Stunning Sentences
Stunning Sentences
 
 
 

What can academic and professional writers learn from the stunning sentences of the best creative writers?

On October 21, I invited Nina Schuyler to join me for a lively conversation and workshop on "Stunning Sentences." Nina is the author of the aptly named book How to Write Stunning Sentences and the popular Substack newsletter Stunning Sentences. She is unrivalled at unravelling complex sentences to show us how they work — and how we can make our own stunning sentences work for us and our readers.

In the first hour of this live two-hour event, I asked Nina what makes for a stunning sentence and why it’s worth paying close attention to intricacies of syntax, structure, and style. In the second hour, Nina offered a hands-on sentencing workshop for paid subscribers to our respective newsletters. To borrow Nina’s own words, we spent time “admiring, mooning over, loving, and learning to write stunning sentences.”

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of this special event:

……………

Nina Schuyler is a master at deconstructing sentences with precision, helping us understand the intricate workings of grammar and syntax. She shared how her passion for perfectly crafted sentences began in childhood. As a young girl, she kept a notebook filled with sentences that moved her — phrases that struck her with awe and sounded like music to her ears. She would record these lines carefully, driven by a yearning to write with the same beauty and skill. Her journey into the world of stunning sentences has been fueled by voracious reading and a deep love of language, eventually leading her to teach style-focused workshops in an MFA creative writing program. Now, after 17 years of teaching, she’s exceptionally skilled at breaking down what makes a sentence memorable and impactful.

In a world where many academic writers suffer from “grammarphobia” (often due to limited formal training), it’s easy to think, Why focus on grammar in my writing when methodology and content seem enough? Does grammar really matter? Nina assures us that it does. Take the principle of repetition, for example. When used with intention, repeated words and phrases can add emphasis, rhythm, and depth to writing, enhancing emotion and making sentences more enjoyable to read.

Nina asks, ‘Why shouldn’t a sentence be anything but pleasurable?’ Grammatical techniques matter because they’re tools for connecting our writing to our reader’s body and senses. Writing with musicality invites readers to feel the rhythm, making each sentence a source of joy. One fascinating tip that Nina shared was about writing in sync with natural breath patterns. The human breath, in English, can hold around ten syllables before needing a pause. By keeping this rhythm in mind, writers can create a harmonious, easy flow. On the other hand, for moments of intense tension or conflict, shortening sentences to fewer than ten syllables can evoke a feeling of breathlessness, mirroring shallow breaths.

You can watch the full two-hour video of Stunning Sentences in the WriteSPACE membership area. Don’t miss the recording of the second hour, in which Nina guides you through exercises for crafting stunning sentences of your own.

A huge thank you to Helen for hosting this wonderful session and to Nina for sharing her knowledge so generously. I look forward to seeing you at the next WriteSPACE Special Event!

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can find the recording of the Special Event in their Video library.  

Not a member? 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.

 
October 2024Helen SwordStylish writing
Writing Together and Alone
Writing Together and Alone
 
 
 

What does social balance in writing look like and feel like to you? Between the allure of solitary writing, the intimacy of a writing partnership, and the comfort of writing in community, where’s your own personal sweet spot?

To explore these questions and others like them, I invited writers to join me in September 2024 for a free WriteSPACE Special Event on Writing Together and Alone. I guided participants through a sequence of reflective exercises to help them find their own ideal balance between solitary writing and social support, and to discover some research-based strategies for establishing an ideal writing partnership, group, or community. I also offered a sneak peek at my new WriteSPACE Travel Grants, which I’m offering to members of my WriteSPACE community who don’t want to travel this challenging road on their own.

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of this special event:

……………

I think most of us can relate to a time in our writing lives when we felt socially unbalanced—the lone wolf, tucked away in isolation, writing a dissertation and hardly leaving the cave… the circus performer parent, juggling responsibilities with no time to write alone… or the social butterfly, flitting between too many commitments, struggling to maintain focus.

The challenge is to find a social balance for your writing—a harmony between the solitude that strengthens focus and the social encounters that ignite new ideas. Your unique context plays a role in this balance too. Helen pointed out that writers in the humanities often work in isolation, in contrast to the more collaborative research environment enjoyed by scientific teams.

