minds and bodies with a kind of astral intimacy, conveying messages that seem intended just for us.

The writing process can feel like that too sometimes: intimate, overwhelming, and altogether too vast and complex to comprehend. Whether we face that process on our own or in the company of others, we are all adventurers making our way in the dark.

Tupaia, the Tahitian celestial navigator who sailed with Captain James Cook on his first voyage to the South Pacific, did not find his way by starlight alone; he also knew how to read the swell of the ocean currents, the drift of the wind, the cries of the seabirds wheeling overhead, the types of fish that the sailors landed in their nets, and the texture of the seaweed that trailed from their bow. Tupaia’s extraordinary knowledge of the locations of surrounding islands—many of them hundreds of miles away—was recorded on a map that subsequent commentators labeled “primitive” because the relational network it conveyed did not employ European conventions of plotting directionality from north to south.

Tupaia’s map of the South Pacific, drawn by Captain Cook and others on board the Endeavor, makes perfect sense if you read it based on a Polynesian worldview .

Similarly, it took European sailors more than two centuries to realize that the intricate rebbelib (stick charts) used by Marshall Islanders as navigational aids are designed to map the intensity of the ocean swells between neighboring islands, not their relative distance or location.

A rebbelib housed at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. (Credit: Cullen328)

Such stories of colonial myopia offer powerful lessons for writers from any culture. To a stranger, our own personal rebbelib might look like a chaotic jumble of sticks and shells. For us, it shows the way home.

Rebbelib drawing by Selina Tusitala Marsh for Writing with Pleasure

Take another look at the collage at the top of this post. What do you see there: a sun, a star, a compass? What other shapes and patterns do you notice when you allow your eyes to soften and linger? Amongst all the straight lines and curved lines, the sunbursts and spirals, what pathways can you trace — real, imagined, or desired?

In nearly two decades of writing about writing, I’ve learned the folly of pointing any writer down a single unidirectional pathway towards meaningful writing: for example, towards productivity or style or community or pleasure. The compass rose of writing offers us not a set of stark choices — north or south or east or west — but a starburst of possibilities, a dynamic creative field.

If you’re an academic or professional writer still trying to find your way, check out my new WriteSPACE Journey Planner. I’ll help you chart a route and itinerary tailored just for you.

Kia pai tō koutou rā (have a great day) – and keep on writing!

Subscribe here to Helen’s Word on Substack to access the full Substack archive and receive weekly subscriber-only newsletters. WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $135/year).

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On March 20, I invited Dr. Sarah Fay for a lively conversation on "Scholarly Writers on Substack".  Sarah Fay, author of the popular Substack Writers @ Work newsletter, is an expert consultant who helps writers flourish on this powerful (but sometimes rather confusing and complicated!) publishing platform.

In the first hour of this free WriteSPACE Special Event, Sarah and I discussed why scholarly writers might choose to publish on Substack and how they can thrive there. In the second hour, we led a hands-on workshop for paid subscribers of our respective membership communities (my WriteSPACE and Sarah’s Substack Writers @ Work) in which we responded to questions about how to get started on Substack and enhance your writing aspirations and goals.

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the live event:

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Some memorable quotes from Sarah and Helen’s conversation:

• “Substack may be the university of the future”

• “If you’re passionate about academia but struggle to churn out words in a publish-or-perish kind of way, then Substack can alleviate some of this stress.”

• “Substack can let the fatigued academic write in a different voice”

……………

In the first hour, Sarah revealed the fascinating evolution of her career as a Substack whisperer, coaching countless writers on how to make their newsletters thrive on the platform. Sarah and Helen then explored all of the fabulous and uplifting reasons why any academic could and should start a Substack newsletter. If you’re an academic, chances are you’re passionate about the niche you write in, and sharing your writing publicly with others isn’t unfamiliar. You’re also no stranger to hard work and can probably squeeze in a once-per-week, or even once-per-month, publishing schedule.
If this sounds like you, Substack may just be the ticket! The thing is, as an expert writer in your field, no one else can do what you do. And your writing probably solves a problem that some people are willing to pay to solve. While Substack can be a great form of additional income, both Sarah and Helen advocate it as a great tool for academics specifically. It can:

1. Amplify your academic work by reaching new and interdisciplinary audiences

2. Supplement your academic writing and your writing skills—you could write about your academic work in a different voice or for a different readership, transforming your research into long-form journalism or creative writing

3. Allow you to take a break from your academic writing life entirely and focus on exploratory, creative, playful writing

In the second hour of this Special Event, Sarah and Helen answered participants’ questions and offered tips and tricks for successful newsletters, including these gems:

• Opt for fewer words and more engaging multimedia content (that said, there are readers who love really long rambling posts on Substack. If this is you, try to target your audience. An unfiltered mode of writing can be a great hook for readers).

• Re-stacking inspiring posts with a note is a great way to get noticed and join the community. People will likely re-stack your posts in response!

• Start from an exploratory place, it’s fine to make changes to your title or subject as you go along.

If you have or are considering your own Substack, do tune into the recording of the live event available in the WriteSPACE under ‘Videos’. At the end of the video, you’ll find Sarah’s writing prompts for analysing your current substack and/or exploring new possibilities.

Thank you to Sarah and Helen for an inspiring and informative exploration of Substack for academic writing, and thank you to all the participants for sharing your comments and engaging questions.

See you again at the next event!

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can now watch the recording of the full two-hour event in their Video library.  

Not a member? Register to receive an email with a link to the video of the first hour.

Better yet, join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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Over the years, I’ve written a lot about writing and risktaking: for example here and here and here. All writing is risky, after all — and as a scholar, mentor, and tireless advocate of stylish academic writing, I see it as my mission to empower writers to face those risks with courage, resilience, and even joy.

Rēinga is a hypermedia poem about creative risktaking that enacts and embodies creative risktaking. Cape Rēinga is the place in the far north of Aotearoa New Zealand where, according to Māori legend, the souls of the dead leap down the roots of an old pōhutukawa tree and start their journey to their ancestral homeland of Hawaiiki. Rēinga variously signifies “the place of leaping,” “the departing place of spirits,” or “the netherworld,” the place where the spirits go.

First published in March 2009 in ka mate ka ora: a new zealand journal of poetry and poetics, Rēinga exists in three different versions in my online poetry collection The Stoneflower Path (2007-2009): as a hypermedia digital poem; as a plain text linear poem; and as an audio recording.

The poem at the top of this post, recorded in March 2024, is clearly different from the one that I recorded back in 2009, not only in terms of my reading pace (slower) and the timbre of my voice (older), but because the words are different. That’s because neither of these recordings fully captures the complexity of the “real” hypermedia poem, which exists in potentially millions of versions.

Do you find the prospect of leaping into a bottomless poem discomforting? Exhausting? Exhilarating? I suspect that your answer to that question will tell you something about your own propensity to take creative risks — or not. Either way, I hope that my guided tour into and through the labyrinthine roots of Rēinga will inspire you to try something new, maybe even something risky, in your own writing.

Enjoy!

The Stoneflower Path

Fifteen years after I first planted The Stoneflower Path in cyberspace, the whizzy website of which I was once so proud now looks as clunky and dated as Bill Clinton’s Blackberry. That’s the risk, I guess, of creating at the cutting edge (or, in my case, at the colorful edge) of technology: everything ages so quickly. An even greater risk, I secretly suspected at the time, was irrelevance. I put in many hours creating those two dozen digital poems using Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Audacity, and Flash; but was anyone ever going to read them, engage with them, remember then? Much as I feared, my self-published collection attracted little critical attention and slowly faded into obsolescence. (Only recently has the tide turned; a few months ago I learned that The Stoneflower Path is now considered a digital literary landmark!)

My hypermedia collection deliberately spotlights the risks and rewards of hypertext, the literary genre that The Stoneflower Path at once embodies, critiques, and celebrates. A hypertext is any text that contains hyperlinks: that is, digital links to words, images, or other media in or beyond the text.1 Hyperlinks offer readers a convenient way of accessing information related to what they’re reading, which is why they’ve become such a familiar presence in virtually every text designed to be read online (including this one). But those temptingly highlighted links risk disrupting the linear flow of our reading and directing our attention elsewhere, much as a footnote drags our eyes to the bottom of the printed page.

When planted deliberately to confuse or misdirect, hyperlinks can lead us off the beaten track completely, sending us spinning into a textual maze with no clearly marked exit. That’s how Rēinga works — and that’s why reading the full hypermedia version of the poem requires a willingness to leap into the dark.

At the place of leaping

First conceived of and published before smartphones and touchscreens became ubiquitous, Rēinga is best experienced on your desktop computer or laptop using a mouse or trackpad.

When you enter the poem by clicking on the title, you’ll always be directed to the same static image — a stained glass mosaic depicting a pōhutukawa tree, two sailboats, and a full moon — and the same opening line:

At the place of leaping

From there, however, the poem bifurcates. As you move your mouse around over the tree, the land, the sea, and the sky, you’ll discover two live hyperlinks. This is your first moment of uncertainty, your first leap into the unknown. A click on the lower sailboat takes you to a glowing purple-and-orange image with the line, This is how I want to live:

A click on the upper sailboat takes you to a grayscale image with the line, This is how I want to die:

From there, it’s no longer a matter of leaping off the cliff into life or death so much as swimming in a roiling sea of possibilities. With 20 live hyperlinks per screen (18 pōhutukawa blossoms + 2 sailboats + 1 moon, minus the current link) leading to more than 50 possible image-plus-line combinations (I used every single Photoshop filter!), you can often create a poem of 20 lines, 30 lines, or more without encountering a single repeated line.

The moon delivers only moon-related phrases, and the sailboats always bring you back to the same two choices — this is how I want to live, this is how I want to die — so you can use those three objects to create some structure for your wanderings. For example, to generate a 16-line poem with a similar cadence to my two voice recordings, try the following sequence of clicks:

at the place of leaping
[upper sailboat] this is how I want to die:
[blossom]
[moon]

[lower sailboat] this is how I want to live:
[blossom]
[moon]
[blossom]

[upper sailboat] this is how I want to die:
[blossom]
[moon]
[blossom]

[blossom]
[blossom]
[upper sailboat] this is how I want to die:
[lower sailboat] this is how I want to live:

Then return to the place of leaping (either by using your back button or by closing your browser window) and repeat the sequence without making any effort to follow exactly the same path. You’ll end up with a new poem that sounds and feels similar to the first, yet hauntingly different.

The hypertext of life

Life is a hypertext, full of risky leaps into the unknown. So is writing. So is art — or, for that matter, any form of creative practice.

In a post titled RISK, our #AcWriMoments prompt for the month of March 2024, Margy Thomas and I each recalled a risk that we’ve taken in our own professional lives. I reflected on how, back in 2001, my husband and I decided to move from our comfortable home in the Midwestern United States to a small island nation in the South Pacific with our three kids, all our earthly possessions, and no jobs or likely job prospects in the academic fields we had left behind:

Those first few years were tough, as we struggled to find our feet personally and professionally. But eventually we both reinvented ourselves in new careers that suited us even better than the ones we’d left behind, and our children got to grow up amongst friends and family in one of the most beautiful countries on earth, a place with strong social and community values that we cherish. Not long after we moved here, I experienced an unexpected creative flowering as a poet and artist, like a rose bush blooming more abundantly than ever after a hard pruning, and I shifted from writing about modernist poetry to writing about scholarly writing.

If, back in 2001, I had clicked on the hyperlink that said Stay rather than the one that said Leap, would I be writing this post today? I doubt it. The poems of The Stoneflower Path were among the many products of the creative flowering that I experienced within my first few years in Aotearoa New Zealand — and Rēinga remains one of my favorite blossoms in the bouquet. I still get a thrill from generating a new poem every time I click beyond the opening image, a photo of the stained glass pōhutukawa mosaic that I crafted “in real life” for my mother’s 80th birthday back in 2005. (It now resides on my brother’s mantelpiece in California). And I still love leaping into the unknown to find out what I’ll learn there.

Subscribe here to Helen’s Word on Substack to access the full Substack archive and receive weekly subscriber-only newsletters. WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $135/year).

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Writing with Pleasure was published by Princeton University Press exactly one year ago. If you missed my virtual book launch on Valentine’s Day 2023, featuring ebullient poet-illustrator Selina Tusitala Marsh and legendary PUP editor Peter Dougherty, you can watch the video replay here.

It took me six years to bring this buoyant book into the world — and yes, I experienced plenty of stumbles and grumbles along the way. But pleasure, I’ve learned, is an emotion contoured by shadows as well as light. No mud, no lotus.

Some days, I’ll confess, all I could see was the mud. My data set included 590 handwritten narratives of pleasure gathered from academic writers around the world; thousands of individual notes and quotes; millions of combinatory possibilities. So much information, so many swirling ideas! How could I make sense of them all for myself, let alone for my readers?

Fortunately, my research on productivity and pleasure equipped me with many creative strategies for bringing curiousity, playfulness, and joy to my writing. One that I turned to again and again was a technique I call “Containers for Chaos”: an iterative process of meaning-making that shifts back and forth between conceptual and material modes. It’s an intensively intellectual activity informed by physical acts of seeing, making, and doing.

Here are three Containers for Chaos that helped me find the shape of my book and the flow of my writing.

Enjoy!

Scrivening

Picture a long wooden table cluttered with piles of pdf printouts, handwritten notes, interview transcripts, rough drafts, notecards, post-it notes, photos, DVDs, ideas scribbled on cafe receipts — you get the idea. Next, imagine a row of colorful milk crates beside the table, each labelled with a potential chapter topic or title. As you sift through the items on the table, you toss each one into the box where you think it belongs, gradually accumulating all the materials you’ll need to support your arguments for each section of your writing project.

That’s how I used Scrivener, a proprietary software program beloved by many academic writers despite its steep learning curve. This screenshot of my Scrivener console comes from the video replay of The Secrets of Structure, a live Zoom conversation that I held with developmental editor and ScholarShape founder Margy Thomas in September 2020, when Writing with Pleasure was still very much a work in progress.

Yes, I would have preferred the chunky materiality of a real wooden table, a real set of milk crates, real piles of real documents with crinkled edges and smudged ink. But the multimodal affordances of Scrivener — the color-coded labels, the scanned handwritten texts, the virtual index cards — helped me contain the chaos of my complex materials in a satisfyingly creative, visceral, non-linear way, with all the added benefits of digitized searching, effortless cutting-and-pasting, and efficient storage.

Fractals

Much though I enjoyed working with Scrivener, I still needed an occasional break from keyboard and screen, a return to the material pleasures of paper, pen, and glue.

One day, following an intriguing conversation with Margy about her Story-Argument model — which offers a way of conceptualizing a scholarly project based on macro, meso, and micro levels of meaning — I decided to map out the story-argument of my book, chapter by chapter and section by section. In joyful anticipation of the task, I gathered some colorful materials that I already had to hand and laid them out on my carpet: a book of Indonesian wrapping paper designs; a stack of post-it notes; a fountain pen filled with turquoise ink.

The image above captures my mapping of the first two chapters: Chapter 1 “Society and Solitude” and Chapter 2 “Body Basics.” On each of the two facing pages, I’ve stuck nine square post-it notes that record the following information:

• The One Essential Idea (OEI) of the chapter.

• The Hook that will draw my readers in and the Revelation that will inspire them.

• The Hook and Revelation for each of the chapter’s three sections.

• Three key Units of Meaning (UoM) for each section:

  • The Claim that will make my reader think, “Oh, really? Prove it!”

  • The Evidence that will persuade them.

  • My Interpretation and Analysis of that evidence.

• The Complications and Caveats that I need to keep in mind.

Smaller post-it notes suggest possible topics for the three illustrated panels in each chapter (“The Pleasures of . . .”) as well as further areas for research.

The visual, tactile process of assembling this Container for Chaos proved intensely pleasurable for me, both intellectually and creatively. The entire project took me no more than a few hours. And by the time I had finished, I understood with a new intimacy and clarity the fractal nature of my book, which started from One Essential Idea — “Academic writers can and should write with pleasure!” — that radiated out into every chapter, every section, and every illustration.

Mosaics

Another Container for Chaos was the mosaic mirror on the wall of my study, which became a sort of talisman for me, a visual representation of the aesthetically beautiful, intellectually complex work that I wanted my book to be. In my Preface, “The Mosaic Mirror,” I recalled how I created the mirror from a curated collection of fragments:

I remember the first time I crafted a mosaic mirror, the one that now hangs in my study. I had already spent a long time assembling its constituent pieces and sorting them into containers: shards of stained glass in rich blues, purples, and greens; sea glass worn smooth and opaque by the waves; seashells and broken pieces of mirror; colorful glass nuggets with flat bottoms and domed tops. I laid out all my materials on my dining room table and began positioning them on a large piece of particleboard around a smaller square mirror at the center: fragments of glass and shell arranged randomly but not capriciously in flowing drifts of light, each set off by the color, shape, and texture of the others.

Describing the structural design of the book, I reflected on the anxieties I felt about publishing such an unconventional piece of scholarship:

The treasures I have laid out here are at least as precious and varied as those bits of stained glass, mirror, and shell, but much more hard-won: first-person narratives of pleasure contributed by hundreds of writers from many different countries; books and articles from a wide range of research disciplines; excerpts from my own poetry and experimental prose; original artwork by my friend and colleague Selina Tusitala Marsh—all broken up into colorful fragments that I arranged with a similar sense of self-confidence mingled with dread. Have I got the balance right? Do I dare to glue them down? Is the grout between them bland enough to set off each independent element yet also strong enough to anchor them in place?

Selina’s artwork beautifully captured the playful mosaic-like energy of the book, reminding us that the pleasures of both writing and reading extend far beyond the march of black letters across a stark field of white:

If you are the kind of reader who likes to start by reading the preface of a book and working your way straight through to the afterword, feel free to set my mosaic metaphor aside and progress along the linear path laid out in the table of contents, which will offer you safe passage. But if you would like to try out a more creative, intuitive, nonlinear style of reading, I invite you to approach this book as you would a mosaic mirror on a gallery wall, first stepping back to take in the whole composition, then moving in close to absorb its colors and touch its textures in whatever order you please.

Each of these Containers for Chaos — my Scrivener project file, my book of fractal logic, my mosaic mirror — helped me find my way to the final structure and shape of Writing with Pleasure. At the same time, each container held its own little universe of colorful chaos: capacious enough to absorb new ideas, flexible enough to allow for experimentation and play.

Perhaps life itself is a Container for Chaos?

Subscribe here to Helen’s Word on Substack to access the full Substack archive and receive weekly subscriber-only newsletters. WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $135/year).

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In February 2024, I welcomed a group of enthusiastic writers to my free Open Beach House at Island Time.

This WriteSPACE Special Event offered a wonderful opportunity for me to show everyone around my Island Time retreat venue and take them on a virtual walk across beautiful Waiheke Island.

From there, we dove straight into a truncated 60-minute Live Writing Studio session so that participants could experience this core feature of the WriteSPACE Studio.

Here is WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the live event:

……………

This special event was far from a typical Live Writing Studio. Not only did it celebrate the 3rd birthday of the WriteSPACE, but it also prompted a collective journey into the realm of joyful writing through a metaphorical tour of Helen’s Island Time retreat venue: Waiheke Island. Waiheke is a special place, nestled in the Hauraki Gulf of Aotearoa New Zealand. You could call it a kind of casual paradise, full of unassuming charm, peaceful bays, vineyards and bushwalks, with independent shops and friendly locals. And it has a dear place in my heart, as it was where I was born and raised.

Our journey in the writing studio began with warm introductions and swiftly segued into a creative exercise. This event aligned very well with the Pleasure Catalyst, and for our creative writing warm-up, we turned to the themes of journeys and writing with pleasure.

You can try this exercise too, either by watching our interactive Island Time video or following the prompts below.

1) Imagine you have arrived on Waiheke Island. You have your hiking boots laced tight and can’t wait to discover the island. Your first stop is Rocky Bay. Located in a more remote part of the island, the bays here are pebbled and rough. But they are a great place to launch a sailboat or kayak.
Where are you starting from on your journey across the island? What does your Rocky Bay of writing look like and feel like right now? (3 minutes to write)

2) Next you embark upon a walk through the Nikau palm bush in Whakenewha Regional Park. The light filters through the canopy, the waterfall trickles in the distance, the tui birds chirp overhead.
Walk silently along the Nikau Track. What are some of the sensory details you notice when you clear your mind and focus on your surroundings? (3 minutes to write)

3) The bush path begins to rise steeply, it brings up your heart rate!
What challenges do you face in your current writing practice that you would like to overcome? (3 minutes to write)

4) You come upon a cool, clear cascade of water flowing from a spring at the heart of the island. What song does it sing to you? What music flows from your heart onto the page? (3 minutes to write)

5) Travelling from your bushwalk, you arrive at a vineyard at the top of the island. What sustenance do you need to fuel you on the rest of your journey? Who will accompany you on your way? (3 minutes to write)

6) Refueled and refreshed, you head down the track on the other side of the island.
What do you hope to find there? (3 minutes to write)

7) You’ve arrived at beautiful Onetangi Beach. Immerse yourself in the blue-green waters of the Hauraki Gulf. What does that cleansing, clarifying ocean swim symbolize for you? (3 minutes to write)

8) Your final destination: a little place called Epiphany Point. Reflect on where your journey across the island has taken you and how it has transformed you. What have you discovered or shed along the way? (3 minutes to write)

In the second half of the studio session, Helen guided the WINDOWS session (Writers IN Discussion with Other WriterS). The WINDOWS sessions are usually 2-3 people in breakout rooms, sharing ideas and editing each other’s work sentence by sentence. (If this sounds like a bit of you, I hope to see you there at the next session!) Those writers who wanted some independent writing time joined me for a 25-minute timed Pomodoro sprint.

In our normal fashion, we concluded this wonderful event with a collaborative poem, with each participant choosing one word to sum up something we had discussed or thought about during the session. Here are the poems from our two sessions:

Puzzle

palm tree dictators
motivated guinea pig
bird re-treat
cliff bonfire
olives canopy
boat notebook

Island

black rock glimmering
journey glade
stairs downhill
pohutukawa

A big thank you to Helen for this informative and inspiring special event and a warm welcome to all the new writers who joined us. I hope to see you all again at the next Live Writing Studio or Special Event!

If you would like to know more about the WriteSPACE or WS Studio, we would love to hear from you!

A recording of thisWriteSPACE Special Event is now available in the WriteSPACE Library.

Not a member? Register to receive an email with the video link.

Better yet, join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources.

Subscribe here to Helen’s Word on Substack to access the full Substack archive and receive weekly subscriber-only newsletters. WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $135/year).

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To kick off 2024 with a burst of color, I’ve brought together half a dozen of my favorite newsletter posts from the past two years, pairing them up for shared conversations under the theme of writing with pleasure. Each pairing ends with a question: What does pleasurable writing look like for you?

You may wish to complement today’s post with the daily prompts of my 30 Days of Writing with Pleasure challenge, now on Day 8 (but it’s not too late to join us!). Then, on February 1, segue into #AcWriMoments 2024, a series of monthly writing prompts co-curated with my friend-in-writing, Margy Thomas. Our open-doored theme for January 2024 is WELCOME.

Enjoy!

The Pleasures of Wordcraft

In the first of these two posts on the pleasures of close reading, I use colored highlighting to analyze (with pleasure) a piece of writing by master stylist Steven Pinker; in the second, I conjure a multilayered collage from the words and images of a Wordsworth poem.