So how do you know what works best for you? And how can you create a sense of group motivation, camaraderie, and peer support for your writing? These are the questions Helen’s wonderful workshop helped us explore.

We began by reflecting on the concepts of extroversion and introversion. You may be familiar with Christine Miserandino’s ‘spoon theory’. A similar metaphor can help you identify whether you're an introvert, omnivert who is introvert-leaning or extrovert-leaning, or extrovert. The "coin metaphor" illustrates this: an introvert starts the day with ten coins and spends one on every social interaction, while an extrovert starts with none and gains a coin after each interaction.

Achieving social balance in writing means recognizing where you fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum—this is your strength—and then complementing that strength by embracing the opposite. For example, if you’re an introvert, how are you incorporating social interactions to support your writing? If you’re an extrovert, how are you carving out space for solitary reflection on your work?

Helen then guided us through an exercise that asked us to reflect on three forms of pleasurable writing: solitary writing, writing with a friend, and writing in community. Henry David Thoreau wrote in his famous book Walden: "I had three chairs in my house: one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society." There’s a common misconception that Thoreau was a hermit, indifferent to others, but in fact, he hosted gatherings and was actively engaged with his neighbours and community—he, too, sought social balance.

After this reflective writing, we discussed how to design the ideal writing group tailored to your own ‘Writing BASE’, which addresses the behavioural, artisanal, social, and emotional dimensions of writing. Striking the right balance between solitude and social interaction is essential to a fulfilling writing practice. And your balance will look different from any other writer’s.

I encourage you to watch the full video to engage with Helen’s reflective writing prompts and take the BASE quiz, which can help you identify your strengths in writing practice.

A big thank you to Helen for designing such an insightful workshop. I look forward to seeing you all at the next Special Event!

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can find the recording of the Special 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.

 
September 2024Helen SwordCommunity
Writing Alone Together
Writing Alone Together
 
 
 

Writing is a fundamentally social act. We write to connect with other people, to persuade and delight them, and to understand our relationships with them.

Paradoxically, however, writing is also a fundamentally solitary act. Even for authors who research and publish collaboratively, most writing starts out as words scrawled, tapped, or typed by one person’s fingers or articulated by one person’s voice in response to signals emanating from that one person’s singular brain.

So where does pleasure sit within this social-to-solitary human spectrum? Everywhere! While researching my 2023 book Writing with Pleasure, I asked nearly 500 academic writers from around the world to recall a time in their life when writing gave them pleasure. The writers in my study described joyful experiences of writing with others and writing solo; of writing among others and writing alone; of writing for others and writing just for themselves.

And then there were all the pleasurable places and practices in between. The crowded café where a lone writer sits scribbling at a corner table, drinking “deep, rich, bitter” coffee and patting the occasional passing dog. The dining room of an old farmhouse where three sisters work silently on their homework, eating steamed damsoms as the trams rattle past. The rented beachhouse where four colleagues gather to bash out a book manuscript, alternating between solo writing sprints and intense group discussion. (“We had ourselves, our computers, our editor, and a lot of gummy bears.”)

I also noted an intriguing variation on the social-yet-solitary theme — scenes of writing infused with a shared intimacy that might best be described as plaisir à deux:

Writing at Harry’s writing desk. Light comes in through the windows, the curtains glow red with the setting sun. Harry helps me edit and reshape my work. I know what I am doing and enjoy the collaborative act of seeing the work take shape. I have been researching this article for 6 months and am excited by the ideas I have. I am sitting on a soft antique chair with the man I love. Aesthetically I like looking at Harry, at the books which line the shelves and at the two computer screens so that we can research and write at the same time. I feel comfortable and excited about the work we are producing. New ideas keep emerging. (Jennifer, lecturer in dance, United Kingdom)

In one memorable narrative, writing alone together takes on the flavor of a secret love affair:

I remember writing and getting drunk. Drunk on alcohol, but also inebriated with life and being together with another writer. This was illicit. We met at the head office where we both worked. He was taking stolen time away from his wife and their infant son. I was in a relationship with a man who had moved back to Germany, leaving me alone in Brussels at the office where I had a rather manual job to fulfil. The writing took place in our separate offices. There was no one else around. Just him two offices further up the corridor and me in my shared office. We were both secretly working on novels. He and I never had an amorous relationship, and yet were conjoined during those stolen hours. (Sofia, associate professor of literature, Sweden)

In another, plaisir à deux swells into plaisir à quatre:

It was fifty years ago—almost exactly. I was an exchange student, writing with a cousin of my host family. Jens—the cousin—and I wrote a letter together, addressed to the host family’s daughter—the cousin’s cousin—and her best friend. Boy and boy writing to girl and girl. We laughed. We (almost) cried. Together we decided that, since his cousin was family, the part of this letter—and it was sort of a collective love letter—that he wrote had to be directed to the friend. But actually he liked the actual cousin more, while I had a crush on the cousin’s friend. The hour or so we spent doing this was among the happiest I can recall. Looking back, I am struck by how unmixed and unhesitant and uncomplicated the pleasure of writing was. (David, professor of German, Vermont, USA)

I love how each of these stories reveals multiple layers of intimacy in and around a scene of writing: between lover and lover, colleague and colleague, boy and boy, boy(s) and girl(s), cousin and cousin, writer and writer.

Psychologist Danielle Knafo observes that words like solitude, relationship, intimacy, and connectedness are fluid, dynamic, and contestable: “We connect, disconnect, leave, come back, move in, move out; boundaries are drawn and erased as a relationship expresses the flux of its function and meaning.” (Knafo, Dancing with the Unconscious, 94). Somewhere in that flux, each of us may be fortunate enough to achieve our own state of pleasurable social balance from time to time: between networking and focus, between conversation and introspection, between expansiveness and intimacy, and between the comforts of human contact and the exhilaration of solitude.

[Adapted from Chapter One of Writing with Pleasure, “Society and Solitude”]

……………

So, what does social balance in writing look like and feel like to you? For more thoughts on the lure of the crowd, the call of the hermit's cave, and the deep pleasures of intimacy, watch the recording of my live Special Event ‘Writing Together and Alone’ (WriteSPACE members can find the recording on their Videos page) or read the summary blog post for some hand-picked insights.

Not a member? 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.

 
September 2024Helen SwordCommunity
Stay-Home Writing Retreat
Stay-Home Writing Retreat
 
 
 

During August 2024, I invited writers from all over the world to join me for a productive, nurturing 5-day writing retreat at home with twice-daily inspiration and a supportive community of other writers.

This 5-day self-paced writing retreat was designed for any kind of writer, including those who aspire to carve out just an hour or two of daily writing time and those who are looking for a full-on immersive experience.

If you missed this event, you may wish to read some of the excellent tips and tricks shared by writers below. And if you’re keen to try it for yourself, you can conduct your own solo writing retreat for free, any time by registering below.

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

……………

Motivated by the uplifting support of fellow writers, this stay-at-home retreat provided the ideal opportunity to focus on those long-neglected writing goals. Helen’s videos each day posed challenges and taught us frameworks for productivity, such as SAFE goals (Simple, Attainable, Forgiving, and Easy!) and the SPACE rubric for pleasurable writing (Socially balanced, Physically engaging, Aesthetically nourishing, Creatively challenging, Emotionally uplifting). Helen encouraged us to set a new SAFE goal each morning and enhance one part of our writing SPACE before reflecting at the end of the day. These frameworks help us to be present in our mind and body when we sit down to write.

I was grateful to read everyone’s reflections, many of which were filled with useful tips and resources. I’ve compiled a selection of lively links for you to browse through below:

Shake it out during a writing break!

Be carried away by the music!

  • Hans Zimmer's ‘Green Card’ movie soundtrack (not too distracting and keeps a good tempo) and the Bridgerton soundtrack (upbeat and motivating) are two good options.

  • For classical music, consider Cosi fan tutte or the Magic Flute (classics!) or Jordi Savall’s baroque chorale music (nice morning music). If you like sound of the mandolin in the afternoon,  try Chris Thile’s acoustic songs.