Savoring good writing or exploring unknown paths: which mode of discovery speaks to you?

These next two posts explore how metaphorical language can inspire and empower academic and professional writers. The first takes you on a joyride through my various publications on writing and metaphor — a theme I can’t seem to escape from! — while the second offers a glimpse of what awaits you in the metaphor-rich landscape of my upcoming Pleasure Catalyst.

Past research or future learning: which direction will the metaphor bus carry you next?

The Pleasures of Be-ing

And finally, here are two contrasting takes on be-verbs. The first plies you with stylistic strategies for avoiding forms of the verb to be, while the second urges you to ignore such bossy syntactical pronouncements and have some fun.

Well-meaning Bee or contrary Cat: whose advice will you follow?

In case you missed my announcement last week: this year I’m scaling Helen’s Word back to one post per week, alternating between newsy newsletters, craft-based essays, and new episodes of Swordswings, my monthly podcast for paid subscribers.

I love hearing back from my readers! Please leave a comment, share this newsletter with a friend, drop me a restack — or at least toss a heart into my crazy weaverbird-mountain-bus-hands-bee-cat collage (which was a lot of fun to pull together).

Kia pai tō koutou rā (have a great day) – and keep on writing!

Subscribe here to Helen’s Word on Substack to access the full Substack archive and receive weekly subscriber-only newsletters. WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $135/year).

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On January 25, I invited members of my WriteSPACE community to join me for a special event, the launch of my new diagnostic survey: The Journey Planner.  

In the first hour of this exclusive WriteSPACE Special Event, I encouraged the writers to answer a series of reflective writing questions and to take two of my diagnostic tools. In the second hour, we discussed their individual goals for establishing healthy and happy writing habits.

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the live event:

……………

This Special Event featuring Helen’s new Journey Planner test offered a chance to reflect on our writing goals for the year.

Helen’s new survey is a great way to identify your writing roadblocks, fill up on your personal rocket fuel (e.g. your strengths and passions as a writer), and chart an ambitious but achievable path to better writing this year. In small groups, Helen was able to offer individual feedback and coaching to help each of us refine our itineraries.

It’s not too late to take the survey, you too can take steps towards designing a plan of action for your writing this year.

Go to the Maproom page in your account. Under the intro paragraph, you will find a link to ‘Try our Journey Planner!’

Complete and submit the Journey Planner Survey, including your results for The Writing BASE and The Roadblock Quiz. Helen will read your answers and will offer personalised advice for you to hone and achieve your goals through a video. I will also be able to send you some resources and a PDF with some writing prompts to explore your plan abstractly and/or creatively.

In fact, why not try the same exercise that Helen coached us through during this Special Event? Grab yourself a notebook and a pen, and find a comfy spot. Take 10 minutes to draw or mind-map your writing goals for each of the following areas:

• Style

• Creativity

• Community

• Productivity

• Pleasure and play

How important are each of these aspects in your yearly plan for your writing? Think about their relative size, texture, shape, colour, and symbolism. See what unfolds on the page…

My personal goals for the year involve unblocking my creative writing and nourishing the vitality of my everyday writing practice. It struck me during this exercise that, much like a healthy diet involves different food groups, a healthy writing practice should also be rich in diverse nutrients. Each of the 5 aspects listed above became a fruit on my plate. Style became a huge grapefruit, not only enormously important to me but sharp and unique in its flavour. Creativity became a wonky pear to represent creative innovation in my work. Community became an apple already partly munched (with thanks to the WriteSPACE community). Productivity was a long banana that stretched into longer and longer stints of daily writing. And pleasure became a strawberry, the smallest of all the fruits on the plate, but potentially the juiciest. I’m reminded of a great interview conducted by celebrity chef Paul Hollywood of the world’s most delicious and expensive strawberries, sold by a humble farmer in Japan. With the right sunlight, warmth and care, those Japanese strawberries could grow to enormous sizes. Similarly, with the right SPACE, my writing practice can become as delicious and richly textured as a fruit salad this year.

If you would like to share your Journey planner sketch/ mind map with us, feel free to submit it via the SPACE Gallery page.

Thank you to Helen for guiding us through this new tool, and thank you to all the writeSPACE members who attended. I look forward to seeing some of you again at the Open Beach House Special Event.

See you again soon!

This Special Event was exclusive to WriteSPACE and WS Studio members.

Not a member? Join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources.

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Many years ago, I took part in a cross-disciplinary collaboration called Metonymy, billed by its organizers as an exercise in artistic blind dating:

Each artist will be paired with a poet or writer, and over a period of one month you will work together to create a collaborative multi-disciplinary work.

My “date” was Anne-Sophie Adelys, a visual artist I had never met. Because we lived at opposite ends of our sprawling city and both had hectic work schedules, we decided to collaborate without meeting. Instead, we agreed on a shared theme — “memory / childhood / paths not taken” — and then mailed two notebooks back and forth once a week for four weeks. (That was back in the days before Zoom, and when the mail service still worked).

Below I’ve traced a few of the thematic and imagistic connections that I remember making as the notebooks travelled between us. But time, like memory, creates its own kind of distance — and some of the most resonant meanings may be those that emerge from the blank spaces in between.

Enjoy!

The containers

To kick off the project, Anne-Sophie and I each selected a blank notebook and mailed it to the other person. Mine was a pretty little pocket-sized blank book with flowers on the cover, a recent birthday gift. Here’s how it looks today, filled with the bulky treasures later added by Anne-Sophie:

Her notebook, by contrast, was a plain black Moleskine:

We both had fun decorating the padded envelopes that we sent back and forth. Here’s one from me to Anne-Sophie:

And one from Anne-Sophie to me:

At the end of the experiment, Anne-Sophie kept her original notebook, and I kept mine — so my only record of hers is the digital exhibit that I created way back in 2010 for my poetry website, The Stoneflower Path. Flipping through my little flowered notebook in preparation for writing this post, I discovered several poems and drawings that didn’t make it into our digital exhibit. What forgotten secrets lurk in Anne-Sophie’s black notebook, I wonder now?

Flowers

When I opened “my” notebook on its first journey home from Anne-Sophie’s studio, a cardboard flower popped up:

Inspired by Anne-Sophie’s three-dimensional imagination, I wrote a poem called “My Grandmother’s Garden” and let it ramble through the notebook line by line, page by page, leaf by leaf. Then, having already filled 20 pages of the notebook with lines of hand-written text and tiny cut-out leaves, I copied the whole poem out again on a scroll of tissue paper that unfurled from the book when it was opened:

My Grandmother’s Garden

in that garden with walls
like a chocolate box
or a casket of dreams
I clambered to the top
of the old apple tree
and feathered my nest with
lace scraps from the attic
paper from the bookshelves
darkness from the cellar
until my wings outstretched
my perch and spiralled me
up to gawk from the sun:
at it all: my mansion of
memory no wider
than a widow’s cottage,
the rolling lawn a doll’s
handkerchief, the secret
garden a tangle of
weeds behind the toolshed.

Birds

At the front of Anne-Sophie’s black notebook, I had pasted a manila label hand-lettered with the phrase “a box of birds.” (Or maybe Anne-Sophie glued the label into the book, and I wrote the words on it? I honestly don’t remember!) It’s a New Zealand colloquialism, meaning chirpy or in good spirits, as in “That little girl is a box of birds!”

The following week, in my flowered notebook, I wove the same words into a poem that conflates fuchsias, birds, and little girls in a ballet class:

Fuchsias

four girls in the back
of Mrs. Fleetwood’s station wagon

a box of birds
a basket of flowers

carpooling to Miss Irene’s
Russian ballet school

Ginna, Kimberly,
Helen, Yvonne

an hour in the suburbs
a room with a barre

birds at the window
fuchsias on the lawn

Should I have been surprised when my notebook returned to me two weeks later with a beautiful bird inside, unfurling its gorgeous wings as the book popped open?

Books

I mailed my notebook back to Anne-Sophie with a new poem inside:

The Books

walking home from Pilates I recall
their perfect posture, the graceful way they slid
from their slipcovers like dancers from the barre
at Miss Irene’s, each bending at my will
as my own obstinate body would not,
its pages arcing over my palm:

a balancing act
an opening door
a floating bird

People

Meanwhile, amongst all the birds, books, and flowers travelling back and forth between us, a familial theme was emerging. People I didn’t know, along with other enigmatic hints of family life — a pair of shoes pinned to a clothesline, an old camera with a neck strap — started appearing in Sophie’s notebooks:

It may have been this drawing of two women strolling side by side that inspired me to write about the sister I never had:

Family Tree

in my dream of a sister
our mother sweeps her hair
into a golden whalespout

our father wraps damp sheets
around her burning body
and rocks her fever away

a jolly jolly sixpence
rolls from his pocket
by the light of a jealous moon

and in our separate gardens
the dark birds assemble
on a wire drawn taut between us

Yes, those dark birds from Anne-Sophie’s envelope found their way into the final sequence of my poem — just as my dream of a sister found its way into a sequence of rose-adorned letters that Anne-Sophie drew towards the back of my flowered notebook, spelling out the word S-I-S-T-E-R:

And then there were the brothers: the real ones who once tied their two-year-old sister (me!) to a clothesline and who later threatened to blow her up with a bottle of fake nitroglycerin. But that’s a story for another day! In the meantime, here’s the photo of my two-year-old self, my hair in a golden whalespout, that I glued into Anne-Sophie’s black notebook:

Looking back all these years later at our creative experiment, I can still vividly remember the anticipation that I felt each week as I opened the mailbox to find Anne-Sophie’s latest envelope/artwork inside. I would tear the package open and flip through the notebook to find how she had responded to my latest entry: subtly, obliquely, never in an obvious or literal way. I did my best to respond in kind, not just with poems but also with glued-in photos and cards and scraps of paper, items inspired rather than directly informed by Sophie’s enigmatic line drawings.

And now I’m thinking: What might such an experiment look like if conducted not between a visual artist and a poet but between, say, a creative writer and an academic, or a scientist and a literary scholar, or any two curious human beings who love notebooks, miss the materiality of snail mail, and would love to find out what creative serendipities might be sparked by such an exchange?

If you decide to try it out, I’d love to hear about it!

This post was originally published on my free Substack newsletter, Helen’s Word. Subscribe here to access my full Substack archive and get weekly writing-related news and inspiration delivered straight to your inbox.

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership, which costs just USD $12.50 per month on the annual plan. Not a member? Sign up now for a free 30-day trial!

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If you subscribed to #AcWriMoments — the 30-day series of daily writing prompts that I co-curated last month with Margy Thomas— you may recognize this image, which I’ve based on the gorgeous photograph of a yellow weaverbird building its nest provided by Steven Pinker as part of his Day 15 prompt, “Linger over good writing.”

Lingering over good writing (and encouraging other writers to do the same) is pretty much what I do for a living — so what better way to illustrate the technique than by lingering over Steve’s own #AcWriMoments contribution?

Taking a page from my own Day 26 prompt, “Write in color,” I’ve used colored pencils to spotlight some of the stylistic features in Steve’s work that I find worth savoring.

Enjoy!

The first paragraph

The starting point for becoming a good writer is to be a good reader. Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose.

---

Steve’s opening paragraph (like the sentence I am writing right now) makes two potentially risky grammatical moves: the first sentence contains the bland be-verb phrase “is to be” (highlighted yellow), and we find multiple -ing words (highlighted blue) across the two sentences. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with either choice. However, as a general rule, be-verbs lack the kinetic energy of more active, vivid verbs, while the suffix -ing can signal the presence of either a verb, noun, or adjective, depending on context; so unless you’re in full control of your syntax, a surfeit of -ings can end up messing with your reader’s brain!

Needless to say, Steven Pinker is in full control of his syntax and style. The is to be phrase in the first sentence functions as a kind of syntactical fulcrum, balancing the phrases a good writer and a good reader (highlighted in pink), while the second sentence uses the repeated -ings to good effect and leaves us in no doubt of Steve’s facility with active verbs (highlighted in orange): acquire, spot, savor, reverse-engineer.

Take a moment, too, to spot and savor the poetry in this passage: the alliteration of spotting and savoring; the assonance and consonance of reverse-engineering examples.

The second paragraph

Much advice on style is stern and censorious. A recent bestseller advocated “zero tolerance” for errors and brandished the words horror, satanic, ghastly, and plummeting standards on its first page. The classic style manuals, written by starchy Englishmen and rock-ribbed Yankees, try to take all the fun out of writing, grimly adjuring the writer to avoid offbeat words, figures of speech, and playful alliteration. A famous piece of advice from this school crosses the line from the grim to the infanticidal:

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—wholeheartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

---

Moving a bit more quickly now, let’s ride the wave of these four splendid sentences, which roll us inexorably toward that famous “murder your darlings” quote by Arthur Quiller-Couch, a starchy Englishman if ever there was one. To fully appreciate their tidal flow — surging from 8 words to 22 and then 34 before ebbing back to 17 — I recommend that you read the whole paragraph out loud.

Here I’ve highlighted the verbs in orange, the adjectives and adverbs in yellow, the nouns in turquoise, and the colorful quotations from Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation) and Quiller-Couch (On Style, 1914) in purple.

You can see at a glance how carefully Steve has chosen and balanced every word and phrase — even (or especially?) the ones borrowed from other writers as negative examples.

The third paragraph

An aspiring writer could be forgiven for thinking that learning to write is like negotiating an obstacle course in boot camp, with a sergeant barking at you for every errant footfall. Why not think of writing as a form of pleasurable mastery instead, like cooking or photography? Perfecting the craft is a lifelong calling, and mistakes are part of the game.

---

Now the floodgates have opened, and the metaphors (highlighted in turquoise) come pouring in thick and fast. We’re carried through the bleak dystopian world of the first sentence, where learning to write resembles a particularly nasty kind of boot camp, to the utopian promise of the second, which offers us a vision of writing as “a form of pleasurable mastery instead, like cooking or photography.” By the final sentence, the word writing has disappeared, transmuted into a craft, a calling, and a game. (The maroon highlighting tracks the journey of writing from learning to doing to perfecting; the orange highlighting illuminates the key phrase at the heart of the paragraph).

Note the quickening rhythm as we’re drawn through the interminable obstacle course of the first sentence (30 words) and the questioning possibilities of the second (16 words) to the punchy promise of the third (15 words). A parallel shift in tone — from negative to hopeful to positive — can be tracked through the transition from third person (“an aspiring writer”) to second person (“barking at you”). By the time we reach the end of the passage, we know that the author isn’t just talking about writing; he’s talking to us.

The list

Though the quest for improvement may be informed by lessons and honed by practice, it must first be kindled by a delight in the best work of the masters and a desire to approach their excellence. Reverse-engineering good prose is the key to developing a writerly ear. Stylish writers, you’ll find, typically share a number of practices, including:

• an insistence on fresh wording and concrete imagery over familiar verbiage and abstract summary;

• an attention to the readers’ vantage point and the target of their gaze;

• the judicious placement of an uncommon word or idiom against a backdrop of simple nouns and verbs;

• the use of parallel syntax;

• the occasional planned surprise;

• the presentation of a telling detail that obviates an explicit pronouncement;

• the use of meter and sound that resonate with the meaning and mood.

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Good writing, Steve suggests here, is “kindled by delight.” In that spirit, I couldn’t resist using a rainbow of colors to highlight all the items on his list of stylish practices, as his own writing exemplifies every single one of them.

Thank you, Steve, for the examples and inspiration!

If you enjoyed this post, I highly recommend that you to read Steven Pinker’s book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, from which his #AcWriMoments prompt was adapted.

This post was originally published on my free Substack newsletter, Helen’s Word. Subscribe here to access my full Substack archive and get weekly writing-related news and inspiration delivered straight to your inbox.

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership, which costs just USD $12.50 per month on the annual plan. Not a member? Sign up now for a free 30-day trial!

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On November 15, I invited Jillian Hess for a lively conversation on "Writers and Their Notebooks".  Jillian is a professor of English at the City University of New York and author of How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information (Oxford University Press, 2022), and she publishes the fabulous twice-weekly Substack newsletter Noted, which has been named as a Substack Featured Publication for two years running (2022 and 2023).

In the first hour of this free WriteSPACE Special Event, Jillian and I discussed some favorite exemplars of creative note-taking and what we can learn from them. In the second hour, we led a hands-on discussion and workshop for WriteSPACE members, guiding participants through some playful note-taking experiments of their own.

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the live event:

……………

This Special Event featuring Helen Sword and Jillian Hess offered a deep dive into the note-taking practices of some famous figures, including Julia Child, Carl Jung, John Milton, George Eliot, Toni Morrison, and Sylvia Plath, among others. Not only that, we also heard about the personal note-taking of both Helen and Jillian! It was so interesting to be exposed to new forms of writing and to contemplate how we can draw inspiration from other writers’ practices.

But what do we actually mean by notebooks? Jillian’s Substack newsletter, Noted, traverses the breadth and scope of this complex genre: drafts, annotated bibliographies, process writing, commonplace books, diaries . . . . Exploring these forms can offer us a teleological reading of the writing process: that is, because we already know what a famous author’s finished work looks like, we can gain insight into how they got there.

Jillian described beginning her own notetaking practice of collecting quotes that inspired or moved her. Much later, while researching in various special archives collections for her PhD, she stumbled upon notebooks much like her own, filled with quotes and sayings. The only difference was that these notebooks were hundreds of years old. She had discovered a very established and theorised tradition called the “commonplace book” tradition. This research would not only become the basis of her recent book about commonplace books, scrapbooks, and albums of the Victorian period, but would also launch her amazing Substack newsletter Noted. No longer a purely academic project, she has broadened her previous focus on romantic and Victorian literature to include figures like artists, musicians, scientists, and chefs.

Jillian also spoke about the bounds of access: While she recognizes that digital access is democratizing this information, she noted that only a small percentage of the material is digitized. For example, to read the papers of writers like Audre Lorde or Gloria Anzaldúa, you have to wade into the archives for a fuller picture.

Here are some memorable quotes from Jillian and Helen’s conversation in the first hour:

• “The commonplace book (or any notebook) can become the nesting place for incubating ideas.” (Jillian)

• “Research on student note-taking shows you remember more when you write by hand because you have to synthesise the ideas as you’re writing. So, notetaking as a practice actually has a pedagogical power.” (Helen)

• “It really depends on what you need as a writer. I think we all need different things from our notebooks.” (Jillian)

• “For me, it’s the glide of the fountain pen on the paper. I have not yet found anything that can replicate that. The material pleasure of writing connects me to being human in various ways.” (Helen)

*************

In the second hour, Helen and Jillian co-hosted a dynamic workshop that encouraged us all to fill our notebook pages with creative flow. What I personally found fascinating was the discussion that emerged, born from a tricky question: Why are we taught that clean and tidy handwriting in notebooks is better than messiness? And how can we overcome this assumption? By learning to love and accept our messy notebooks, can we also learn to love and accept the messiness of our early book and article drafts?

Jillian assures us that there is creativity in the messiness. But she too has been caught thinking that a tidy notebook equals a tidy mind. If you have felt neatness envy, it might be time let go of that guilt. The truth is that a lot of really great writing happens in the messiness. Your own “waste notebook” may liberate you to scribble, scrawl, and jot freely, and you can extract and re-write any juicy ideas later on.

To replicate the workshop, you may want to try out one of the following exercises while embracing any messiness that may wiggle its way onto the page:

1. Spend 5 minutes filling a page of your notebook by writing about any topic that springs to mind. You may wish to incorporate color, drawings, creative arrangements, words and imagery, or quotes. Call it a brainstorm, a creative explosion, idea generation, whatever you like. But don’t overthink the process and let yourself be surprised by what flows.

2. Be inspired by Carl Jung’s daily mandalas and create your own. This could become a morning ritual, like the “morning pages” that Julia Cameron advocates every writer should try. Embrace it as a quiet and reflective moment to warm up your writing day. See several of the creations from Jung’s Red Book below.

Thank you to Jillian and Helen for an inspiring romp through the world of notebooks and notetaking, and thank you to all the participants for sharing your comments and engaging questions.

See you again at the next event!

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can now watch the recording of the full two-hour in their Video library.  

Not a member? Register to receive an email with a link to the video of the first hour.

Better yet, join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources.

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On February 14th, 2022, to celebrate the first anniversary of the WriteSPACE, I offered a free Zoom workshop called “Writing and Paper Collage.” Participants from around the world gleefully showed off the piles of materials that they had gathered for the event and piled next to their computers: scrap paper, wrapping paper, wallpaper, post-it notes, bus tickets, book jackets, stickers, doilies, old copies of the London Review of Books . . . .

And then there was Hussain, who logged in from a refugee detention centre in Indonesia. He brought along the few items he’d managed to forage: a sheet of white cardstock from the back of an old workbook; a red felt marker; a small piece of plastic-coated wire. While the other participants created gorgeous, complex collages from their assembled materials — you can see some examples here and here — Hussain drew a heart with the red marker, then pushed the wire through holes in the cardstock to create a woven outline.

“The wire has an interesting story,” he later told me:

Last year in March I got Covid then I was quarantined here. Because the room was hot, the accommodation management brought a new fan and the wire was wrapped around its cable. As boring as it is being locked inside a room, I took the wire and initially made a ring for myself. On the day of the Valentine workshop, the idea of a heart came to my mind.

Hussain had first contacted me out of the blue in April 2021, shortly after I launched the WriteSPACE. In imperfect but eloquent English — acquired mainly, I later learned, from free instructional videos on YouTube — he introduced himself and politely asked for help:

I'm Hussain Shah Rezaie from Afghanistan but currently living as a refugee temporary (for seven years) in Indonesia. 

Writing has worked yet as a rescuer to the daunting difficulty of my life as a refugee. One of the thing that stand on my way to write is getting access to some high quality writing material, as well as, making connection with experienced and renowned writers for constructive feedback. . . . Internet is the only place I sneak around to have some sort of connection. I know that the mere practice of writing is being done solitary in the corner of empty space, but becoming better writer to some extent depend on connection with like minded people. . . . I would really appreciate if I get a chance to attend to your future writing program.

Intrigued, I organized a WriteSPACE scholarship (underwritten by a generous professor in Texas) and invited Hussain to start attending my weekly Live Writing Studio. From time to time I checked in with him to ask after his family, especially after the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban in August 2021. But not until February 2022, a few days after he showed me his wire-woven heart at the collage workshop, did I finally ask him to meet with me one-on-one and tell me his life story.

I was born in 1998 in a gash of green between arid sharp mountains in Haidar, Jaghori. If you look through a satellite image, it all looks like deserted altitudes. Even for a wild reptile this region would be a rigorous place to live. But it’s home to uncounted numbers of Hazara. Our ancestors were pushed into the mountains as far as the elderly recall from their elderly. Since then, the mountains have protected us . . . . (From Walk with Me: A Refugee’s Journey to Freedom)

The eldest of three children, Hussain dropped out of school at age 14 to support his mother and younger siblings following the tragic disappearance of his father. At 16, he was captured and beaten by the Taliban and accused of a crime he did not commit. After making a harrowing escape, he was people-smuggled by his terrified family to Indonesia, where he spent the next nine and a half years in a series of refugee detention facilities, forbidden to access formal education or to seek paid employment.