  • Helen recommends bringing nature into your writing space by listening to birdsong recordings. Here is a beautiful recording featuring New Zealand native birds (At the beginning you can hear the voice of the Tui bird - my personal favourite - which mimics other birdsong, creating a surprisingly melodic cacophony of caws, trills, guttural splutters)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhvCsYFZ0vQ

    A key takeaway for me was the idea that a chapter or writing breakthrough could be associated with a piece of music. When you hear it again, you can remember that powerful writing moment!

Time your writing sessions!

I’ll end this quick summary with one writer’s reflection about beautiful writing:

My aim has always been to craft a beautiful thesis - in fact, when my supervisors asked for a plan it was in bullet point format and started with 'write 100, 000 beautiful words', then 'obsess over commas (a little too much)' - I said I wanted it to be a page-turner, a good read, but they said that can wait until the thesis is turned into a book. My argument is: why wait? Why forego the pleasure of crafting words that are, as Helen describes, 'aesthetically nourishing' to both me and my readers? I’m so glad I signed up for this week!

I look forward to seeing you at the next WriteSPACE Special Event!

Not a member? 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.

 
August 2024Helen Swordproductivity, Writing retreats
What the Bird Said
What the Bird Said
 
bird, heart, grey and gold rainbow
 
 

What is that jewel-eyed bird saying to the glowing glass heart in the sky?

The answer lies inside your notebook. Unlock your own truth by picking up your favorite pen, setting a timer for ten minutes, and writing whatever words flow through your heart and hand onto the page.  

          Your title: "What the Bird Said"
          Your topic: Your writing

I tested out this prompt on the participants in two recent Virtual Writing Studio sessions. Their responses were lyrical, honest, and wise:

  • The bird said: I perch in awe of the perfect writing – the heart – that stands out in the grey background, ready to take flight towards it. I prime my wings and aim toward clear, concrete, concise, and colourful writing. (Vicky, UK)

  • I overheard the bird talking not long after I presented a conference paper titled "What can positive psychology offer to maths teaching and learning?" The bird said: "So now we are expected to be psychologists as well as maths lecturers? That bird is crazy! If I try to advise students on things beyond maths, why should they believe me?" (Anita, South Africa)

  • I wrote about a rejection letter that I received last week. When I criticized my writing and myself, the bird reminded me that I should be more compassionate and supportive of myself. (Angelica, Texas, USA)

  • The bird said: Perhaps try writing less and listening more. Research is a crafting art. Listen for the story in the sunrise, in the river running, in the teeth of old auntie casuarina. You worry too much about writing. Words are helpful, but they are not enough to fully express a life well-lived, or the ancient wisdom of Indigenous Songlines, or the importance of earthworm encounters. Sit with me awhile and we will listen together. (Nina, Australia)

  • The bird said: Let your writing move like me through the blue sky … let it go anywhere; it can soar to great heights and it can swoop close to the ground. When you need to, you can take a rest on high branches; at other times, you can write with others – a murmuration of writespacers. You fly to make meaning, to come to know but most importantly, to connect your lines of flight with others. (James, UK)

  • “Take heart,” the bird said. “As the sun burns, so does the ever-present inspiration for your writing”. How did it know that I was in the process of floundering, lost in a sea of data, demands, and deadlines? I sat back and contemplated its words, feeling for the first time in a while a sense of calm as I turned back to the screen. The words on the page suddenly seemed clearer, less imposing. The sun was in the sky, it was heart-shaped, and birds talked. Things weren’t so bad after all, and neither was my writing. (Victoria, Australia)

Creative writing prompts like this one can help you discover things about yourself that you didn't know you know. They fire our imagination and light up our words.

What are you waiting for? It’s time to open your notebook, fill your pen, and find out what that mysterious bird is telling you.

For more writing prompts like this one, check out the "Writing Warmups" playlist on my Helen's Word YouTube channel or visit my Live Writing Studio, where I'll invite you to get your creative juices flowing with some playful, permissive freewriting before we turn to more "serious" writing tasks. If you're not already a WriteSPACE member, you can use the discount code SNEAKPEEK for a sneaky month of free membership.

I'd love to see you there!

Not a member? 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.

 
August 2024Helen Swordcreativity, writing prompts, October 2022, October 2024
Structural Designs
Structural Designs
 
 
 

I clipped the maps, buildings, and grids in this colorful paper collage from a community theatre prospectus that I picked up in Lucerne, Switzerland on the way to my annual Mountain Rise writing retreat. (What an amazing week that was!) The two appliquéd birds graced a postcard that I purchased in early June at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and I cut out the two Swiss chalets from a tourist brochure advertising tours of a chocolate factory.

Together, these images represent many different kinds of structure: textual, textural, architectural. And what better way to invoke the varied structures of scholarly writing — and to launch my new 6-week focus on Structure — than with a riotous array of straight lines and curved lines, buildings and birds, maps and metaphors?

In early July 2024, in addition to launching ‘Structural Metaphors’ (a 6-week Swordcraft series exploring metaphors for structuring six key aspects of your scholarly writing) and the Structure Sequence of the Live Writing Studio, I also hosted a free 2-hour Special Event all about structure! There I took attendees through a series of strategies for finding the best structure for a current book, thesis, article, chapter, or any other writing project they wanted to focus on. The aim was to create a new structural design by the end of the session. 

If you missed this live Special Event, you can register below for the free recording of the live session, or read the highlights below. Enjoy!

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

……………

This session was such a treat! Helen coached the attending writers through an interactive structure exercise, with just 30 scraps of paper and 30 minutes. If you’re working on a book or a thesis with many different facets or chapters, this workshop is for you! (Click the green button above to receive the video link). This workshop was great for experimenting with new arrangements, hierarchies, and ways of thinking. Helen also asked us to consider metaphors to invoke new sets of ideas: What would happen if I think about my book or article as a tree? or a city? or a map?

There are, of course, several fantastic tools for a more linear structural organisation (if that floats your boat) — for example, Helen mentioned how to ‘outline’ your structure, revealed tricks for using Scrivener, and recommended Margy Thomas’s ‘fractal structure’, which helps keep sections consistent in length and depth. But it’s worthwhile exploring non-linear tools, too, such as radial mind-mapping using color, metaphor, and sketches. Helen encouraged us to consider how we might approach a linear artefact such as a book using a non-linear structure to give the reader multidimensional ways to read it. (Challenging, but not impossible!) For a great example, take Helen’s book Writing with Pleasure, which was structured like a mosaic mirror—you really don’t need to read this book in a set order. Or Douglas Hofstadter’s book: Gödel, Escher, Bach, which subdivides chapters in a playful way.

It was wonderful to hear the comments from each of the attendees at the live workshop and their takeaways. Helen mentioned that it’s useful to understand the differences between stages of structuring your writing. Ideation (the inception of an idea, the spark that ignites the creative flow), leads to conceptualization (which refines the raw idea into an overall plan), and builds an architecture of ideas (which organises the information). Workshops like this one walk you through these stages, and then you can use metaphor and linear tools to solidify the direction of your project. Interestingly, the more seemingly unstructured or non-linear the topic, the more it lends itself to really strong structural thinking!

A big thank you to Helen for this very helpful 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.

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can find the recording of the Special 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.

 
July 2024Helen Swordstructure, style
Open Chalet at Mountain Rise 2024
Open Chalet at Mountain Rise 2024
 
 
 

In the heart of the beautiful summertime Swiss Alps, Helen hosted her annual virtual retreat sessions from Chalet Alpenheim in Wengen. Each session offered a tour of the retreat venue, followed by some reflective writing designed to shift writers into the relaxed-but-energized creative mindset of "retreat mode."

If you missed this event, you can register below for the video recording of the live session, or read Amy’s personal account and follow the exercise prompts below.

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

……………

Wengen is not only an ideal place to hike and admire nature, it is a fabulous place to write. Maybe it’s something in the air that sweeps in through the beautiful valley. Perhaps it’s simply the exceptional company of like-minded writers. Whatever it is, inspiration flows freely there!