Faced with crushing boredom and an uncertain future, Hussain refused to give in to despair. Instead, he embarked on an ambitious program of self-education, learning English and studying subjects such as psychology and creative writing via free videos, courses, and ebooks that he accessed via wifi on an old cellphone. As his writing became more fluent and assured, he found the words to describe the emotional impact of his situation:

My act of controlling the psychological gear of my distress has been a mere coping mechanism to the underlying issues that have been out of my control. It has been like walking in a lightless night toward a never coming dawn. Nine years and three months have passed since I began my life as a refugee in Indonesia. My helplessness toward the deteriorating situation of my family often darkened my walk. The basic rights I have been denied, the years of incarceration inside prison walls, have been the wild beasts in the walk. During my time in Indonesia, these beasts have claimed the lives of around 60 other refugees. (From Walk with Me: A Refugee’s Journey to Freedom)

A young man in limbo. A heart behind wire.

Around the time of our conversation in February 2022, I had developed an interest in Tarot cards — not for their divinatory power (which I don’t believe in) but for their richly poetic and symbolic qualities. That week I’d drawn the Three of Swords, depicted in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck as a heart pierced with wounds so ancient that they no longer bleed.

In Tarot, the suit of Swords — associated with the element of Air — signifies not physical violence so much as the power of language and thought to harm or to heal. After logging off from my call with Hussain, I stared at those two blood-red images: Hussain’s cardboard heart laced with wire; the Tarot heart pierced by Swords.

Then I walked into the kitchen and said to my husband, “We’ve got to get him out of there.”

Some 21 months later, on October 4, 2023, Hussain was granted permanent residency in Aotearoa New Zealand under a pilot Community Organization Refugee Sponsorship scheme.

He will arrive next month in Auckland — one of the most expensive cities in the world — with no money, no formal educational qualifications, and virtually no possessions, aside from the donated laptop on which he has composed an ever-growing collection of short stories, personal essays, and poems.

Some of these beautiful pieces have already been published in international journals such as the Cincinnati Review and the archipelago. Others will appear Hussain’s newly launched Substack newsletter, Walk With Me:

Through poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, I tell my story. My story of escaping war in Afghanistan and living nearly a decade long in limbo as a refugee in Indonesia.

The journey is sad as it sounds and difficult as it seems. Yet, through this journey I found myself. I have found hope when it was taken from me. I have found beauty when everything seemed ugly. I have found truth amidst lies. I have found psychological and spiritual freedom when I had my physical freedom hidden behind barbed wire. All through a pen and paper or the small screen of my cellphone.

Hussain could not have made it this far without the generous contributions of time and energy from a small but devoted group of WriteSPACE members and other mentors around the world — Anita, David, James, Janet, Joanna, Karim, Lynne, Nikie, Nina, Pat, Sophie, Vicky — with special thanks to my husband Richard for his unflagging support and to our business manager Victoria for her fierce commitment to human rights and her many hours of volunteer labor on Hussain’s behalf.

Now you, too, can become part of Hussain’s story.

By subscribing to Walk With Me — currently free — you can follow his extraordinary journey as it unfolds. Eventually, as soon as has opened his own bank account in New Zealand and can start accepting paid subscriptions, Hussain hopes to be able to earn enough from his newsletter to spend a day or two each week writing.

In the meantime, if you’re inspired by Hussain’s story and want to help, you can make a direct donation to a scholarship fund set up by his sponsoring organisation, WriteSpace Ltd. His long-term plan is to attend university and study psychology so he can help other refugees survive and thrive. Please be assured that every cent you contribute (minus bank and credit card fees) will go directly towards Hussain’s living costs and future educational expenses.

Thank you for travelling this path. Thank you for walking with Hussain.

This post was originally published on my free Substack newsletter, Helen’s Word. Subscribe here to access my full Substack archive and get weekly writing-related news and inspiration delivered straight to your inbox.

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership, which costs just USD $12.50 per month on the annual plan. Not a member? Sign up now for a free 30-day trial!

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On Day 2 of #AcWriMoments, my co-curator Margy Thomas invited our readers to reflect on the public or private names that guide their writing process:

Turn your attention to a name you’ve chosen for your body of work or a piece of it. In your journal, in your imagination, or in conversation with a friend, reflect on these questions:

What meanings does the name hold for you? How has the name guided your writing process, or how could it guide your process? Might another name be waiting to be chosen by you? Guided by a name you have chosen, what is one small step you can take in your work today?

Margy’s prompt led me to consider the various acts of naming that have inspired my title for today’s post, Moments of Sacred Space:

• Moments refers, of course, to #AcWriMoments itself. Our intentionally cheeky hashtagged title transforms Academic Writing Month, aka #AcWriMo — a 30-day period traditionally associated with ticking timers, mounting word counts, and other quantitative performance metrics — into a series of reflective Academic Writing Moments instead.

• SACRED is the acronym that Margy and I used in our Day 1 post to categorize the six different kinds of writing prompts drafted by our fabulous contributors.

• SPACE is my shorthand for the five elements of pleasurable writing around which I have built my virtual writing community, the WriteSPACE.

Here’s a brief tour of this SACRED SPACE.

Enjoy!

Sacred

“Which kind of #AcWriMoment are you most looking forward to cultivating this November?” Margy and I asked our 1.46K subscribers (so far!) on Day 1.

How better to articulate the possibilities offered by each of those six SACRED moments — Strategic, Artisanal, Creative, Reflective, Embodied, Delicious — than by drawing on the rich, thoughtful responses of our readers?

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Strategic moments yield insights about what idea you’re really trying to convey and how best to convey it.

Rebecca wrote:

Strategic moments really resonated with me. I have a lot of "writing" strategies but what is the strategy for conveying my meaning and purpose? I'm going to move that question to my morning pages to ponder a bit longer.

Artisanal or crafty moments immerse you in the process of creating work that is not just true and useful, but also beautiful.

Pam wrote:

The artisanal moment sounds just right for where I am in my writing. I’m a knitter; I find joy in learning techniques from others, gathering ideas and materials, and then shaping these into something that is both beautiful and functional. Well, that’s my hope, anyway. This month I want to do something along the same lines with my writing.

Creative or experimental moments open you up to insights you never could have planned.

Wai Ling wrote:

I am looking forward for Creative (experimental) moments to remind me that writing a dissertation is a creative process where I can insert my authentic self into it without getting lost in the rigors of a research.

Reflective moments bring insights about who you are and how you express your unique self through your work.

Hava wrote:

I’m looking most forward to Reflective moments. I’ve been on a year-long process of slowing my pace, after a few years of working at a highly reactive pandemic pace. That left me super other-focused, meeting the needs of my students, colleagues, & institution as they arose. I’m working on discerning what I want to think about, what I want to work on, separate from the sort of emergency crouch I had fallen back into during super active COVID. I hope I can use these #AcWriMoments to help me focus in even more on my own curiosity & goals.

Embodied moments invite you to physically enact the ideas you’re trying to express, thereby deepening your understanding of those ideas.

Sophie wrote:

Having spent eight immobile weeks with a broken ankle, I'm most looking forward to Embodied moments, where I can move, stretch and bring my whole body to my writing again.

Delicious moments are, well, just that — moments to be rolled around on your tongue and savored.

Aditi wrote:

I'm looking forward to delicious moments the most. I'm getting prepared to present a big piece of work and have it be publicly acknowledged.

As for me, I’m looking forward to them all!

SPACE

While researching my recent book Writing with Pleasure (Princeton 2023), I collected “SPACE maps” from hundreds of academic writers, whom I invited to draw a SPACE of pleasurable writing that is:

• Socially balanced

• Physically engaging

• Aesthetically nourishing 

• Creatively challenging 

• Emotionally uplifting 

Their colorful responses take us to outer space and back down to earth, relive childlike joy in the playground of writing, and celebrate the bodies we write with and the places where we write. 

You can find a collection of these SPACE drawings in the SPACE Gallery on my website — or, better yet, join my wonderful WriteSPACE community to experience the five principles in action.

Acronyms are powerful! When we transform the SCARED PACES of our frantic lives into a SACRED SPACE for writing, we learn to stop running after all the wrong things and to settle into a quieter, more nourishing relationship with our words and our work.

Here are three online resources dedicated to helping you build your own sacred space of writing:

• #AcWriMoments: 30 days of daily prompts for finding courage, clarity, and purpose in your scholarly work throughout the month of November.

• WriteSPACE: An online writing community devoted to nurturing the social, physical, aesthetic, creative, and emotional dimensions of your writing practice.

• The Productivity Catalyst: A 6-week course that teaches you how to integrate six core elements of productive writing — time, space, flow, craft, community, and joy — into your everyday writing life in a gentle, forgiving way. The Productivity Catalyst starts tomorrow, but there’s still time to join us!

This post was originally published on my free Substack newsletter, Helen’s Word. Subscribe here to access my full Substack archive and get weekly writing-related news and inspiration delivered straight to your inbox.

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership, which costs just USD $12.50 per month on the annual plan. Not a member? Sign up now for a free 30-day trial!

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In my book Writing with Pleasure, I describe a playful project that I undertook at a time in my career when I was struggling to balance my research and teaching load with the demands of a busy academic leadership role.

Over a two-month period in early 2016, I drew hundreds of tiny color-coded mosaic tiles along a winding paper path that I called the Email Trail. Every week I chose a different set of colored pencils and a different theme to focus on, with each tile representing an ingoing or outgoing email message. My mission? To transform my daily task of clearing my email inbox — which took, on average, two hours per day — from a stressful activity into something more pleasurable and engaging, or at least less burdensome.

Last week, I found my 2016 Email Trail notebook wedged amongst a stack of old journals, its eccentric hoard of workplace data still intact and, until now, unpublished.

I invite you to join me for a walk along the Email Trail.

Enjoy!

Weeks 1-2

January 2016 got off to a slow start, as reflected by my relatively light email workload in the first two weeks of the year. Between January 1-15, I sent “only” 95 outgoing work emails, which I color-coded in my notebook according to the gender of the recipients: purple for women, green for men, and blue for mixed groups or for individuals whose gender identity I didn’t know.

What I learned: Nearly two-thirds of my email conversations were with women, many of them working in administrative or service roles. As a senior female academic who has been socialized all my life to be friendly and accommodating towards other people, did I spend more time responding to routine transactional emails than my male colleagues typically did? (I never investigated that question further but have my suspicions!)

Week 3

By the third week of January, the pace of my email exchanges started picking up. In the 7-day period between January 16-22, I sent out 62 emails to colleagues within my own university and 56 messages to external email addresses. Notably, I was preoccupied that week with organizing an international conference panel, which almost certainly skewed my ratio of external to internal emails.

What I learned: Although most of my day-to-day electronic communications remained internal to my university, there were periods when email became a crucial point of connection and exchange with international colleagues. I resolved to savor those periods of heightened engagement with the wider world, rather than frantically rushing through them to get to the next trivial administrative task.

Week 4

In the fourth week of January 2016 I went completely off-grid, hiking the spectacular Milford Track. When I returned the following week to find 144 new emails in my work inbox, I decided to track how I handled each one. Thirty-three messages (red) could be deleted without reading (this number didn’t include all the junkmail that had already been triaged by my email filtering service!) I quickly skimmed through and deleted a further 39 emails (green). But 21 messages (indigo) required careful scrutiny followed by a reply and/or action, and I read and filed a further 31 emails (purple).

What I learned: I was handling a lot of email every week with attention and care — no wonder I so often felt stressed! Some of my processes were quite efficient (such as filtering and deleting spam); however, I realized that I was wasting a lot of time meticulously filing away messages that I would never look at again.

Week 5

In the first week of February — a short work week due to a 3-day holiday weekend — I tracked the status of my outgoing emails, which numbered 74 in all:

• 32 messages (blue) started a new email trail.