This year, Helen took her Open Chalet visitors on a simulated retreat, journeying up and back down the mountain with multiple writing prompts. It’s definitely a good idea to dedicate half an hour to follow along with the live video (click the green button above), or you can sample the first few reflective prompts below:

  • Where are you starting from on your journey today? For example, ‘I am starting from a place of anxiety’ or ‘I am starting a new project that is exciting but needs quite a lot of mental heavy lifting.’ How far have you travelled to get here? (2 minutes)

  • Where do you want your next writing journey to take you? Interpret this question however you want! It could be your very next chapter or your next 6 months of writing… (2 minutes)

  • In Wengen, you can take the cable car up the mountain and walk up to the viewing platform shaped like a crown. What are some of the values and interests that have brought you to this place? (2 minutes to brainstorm)

  • Of all the interests and values that you’ve identified, what are some of the brightest jewels in your crown?

For the full series of prompts, register for the video above—it’s well worth it!

I want to say a warm thank you to this year’s retreaters (it is you who make Mountain Rise so special), to all the writers who came along to the Open Chalet this year and simulated their own retreats, and to Helen for guiding us through these fun and insightful writing prompts. After seeing the drawing of my dissertation structure, I hope you might be inspired to create your own structural map of your project or a reflective map of your professional writing journey. And if you would like to share it with us, you can send it via this link! I would really love to see it.

See you again at the next event!

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can find the Open Chalet at Mountain Rise 2024 video 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.

 
June 2024Helen Swordreflection, Writing retreats
Writing? It's a Piece of Cake!
Writing? It's a Piece of Cake!
 
 
 

It’s my birthday today, so I’ve baked a cake!

Okay, so it’s a virtual cake, not a real one. But it still looks pretty delicious, doesn’t it? I started with a dark chocolate base spread with white icing, then added a pile of gleaming red cherries, a wreath of blue macarons, and a golden rose in the center.

Birthday Cake is the latest video in my new Sharing Plates collection, a series of on-demand writing studio sessions that I’ve created exclusively for my WriteSPACE membership community — but because it’s my birthday, I’m sharing this Sharing Plate with the world.

The full 65-minute video includes:

  • a playful, generative writing warmup (“Silk Scarf”);

  • three short writing sprints (aka pomodori) timed with a strawberry, a blue macaron, and a champagne bucket, respectively; and

  • a wordcraft workout on the theme of mixed metaphors (“Mixed Drinks”).

To get the most from this sweet treat, I recommend that you set aside enough time to make your way through the full 65-minute sequence in a single sitting. Afterwards, if I’ve got the recipe right, you’ll feel nourished, inspired, and eager for more.

You can savor this Sharing Plate on your own or in the company of other writers. Either way, I hope that your writing session will feel like a piece of cake!

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can find this video and other Sharing Plates in their Video library.  

Not a member? 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.

 
June 2024Helen Swordproductivity, Community
Sharing Plates for Writers
Sharing Plates for Writers
 
 
 

I’m irrationally excited to announce a new set of resources that I’ll be adding to my WriteSPACE membership area over the next few months: Sharing Plates. The first video in the series, Caprese Salad, is now available in the WriteSPACE Library, and in celebration of its launch I’m posting a free version here. Enjoy!

So what’s a Sharing Plate? Well, you’re probably already familiar with the “Pomodoro Technique,” a time management method that originated in the late 1980s. Writer Francesco Cirillo used a tomato-shaped kitchen timer (“pomodoro” in Italian) to set short writing sprints for the members of his writing group, who would write together in silence for 25 minutes, take a 5-minute stretching break, and then repeat the process a few more times.

Cirillo’s simple “shut up and write” method (or, as I prefer to call it, “show up and write”) proved useful for many writers, so the technique spread far and wide, along with its unusual name. I like the method so much that I’ve stocked the WriteSPACE Library with no fewer than 37 different pomodoro timer videos, ranging from 5 to 40 minutes long. Each one offers a different timer (not just tomatoes!) that you can use to time your own writing sprints: a purple penguin, a blue macaron, a silver champagne bucket, and many more. These playful pomodori won’t magically transform you into a more stylish or productive writer, but at least they can help bring some pleasure to your writing process.

For years, WriteSPACE members have been asking me to make some longer timer videos — and now, at last, I’ve done it! Weaving together existing videos from my YouTube channel with newly-filmed material, I’ve created a series of self-contained, on-demand writing studio sessions.

Each themed 1- to 2-hour Sharing Plate video consists of a brief introduction, a creative or reflective writing warm-up, a sequence of timed writing sprints with short stretching breaks in between, and a Wordcraft Workout — that is, a writing or editing exercise designed to develop your craft as a writer.

Ideally, I hope that you’ll consume these Sharing Plates in the company of other writers, either virtually or “in real life” — but of course you’re also welcome to savor them on your own. Just set aside an hour or two of focused writing time, choose a Sharing Plate from the WriteSPACE Library (more are coming soon!) and start writing.

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can find this video and other Sharing Plates in their Video library.  

Not a member? 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.

 
June 2024Helen Swordproductivity, Community
Writer's Diet Clinic
Writer's Diet Clinic
 
 
 

During the first week of May, I invited writers to join me for two free online Writer’s Diet Clinics, in which we discussed how to cook up delicious, nourishing prose for your readers to savor!

If you missed this event, you can register below for the free 25-minute Writer’s Diet Tutorial video, recorded during the live clinic on May 8. In the tutorial, you will learn about the online Writer’s Diet Test and my premium Writer’s Diet PLUS tool for WriteSPACE members.

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

……………

In the first hour of each session, Helen guided participants through a brief Writer’s Diet tutorial to introduce her free online Writer's Diet diagnostic tool and its younger, more sophisticated sibling, the Writer’s Diet app for MS Word. (Some seasoned WD users could opt to spend that time doing a 25-minute pomodoro instead). In the second hour, Helen ran a live writing clinic to help the writers make sense of their Writer’s Diet test results.

The Writer’s Diet is an excellent diagnostic tool; I use it regularly for my own writing. You can paste in a text sample of anywhere from 100 to 1000 words to get a diagnosis, which is split into different categories. If you get a diagnosis of ‘Heart Attack’ or similar, the results will light up with rainbow colours, indicating you have many editing options available. In the case of this tool, the more colour you see, the more your verbal arteries are being clogged (metaphorically speaking, of course).

I love that you can filter by specific categories with the test. You click on each box, and it will give you the diagnosis just for that category. Helen offered some golden advice for this test: Take it with a little pinch of salt. Remember that it’s an algorithm, and you are the style expert of your own work. It’s easy to assume that you must eliminate all of those coloured problem words—which would be difficult and unnecessary. You don’t have to remove them all, but it does teach you about your default word selection. I tend to towards ‘misty’ with be-words, something that I always check for! Using a lot of be-words can mean too many passive verb constructions. So when I revise, I remove ‘is’ and introduce active and robust verbs to drive my writing forward.

If you have yet to take the test, I hope you’ll enjoy exploring its many insights. And don’t forget to watch Helen’s tutorial via the green link above. A big thanks to Helen for hosting these two wonderful sessions. I look forward to seeing you all at the next WriteSPACE special event!

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can find the recording of the Writer’s Diet Tutorial 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.

 
May 2024Helen Swordstyle, Writer's Diet
Supporting Neurodiverse Writers
Supporting Neurodiverse Writers
 
 
 

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:

……………

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 between Helen and Eirini.

Some memorable quotes from this WriteSPACE Special Event:

  • “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.”

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 for everyone. 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 coping 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 writing with neurodiversity 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.

 
April 2024Helen SwordCreativity, poetry
✨Star Navigation
✨Star Navigation
 
 
 

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).

 
April 2024Helen SwordCreativity, poetry
Scholarly Writers on Substack
Scholarly Writers on Substack
 
 
 

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:

……………

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.

 
March 2024Helen Swordwriting process, Substack, Academic
At the Place of Leaping
At the Place of Leaping
 
 
 

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).

 
March 2024Helen SwordCreativity, poetry
Containers for Chaos
Containers for Chaos
 
 
 

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).

 
February 2024Helen SwordWriting with Pleasure, writing process, Creativity
Open Beach House
Open Beach House
 
 
 

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).

 
February 2024Helen SwordWriting with Pleasure, Live Writing Studio
The Pleasures of Writing
The Pleasures of Writing
 
 
 

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).

 
January 2024Helen SwordWriting with Pleasure, metaphor, Spotlight on Style
The Journey Planner
The Journey Planner
 
 
 

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.

 
January 2024Helen SwordStylish writing, notebooks, writing process