• 24 emails (green) replied to a new email trail started by someone else.

• 18 emails (orange) contributed to an existing conversation.

What I learned: Perhaps I could keep my inbox clearer by initiating fewer new conversations and bringing ongoing exchanges to a close?

Week 6

Week 6 was another 4-day work week. Of the 67 emails that I sent out that week, 43 messages (orange) contained fewer than 50 words; 16 (violet) were between 51-99 words long; and 8 messages (magenta) exceeded 100 words.

What I learned: The shorter emails were mainly transactional and could be clustered and cleared fairly quickly. The longer ones, by contrast, were often linked to chunky writing tasks such as administrative reports and reference letters, which required from me an entirely different kind of focus and time commitment. Anything over 100 words isn’t just an email any more; it’s a project!

Week 7

When I tracked the number of people to whom I cc’d each of my outgoing messages, I was surprised to find that well over half of my emails — 57 out of 92 — were addressed to only one person. Around one third of my messages (32) reached groups of 2-8 people; and only 3 emails that week went to recipient lists of 9 people or more.

What I learned: Most of my email consisted of one-to-one exchanges. Maybe I should pick up the phone more often?

Week 8

Week 8 was relatively mellow; I sent out only 46 emails. The topics of these messages were fairly evenly distributed among the categories of research (14), teaching/supervision (14), and administration (12); plus there were 6 emails of a more personal nature that I coded as other.

What I learned: Research-related tasks took up a larger share of my email than I had realized. When I started to count that “email time” as “research time,” I became less stressed about the perceived imbalances in my workload, which felt heavily skewed towards teaching and administration.

Week 9

In my final week of tracking my email, I scrutinized the purpose of each outgoing message. It turned out that I spent much of my time and energy simply greasing the wheels of human interaction:

• Arranging a meeting (red - 12)

• Thanks/acknowledgment (dark orange - 18)

• Question/request (light orange - 18)

• Response to a question/request (blue - 18)

• Other (yellow - 19)

What I learned: Writing and responding to email can feel monotonous and impersonal. But every email exchange — at least until the chatbots take over completely! — represents a human interaction. By picturing the person at the other end of each email and imagining myself actually communicating with them, I found I could make the whole endeavor feel much more meaningful and human.

The end of the trail

The Email Trail petered out in March 2016, as I realized that my experiment had increased rather than decreased the amount of time I was spending on my email — which rather defeated the point! The lessons I learned, however, have stayed with me. For example, I now make a point of writing transactional emails more quickly, taking frequent breaks from keyboard and screen, and picking up the phone for conversations that called for the warmth of a human voice.

Looking back, the Email Trail helped me to see my weekly email load through new eyes (or, if you will, through mosaic-colored glasses) and to reframe my attitude toward what I had previously regarded as a menial and often meaningless task. Each week, as my hand-drawn tesserae accumulated and the winding trail through my notebook grew longer, I was able to recognize in a visual, visceral way just how much I had actually accomplished that week—a striking change from the “inbox zero” approach to email management, which aims to sweep the trail clear.

This post was originally published on my free Substack newsletter, Helen’s Word. Subscribe here to access my full Substack archive and get weekly writing-related news and inspiration delivered straight to your inbox.

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership, which costs just USD $12.50 per month on the annual plan. Not a member? Sign up now for a free 30-day trial!

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A metaphor is like . . . a double-decker bus careening wildly through the air while its passengers sit calmly inside?!

Well, I guess that’s as good a metaphor as any for the way metaphor works. Derived from the Greek words meta (over) and pherin (carry), metaphor is a figure of language that draws unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated objects or ideas; it carries us over from one conceptual space into another. Most of the time, the journey is so smooth that we don’t even notice how high we’re flying or how far we’ve travelled. But every now and then, when a metaphor stretches our senses or lurches out of control, we may feel a sense of vertigo.

Metaphors aren’t just frivolous froufrou, the rarified domain of literary scholars and poets. In Metaphors We Live By — one of my favorite books on metaphor — philosophers of language George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that all language is deeply metaphorical. The vocabulary of embodied experience is (metaphorically) hardwired into our brains, which explains why we tend to talk about abstract concepts such as time (“the hours are slipping away”) and intellect (“I’m gathering my thoughts”) as though they were material objects.

Still not convinced? I challenge you (whoops, challenge is a metaphor!) to write a whole paragraph on any abstract topic without employing (whoops again) any metaphorical language. Chances are that you won’t get very far (whoops again) — or if you do manage to come up with more than a few metaphor-free sentences, your writing will be as bland as dry toast without butter or jam.

For me, metaphor is a magic bus that I plan to keep riding for as long as I keep writing. It’s been quite a journey so far! I’ve published a number of articles and book chapters on the explanatory, generative, and redemptive powers of metaphor, and that bus is still a long way from running out of gas. Below is an omnibus (pun intended) of lightly adapted excerpts.

Enjoy!

Show and tell (2012)

The fact is, that in the primeval struggle of the jungle, as in the refinements of civilized warfare, we see in progress a great evolutionary armament race. . . .  Just as greater speed in the pursued has developed in relation to increased speed in the pursuer; or defensive armour in relation to aggressive weapons; so the perfection of concealing devices has evolved in response to increased powers of perception.

H. B. Cott, Adaptive Coloration in Animals (London: Metheun, 1940), 158-9.

Cott’s “evolutionary arms race” analogy — animal species are like nations at war, heightened perception is like a weapon, camouflaging devices are like defensive armor — belongs to a long list of analogies that scientists and scholars have used to help us make sense of our world.  Computer programmers “boot” their hard drives (the term derives from the phrase “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps”); linguists who study metaphor and analogy speak of “conceptual mappings.”  Some of these analogies may be misleading: for example, so-called “junk DNA,” which denotes non-coding portions of a genome sequence, has turned out to have more important biological functions than its throwaway name would suggest.  Many scientific analogies, however, are so effective and compelling that they have entered our cultural lexicon and perhaps our very consciousness.  The programmer who first slapped familiar office labels onto various computer functions — “desktop,” “file,” “folder,” “control panel,” “recycle bin” — certainly knew something about human psychology and our hunger for language that invokes the physical realm.

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from Helen Sword, Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard University Press, 2012)

Metaphors to write by (2017)

If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — wholeheartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

Arthur Quiller-Couch, “On Style,” 1914

If you want a golden rule that will fit every thing, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

William Morris, “The Beauty of Life,” 1919

If editing is akin to infanticide, what other acts of violence and sacrifice does our writing demand of us? Arthur Quiller-Couch’s murderous metaphor has been quoted, misquoted, and misattributed by numerous authors, but seldom with any commentary to the effect that its morbid view of the writer’s craft might cause far worse damage than the demise of a few overblown sentences. What if we were to replace Quiller-Couch’s “practical rule” for writing with William Morris’s “golden rule” for living, which teaches us that practicality and beauty can be soul mates rather than enemies? What happens when we invite positive emotions and language into our writing practice — and encourage them to make themselves at home?

from Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Harvard University Press, 2017)

Mining the language of metaphor (2018)

In my research on the background, habits, and emotions of academic writers from across the disciplines and around the world, I found metaphorical language everywhere. How do academics learn to write?

By the seat of my pants.

Sink or swim.

How do they get their writing done?

Fifteen minute jam sessions.

My writing comes in waves.

How do they feel about their writing?

Writing is like going to bed as a child— I resist it constantly.

The road to satisfaction is paved with less enjoyable emotions.

Each of these phrases contains shadings and highlights that get flattened out in the conceptual glare of abstractions such as anxiety or pleasure. Even apparently positive metaphors nearly always reveal a negative face, a “shadow side” that lends them dimension and meaning:

I love to immerse myself.

(But immersion can lead to drowning).

I always know I’ll get to lift off.

(But until you do, you’re stuck on the ground).

The most complex and productive metaphors chart an author’s progress from blockage to breakthrough in ways that acknowledge both the challenges and the pleasures of the process:

I enjoy being lost and hacking away the bush and branches to reach the clearing,

[It’s] akin to a really good cardio work-out.

Some respondents even convey the intricacies of their ambivalence in phrases that have the sonorous ring of poetry:

I walk my thoughts together in the forest.

It feels like jumping into a river.

Words are like gold.

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from Helen Sword, Marion Blumenstein, Alistair Kwan, Louisa Shen & Evija Trofimova, Seven Ways of Looking at a Data Set (Qualitative Inquiry, 27:4 (2018): 499-508)

Metaphors of frustration (2018)

When I asked a group of colleagues at a writing retreat to come up with metaphors that describe their frustration as writers, their words (paradoxically?) flowed freely. Frustration, they told us, resembles a physical blockage, like constipation or being unable to sneeze. Frustration is an impassable obstacle, like coming to the edge of a cliff. Frustration is an expenditure of energy that gets you nowhere, like running in a hamster wheel. Frustration is a self-imposed hindrance, like painting yourself into a corner. Frustration is a road paved with broken glass: “Whichever way you go, it’s going to be painful.” Frustration is performance anxiety, like getting on stage and forgetting your lines. Frustration is a heaviness, like being weighted down by stones. Frustration is slow progress, like a snail inching its way across a playground. Frustration is fear, like a dream of having your teeth fall out. Frustration is the distance between you and your destination, like a light at the end of the tunnel that never seems to get any closer. Frustration is an exercise in futility, like playing an endless game of Snakes and Ladders or winning a pie-eating contest in which the prize is more pie. Frustration is the panic you feel when you are in an impenetrable wilderness and find out that even your guide is lost.

Three months later, I prompted the same group of colleagues to “re-story” their metaphors of frustration into redemptive tales of effort and accomplishment. Some found ways of conquering frustration by enlisting other people to help them:

If you’re afraid of forgetting your lines, you can make sure there’s a prompter in the wings of the theatre.

Sometimes when I feel that I’m sinking in a swamp, all it takes to save me is a lifeline thrown by a friend or colleague.

Some invoked metaphors of patience:

When you’re being swept out to sea by a riptide, there’s no point fighting it; you just need to stay afloat and swim sideways until you’re free of the current.

It’s like those Biblical stories of walking through a dark place but knowing you’ll survive: transformation requires faith.

Some called on magical thinking:

In fairy tales, if you find yourself trapped underwater, you’ll sprout gills and turn into a fish or a mermaid.

When you come to the edge of the cliff, just fly!

What all of these solutions have in common is a shift of attitude: what one colleague called “crossing the bridge from the can’t to the can.” Metaphor, as this exercise reminds us, can become a tool not just for describing frustration but for refashioning it, rerouting it, and finding a way beyond it.

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from Helen Sword, Evija Trofimova & Madeleine Ballard, Frustrated Academic Writers (Higher Education Research and Development, 37:4, 2018)

The feedback loop (2019)

Metaphor can exercise a powerful “feedback effect” on our psyches, shaping how we think and act:

In all aspects of life ... we define our reality in terms of metaphors and then proceed to act on the basis of the metaphors. (Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We Live By ).

My own “aha moment” in this regard occurred when I was working on a book about the writing habits of successful academics, a project that inevitably prompted considerable self-reflection. I wanted my book to inspire academics to write with greater confidence, craftsmanship, and care. However, an early reader of the manuscript pointed out that I described my own confident, craft-focused, careful compositional style as finicky, snail-paced, and pathetically slow. The negative feedback generated by my choice of words, I realized, was at odds with the positive image of the writing process that I aspired to project. Thanks to my reader’s gentle intervention, I replaced pathologizing verbs such as fuss, fiddle, and tweak with craft-affirming alternatives such as adjust, tinker, and polish — and from that moment onward I resolved to take greater care with my metaphors.

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from Helen Sword, Snowflakes, Splinters, and Cobblestones: Metaphors for Writing (in S. Farquhar and E. Fitzpatrick, eds., Narrative and Metaphor: Innovative Methodologies and Practice, Springer, 2019)

The mosaic path (2022)

I love collecting objects that have been discarded or passed over by others – stained glass offcuts, chipped crockery, river stones, seashells – and assembling them into new works of art, creating unexpected juxtapositions of color and form.  When the intricate mosaic walkway that I had spent seven years designing and grouting into place was bulldozed by autocratic university administrators and replaced with a straight and narrow footpath, I understood their motivation: my joyfully meandering pathway was too non-conformist, its colors too rich, its energy too vibrant, to suit their dehumanizing neoliberal agenda. But a mosaic, having been created from fragments, can be reassembled in new configurations even after having been blown apart. I now spend my days on a beautiful South Pacific island laying out another crazy paving, this one even more colorful and playful than the last. (It’s called the WriteSPACE). This time, however, the pathway runs through my own property rather than the university’s; never again will I risk having my life and art consigned to a dumpster by philistine landlords.

The mosaic metaphor has helped me recognize my former role as the director of a higher education research centre — indeed, my entire scholarly career — as a creative practice that, like all art-making, is richly fulfilling but fraught with risk. I do not mean to suggest here that metaphorical language can always pave over pain, nor that beleaguered academics should respond to all administrative abuses of power as I have done in this instance, by retreating to an island (literally as well figuratively) and giving up on institutional activism. My decision to start my own business as an international writing consultant, building new pathways into writing for scholars around the world, has come towards the end of a long career spent fighting in the university trenches for causes such as gender equity, cultural inclusiveness, and student-centered teaching. 

If I were ten years younger, a different set of metaphors might have inspired me to gird my loins emotionally and return to the fray. (Rest assured, however, that I would not have persisted with the military trope for long; its shadow side is too dark to dwell in, even if academic life does sometimes feel like a war zone.) Either way, redemptive metaphors have helped me find my way forward. Indeed, the very process of writing this essay has accelerated my transformation from a self-perceived victim of circumstance to a maker and shaper who has taken my future into my own hands. 

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from Helen Sword, Diving Deeper: The Redemptive Power of Metaphor (in Julie Hansen & Ingela Nilsson, eds, Critical Storytelling: Experiences of Power Abuse in Academia, Brill, 2022)

The SPACE of metaphor (2023)

A well-turned metaphor can be a source of pleasure in its own right. But metaphors can also amplify our pleasure in writing, casting light into the darkest corners of our WriteSPACE and helping us negotiate its challenges. By rendering abstract emotions concrete, metaphors give shape and substance to our fears, hopes, and desires. At their most generative, they become the emotional touchstones that we return to again and again, the guides and mentors that lead us onward and inward to new discoveries and deeper truths about our writing.

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from Helen Sword, Writing with Pleasure (Princeton University Press, 2023)

This post was originally published on my free Substack newsletter, Helen’s Word. Subscribe here to access my full Substack archive and get weekly writing-related news and inspiration delivered straight to your inbox.

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership, which costs just USD $12.50 per month on the annual plan. Not a member? Sign up now for a free 30-day trial!

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On October 17, I invited criminologist David R. Goyes, a senior researcher at the University of Oslo, to join me for a lively conversation on "Writing and Risktaking". 

In the first hour of this free WriteSPACE Special Event, David and I discussed the benefits and (of course!) the risks of defying disciplinary conventions to produce bold, engaging academic prose. David recounted his own journey into a more stylish way of writing and shared some examples of pushback and (mostly) praise from co-authors, editors, and readers. In the second hour, we co-led a hands-on discussion and workshop for WriteSPACE members, guiding participants through some risky writing experiments of their own.

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the live event:

……………

This Special Event featuring Helen Sword and David Goyes offered a provocative entry into the world of risky writing. Breaking free from the straitjacket of academic prose is by no means an easy task; it takes a lot of courage to dismantle imitative writing habits, broaden your mindset, find supportive colleagues to back your ideas, and stand firm about the creative elements into your academic work.

Seems like a lot of obstacles, doesn’t it? But by the end of the session, Helen and David had convinced me of the great opportunities and joy to be found in risky writing.

Some memorable quotes from David in response to Helen’s questions:

• Q: What is risky writing?

  A: Risky writing could be going against the stream, challenging conventions, or using tools that others don’t use. It is risky because you think, ‘If I deviate from the academic standard, I won’t be published, I’ll be criticised, or I won’t be taken seriously.’

• Q: Is it harder to take risks when you’re not a native English speaker?

  A: Writing in your second language can make you a better writer. It’s risky, but it challenges you to achieve clarity and depth.

• Q: Doesn’t risky writing lead to pushback from editors and peer reviewers?

  A: It’s a myth! I would say that 95% of peer reviewers appreciate risky or creative elements. More often, it is the co-authors who generate pushback, or maybe it is even self-disciplining.

David and Helen spoke about imitative writing: Are we learning bad habits from our colleagues? It’s not uncommon for early-career scholars or academics in highly conventional fields to find themselves trying to imitate the writing style of their disciplinary canon. Early-career academics can also be the strictest peer reviewers because they feel the need to reproduce the harsh comments they received for their own first publications. It’s easy to feel trapped into thinking “This is how academic writing is done. I must speak and write in a certain way, and teach others to do the same.” A vicious circle indeed, and an unnecessary one.

What are some ways to break the cycle, you ask? Here are three common routes:

1. Social influence: Seek out likeminded risktakers and creatives in or beyond your discipline.

2. A crisis: Something just isn’t working, so you have to drastically devise a plan B.

3. Education: When you read a book or attend a course taught by an expert in the field, you’re exposed to new ideas that in turn encourage self-reflection (“Is this really the only way to do it?”). By reading this article, you are already well on your way towards becoming more aware of and empowered by risktaking!

(For more on how imitative behaviour molds culture, Helen recommends Culture and the Evolutionary Process by Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson).

David showed us praise-filled reviews for his “riskiest” articles, which draw on techniques such storytelling, poetry, personal narrative, conversation, dialogue, and melodrama. Check out these articles by David and colleague for some excellent examples of risky writing that paid off:

1. For storytelling, see the introduction ‘Sour Milk’ of Goyes et al., “‘An incorporeal disease’: COVID-19, social trauma and health injustice in four Colombian Indigenous communities”, Sociol Rev, 71:1 (2023): 105–25.

2. For personal narrative, read David’s own dream research log in Goyes & Mari Todd-Kvam, “Dreams and Nightmares: Interviewing research participants who have experienced psychological trauma”, in Ethical Dilemmas in International Criminological Research (Routledge, 2023).

3. For dialogue, listen to interviewees’ personal voices and singing in Goyes & Sveinung Sandberg, “The soundtrack of criminal careers: On music, life courses and life stories,” Theoretical Criminology, 0:0 (2023).

4.  For poetry, see the ending of Goyes, “Latin American green criminology,” Justice, Power and Resistance, 6:1 (2023): 90-107.

David posed us a challenge: We must look at risk with new eyes. Something may be safe despite looking unsafe. He remembers going to a prison in Bolivia to conduct research; nervous about entering a high-security prison to interview murderers and other serious offenders, David was surprised when his scariest interviewee started crying and confessing his loneliness. We often erect boundaries and suffer from fears that have been taught to us or reinforced by others in our discipline. Unless we learn to push against these boundaries and scrutinise these fears, we can end up locking ourselves in our own kind of prison, a space where there is no creative licence to be found.

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In the second hour of the event — the workshop for WriteSPACE members — we delved into practical problems faced by academic writers. David provided his insightful expertise as an academic who has received both negative and glowing responses for his “risky” (aka stylish and creative) academic articles and discussed how to respond to negative feedback while remaining firm on your ideas.

As one participant noted in the comments:

Academia is, subtly perhaps, a very hierarchical environment. I'm grappling with how to establish myself and push the conventions of writing while ensuring I am taken seriously at the same time, despite being an early career academic.

To address some of the questions raised in the first hour, Helen and David guided us through several creative experiments, which I would encourage you to try right now. Grab yourself a pen and notebook and find a comfy space to do some freewriting:

• 5-min Prompt: Think about your current project. How can you bring risky writing into your work? Perhaps you might consider some of the following: Story, poetry, personal narrative, conversation, dialogue, melodrama…

• 5-minute prompt: Imagine Reviewer #2 (the grumpiest or most conservative gatekeeper you can imagine) responding to your risky writing. What do they say about it (and you)?

• 5-minute prompt: Now imagine Reviewer #1 responding positively and with high praise to your risky writing. What do they say about it (and you)?

For some of Helen’s articles that encourage risktaking in academia, see:

1.  Sword, The First Person. Teaching and Learning Inquiry 7:1 (2019): 182-190. Republished in the Good Writing Gazette, 2020.

2. Sword, Snowflakes, Splinters, and Cobblestones: Metaphors for Writing, in S. Farquhar and E. Fitzpatrick (Eds.), Narrative and Metaphor: Innovative Methodologies and Practice (pp. 39-55). Singapore: Springer, 2019.

3. Sword, Marion Blumenstein, Alistair Kwan, Louisa Shen & Evija Trofimova, “Seven Ways of Looking at a Data Set,” Qualitative Inquiry, 27:4 (2018): 499-508.

4. Sword, “Seven Secrets of Stylish Academic Writing,” The Conversation, 13 July 2012.

A big thank you to David and Helen for this interesting and inspiring Special Event, and thank you to all the participants for sharing your comments and engaging questions.

See you again at the next event!

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can now watch the recording of the full two-hour in their Video library.  

Not a member? Register to receive an email with a link to the video of the first hour.

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We’ve been “making stuff” in the Creativity Catalyst all this week, which has inspired me to lean with extra energy and attention into making the paper collage that heads up today’s newsletter.

I approach the process differently every week. Sometimes I already have a topic in mind, so I let the title or theme dictate the design. Right now, for example, I’m mulling over the collage options for my upcoming WriteSPACE Special Event on Writing and Risktaking with criminologist David R. Goyes. Should I create a recognizable scene — a mountain climber scaling a cliff, for example, or a ringmaster placing their head in a lion’s mouth — or use abstract images to invoke an emotional response? Will I incorporate words amongst the images? What does risky writing look like, anyway?

More rarely, I start with the collage and let the writing follow. Perhaps I’ll begin with a word or image and build the collage from there. Or maybe I’ll pull out paper and scissors and glue and just start playing around: cutting pictures from magazines and books, juxtaposing colors and textures, waiting for the moment when the collage show me where it’s taking me. I love this part of the process, which never fails me. Bit by bit, under my moving hands, a colorful conglomeration of images takes shape — and as it does, I’m thinking about how and what I’ll write to go with my new collage.

Below you’ll find my visual-verbal narration of how this week’s image came into being. I’ll end with a few writing/collage prompts that you can try for yourself.

Enjoy!

The Simplon Pass

Many years ago, when I was a PhD student in comparative literature, I read Wordsworth’s masterpiece The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind in a graduate seminar on Romantic poetry. Our professor pointed out the famous scene — sometimes published as a free-standing poem called “The Simplon Pass” — in which the young poet experiences a kind of sublime epiphany, a perception of divine Eternity in the ever-changing features of nature:

The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And in the narrow rent, at every turn,
Winds thwarting winds bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first and last, and midst, and without end.

But shortly before this revelation, Wordsworth narrates a scene of bitter disappointment, almost as though the former required the latter for its release. Having become separated from the rest of their group while crossing the Alps between Switzerland and Italy, the poet and his companion attempt to scale a lofty mountain, get hopelessly lost, and have to backtrack. Eventually they meet a local peasant who points out the route to their destination, which leads inexorably downward:

Loth to believe what we so grieved to hear,
For still we had hopes that pointed to the clouds,
We questioned him again, and yet again;
But every word that from the peasant's lips
Came in reply, translated by our feelings,
Ended in this,—that we had crossed the Alps.

The mountains of the mind

Using italic font in several different sizes, I printed excerpts from the “crossing the Alps” stanza on collage paper of various shades and textures, pondering as I did so the central question of Wordsworth’s poem: What does it mean to cross the Alps unknowingly, missing out on that key moment of summiting? If you undergo a major life transition without noticing it, can you really count it as a milestone?

Opening myself to the wisdom of what Ursula K. Le Guin calls handmind, I started cutting and layering the paper, trusting my hands to tell me what to do. Before long, I noticed mountains forming:

My collage, I decided, would depict a mountain range criss-crossed by tracks of text. My placement of each “mountain” was dictated — no, that’s too strong a word, it was suggested — by some ineffable combination of color, pattern, texture, and text. Some of the words ended up upside down, or they slanted sideways like layers of sandstone shifted by ancient earthquakes:

I decided not to use the pink sheet on which I had printed out the poem’s key message in bolded, extra-italicized text, as it seemed a bit too in-your-face:

But I did make sure that the phrase “we had crossed the Alps” appears in a prominent position on the white mountain in the foreground of the collage:

And when my composition was all but complete, I capped that white mountain with another iteration of the same phrase, carefully centering feelings at the peak of the mountain and crossed the Alps just below:

All that remained for me then was to photograph the finished collage in better light and play around with the color mix in Photoshop, so that the finished artwork glows on your screen as though backlit by bright mountain light:

Have you ever fixed your eyes on a real or metaphorical mountain and, in doing so, lost sight of the path you’re actually walking on? Have you ever looked back on a transformational moment in your life and realized that you failed to notice it at the time because you were focusing on the wrong things? Like Wordsworth’s poem, my poem chronicles the challenges of looking, travelling, noticing, aspiring — the central themes of any writer’s life.

Coming down the mountain

If you’d like to try this writing-and-collage exercise for yourself, here are a few prompts to get you going:

1. Choose a short passage of text to work with: for example a poem or song lyric, a paragraph by a favorite author, or a piece of your own writing.

2. Copy or print the text out on sheets of colored or patterned paper, using different fonts and font sizes if you wish. As you do so, think about why you’ve chosen this particular text and what you can learn from attending to it closely.

3. Cut or tear the paper into scraps or shapes and start arranging them on a piece of cardboard — anything strong enough to remain stiff even when you covered with wet glue.(I use square 15x15 cm pieces of canvas or card stock, but any size or shape will do). Think about what you’re doing and why as you make your decisions about composition, imagery, and form, but don’t overthink.

4. When you feel ready, start gluing the paper onto the cardboard using white glue or a glue stick. Don’t worry if you make mistakes or affix things in the “wrong place” (whatever that means!) Mistakes can lead to serendipitous flashes of insight.

5. To finish off, you can frame and display your collage, or glue it into a notebook, or photograph it and post it on Instagram — or not! In collage-making, the process matters as much as the product.

6. Don’t forget to write! Before, during, after the collage-making process — in your head if not on paper. Your handmind will tell you what to do.

This post was originally published on my free Substack newsletter, Helen’s Word. Subscribe here to access my full Substack archive and get weekly writing-related news and inspiration delivered straight to your inbox.

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership, which costs just USD $12.50 per month on the annual plan. Not a member? Sign up now for a free 30-day trial!

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The theme of the fourth Creativity Catalyst module is “Move Around,” an exhortation that I’ve taken rather literally by traveling to Australia for ten days! Sydney is a great city for walking — not to mention bussing, biking, training, and ferrying — and my notebook has been happily accompanying me to all manner of cafes, museums, beaches, and other lovely writing spots.

If you’re like me, you may find that some your best thinking-about-writing happens when you’re out walking. Paradoxically, however, the act of walking is not conducive to actually writing. Sure, you can record your thoughts on your phone as you walk and write them down later, or you can stop for a while to scribble down your brilliant ideas (if you’ve remembered to bring along a notebook); but at that point you’re no longer really walking, are you?

Conversely, you may find that some of your best writing happens just after you’ve been engaged in physical activities that don’t involve thinking-about-writing. Sometimes your brain needs a break so that you can return to your writing with a clean mental slate.

In this post, I draw a distinction between mindful walking — when you deliberately focus on your body, your senses, and the world around you as you walk — and writingful walking, when your body is moving forward but your thoughts are consciously turned inward. Go for mindful walks when you want to clear your head and for writingful walks when you want to push your ideas in new creative directions.  Both kinds of walking are good for you, after all!

To finish off, I’ve included links to some walkingful reading materials that explore in greater depth the many historical, conceptual, and metaphysical connections between walking and writing.

Enjoy!

Mindful walking

The phrase mindful walking is something of a misnomer, as the meditative practice of mindfulness — often described as “living in the moment” — involves attending to your physical senses rather than to the messy machinations of your intellect. Mindful walking recalibrates your body, refocuses your brain, and reminds you of the power of sensory experience to engage our emotions (a useful principle for any writer to keep in mind).

Mindfulness feeds your writing by deflecting you from thinking about your writing. Here are some prompts you can try next time you stand up from your desk to go for a walk:

• Bodyful walking
  As you walk, pay attention to how you hold your body as you move through space. Spend some time taking your mind through a slow body scan, deliberately sending your awareness first to your feet as they flex and fall, then to the pivoting of your ankles, the stretching of your calf muscles, the hingeing of your knees, and so on, all the way through to the top of your head. Think about the pendular swing of your arms, the line of your spine, the way you hold your head, the slope of your shoulders: are they hunched up near your ears as you walk, or are they relaxed and mobile? Bodyful movement develops your postural awareness and prepares you for the hard physical work of sitting and writing.

• Senseful walking
  Hone in on each of your senses in turn: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. For example, you could bring your attention to a single color, or to visual patterns in the landscape — I like focusing on the interplay of straight lines and curved lines — or to the many different sounds that you hear when you tune in to notice them: your footfalls, your breath, the wind in your ears. How many different scents can you pick out as you walk past a garden or a market stall? What textures can you touch as you travel?

• Spaceful walking
  Trace a horizontal line through space as you walk, attending to the vertical volumes that rise above or fall away below you along your route. Notice the layers of the landscape you’re moving through: what’s happening at ground level, at tree level, at cloud level? Walk in a straight line, in circles, up and down stairs, in zigzags. You can add an aleatory dimension to your travels through space by flipping a coin at every street corner — heads means turn right, tails means turns left — and following wherecwe chance leads you.

• Artful walking
  Look around you with an artist’s eye as you walk. Stop to photograph intriguing objects and scenes, or at least to frame them with your eye. Listen to the music of the landscape: chattering birds high above you; a radio blaring from a passing car. Notice the art and artistry all around you — architectural details, street signs, posters — and create your own works of art through the transformational magic of your gaze.

• Freddieful walking
  Not to be confused with fretful walking! My wee dog Freddie reminds me daily to savor the pleasures of the material world. While I may not share his delight in certain odors — rotten food and dog pee come to mind — it can be a lot of fun to try to picture and sense the world through his merry little eyes.

The only rule involved in mindful walking (if you want rules at all) is that you must not think about your writing as you walk. As soon as your mind begins to stray, simply bring your thoughts back to the designated object of your walk: birds, buildings, body, or whatever else you’ve decided to focus on. If you get bored, shift your focus to something else: flowerful walking, peopleful walking, birdful walking, architectureful walking, dogful walking (paying attention to other people’s dogs, not just your own) — the possibilities are endless!

Writingful walking

“Simply bring your thoughts back to the designated object of your walk” — hah! That’s easier said than done. Thoughts have a pesky habit of following their own path, especially when our bodies are moving too. So you may wish to put a time limit on your first attempt at a mindfulness walk — say, 5 or 10 minutes — then let your thoughts off leash for a while.

When you’re ready to shift to “writingful walking,” take a moment to recalibrate, then set yourself a writing-related topic to focus on or an issue to work through. I enjoy brainstorming about new projects while I walk; the rhythm of my legs and arms sets my ideas flowing, and it’s easy for me to retain a few key bullet points on my phone or in my head (as I did, for example, with the list of “mindful walking” ideas above). When I try to compose fully-formed sentences and paragraphs, by contrast, I’ve found that the words tend to unravel as soon as I start recording them or writing them down; so I’ve stopped trying.

Writingful walking can be solitary or social, freewheeling or focused. It requires just two key ingredients: time and space. In Writing with Pleasure, I observed that “the contemplative rhythms of walking demand ample investments of unstructured time, historically a commodity more readily available to men than to women”:

William Wordsworth striding over daffodil-covered hillsides; Charles Baudelaire flâneuring through the arcades of Paris; Charles Darwin wearing a groove in the section of his garden path where he paced up and down for several hours a day; Wallace Stevens jotting down snippets of poetry while he walked to his job as an insurance executive, where he gave them to his secretary to type up. (Writing with Pleasure, p. 52)

Time remains a rare and precious commodity for nearly every writer I know; but space for generative movement is generally easier to come by. Note that the romantic landscapes of Wordsworth and Baudelaire — the mountains of the Lake District, the grand shopping arcades1 of Paris — find their mundane equivalents in Darwin’s well-worn garden path and Stevens’ daily walk to work through the decidedly unromantic streets of Hartford, Connecticut.

Writingful walking allows you to double-dip on both time and space: you’re writing and walking, moving your words and your body, rather than having to choose between intellectual labor and physical exercise. How efficient! But remember, you can’t be hyperproductive all the time. Writingful walking activates the writing brain; mindful walking clears it; but sometimes it’s best just to go for a walk and let your mind wander where it will.

Walkingful reading

The relationship between writing and walking has been the subject of numerous books, articles, and scientific studies,

from Merlin Coverley’s cultural history of the writer as walker (The Art of Wandering) to Frédéric Gros’s lyrical meditation on living and thinking in motion (A Philosophy of Walking) to Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman’s dense account of how carefully staged “research-creation events” can help participants navigate their way through tricky topics such as “settler colonialism, affective labour, transspecies, participation, racial geographies and counter-cartographies, youth literacy, environmental education, and collaborative writing (Walking Methodologies in a More-than-human World: WalkingLab). (Writing with Pleasure, p. 52)

You can find a whole section on Writing and the Body in the Bookshop on my website; don’t miss Cheryl Pallant’s Writing and the Body in Motion: Awakening Voice through Somatic Practice (not just on walking!) and Tim Ingold’s brilliant Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge, and Description.

My favorite short article on writing is On Walking and Thinking: Two Walks Across the Page by writing scholars Evija Trofimova and Sophie Nicholls (the latter’s Substack newsletter Dear Writing is a weekly delight). Sophie likens unstructured freewriting to a ramble in the woods near her home in Yorkshire:

The woods are full of darkness and danger, grandmother’s cottage, wild beasts, witches, poisonous fruits. The woods are where traps are laid, where children wander and get lost, where enchantments befall us. By stepping into the woods, we surrender to not knowing, to walking off the path and into the depths of our imagination.

Evija, by contrast, summons up the flat, wide-open landscape of her native Latvia:

When I’m stuck, I crave openness and space. . . . Here, where the landscape is simple and spacious, my thoughts can breathe. Ideas quietly graze as I move through them. The country road is under my feet and I know exactly where I’m heading. . . . I need to be able to look far into that hazy distance to get my sense of seeing things “in depth.”

I used a walking-and-writing line drawing by Evija as the starting point for my paper collage this week, which depicts a word-strewn path that draws us enticingly forward into unknown landscapes. Was there ever a better description of writingful walking — or, indeed, of walkingful reading?

This post was originally published on my free Substack newsletter, Helen’s Word. Subscribe here to access my full Substack archive and get weekly writing-related news and inspiration delivered straight to your inbox.

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership, which costs just USD $12.50 per month on the annual plan. Not a member? Sign up now for a free 30-day trial!

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