My beloved Creativity Catalyst course is now underway, and I’ve decided to play along — that is, I’m planning to try out some of my own writing prompts each week here in my paywalled garden. Each of the six weekly modules poses a creative imperative that I’m eager to heed:

1. Tell your story

2. Play with poetry

3. Be dramatic

4. Move around

5. Make stuff

6. Mix in metaphor

It can be scary, I know, to send your writing experiments out into the world for other people to see. But that’s exactly what I’ll be urging the Creativity Catalyst participants to do week after week, albeit within the safe space of the course’s gated membership area (and only if they want to) — so I’m going to walk the talk and join the vulnerability parade.

This week, I skipped ahead to Week 5 and mashed together two prompts, called “Juxtapositions” and “Layerings,” to create my paper collage for this post. The many juxtapositions and layerings of imagery, color, and form — apples, stargazer lilies, golden orbs, an ornate garden gate, a ready-to-bud David Hockney tree — are still jostling and settling in my mind. Perhaps my rough-but-resonant composition is emblematic of the Creativity Catalyst itself, with its gated content and disruptive energies? Or maybe it gestures towards a liminal moment of arrival and entry? I guess I won’t know until I write about it. . . . 

But let’s not go there today. Instead, I invite you to accompany me on a quick guided tour of the marvelous Creativity Catalyst Showcase that we assembled at the end of the course last year — or you can check it out on your own. Warm thanks to Amy Lewis for curating the Showcase and to all the amazing participants from around the world who granted us permission to exhibit their writing experiments in public. 

Intrigued? Inspired? There’s still time to join this year’s Creativity Catalyst! Why not treat yourself and your writing to an eye-opening, intellect-sharpening, soul-expanding elixir of creative joy?!

Step into the Showcase

To get the most from the Creativity Catalyst Showcase, I recommend that you click into each of its six Galleries in turn and spend some time exploring the exhibits there.

But life is short and we’re all very busy, so I’ve selected one exhibit from each of the galleries to highlight here — making some tough choices along the way, as there were so many treasures to savor. Enjoy!

Tell your story

The Story Gallery showcases some of the powerful non-fiction produced by Creativity Catalyst participants when they brought core elements of storytelling such as character, setting, and plot to their academic and professional writing.

Emily (USA) used the genre of detective fiction to revise an article on the challenges of learning to meditate:

I liked the idea of “Detective” as a genre. The original article says:

“At first we engage with our practice through words, yet, in no time at all, discover words are not enough. The Zen student finds they are being asked to hear meaning with more than just the ears, and somehow produce an answer beyond words.”

My first stab at a detective-like feel was:

“The student eyed the teacher warily. It seemed like this standoff had been going on for years. In fact it had — though this particular battle was only moments in the making.”

But since this doesn't say enough to resemble the original article I added more details:

“The Zen student eyed his teacher warily. The scent of incense hung in the air in the small, softly lit space. It seemed like this standoff had been going on for years. In fact it had — though this particular battle was only moments in the making.”

Play with poetry

The Poetry Gallery demonstrates how writers from any discipline or genre can use poetic language to think more creatively, write more vividly, and connect with their readers more effectively.

Vanessa (Switzerland) wrote this evocative poem as a tribute to her years of fieldwork in Ghana:

SALT

Chains on a vessel
He skips a beat
It’s just... you know... back in the day
Now it’s fish they ship away
A pool of blood
A moonless night
Such tenderness
Your light shines bright
The open sewer
The tuna stench
Their graceful posture
My back on that bench!
Mornings at the navy base
The fiery star’s hot kisses
Lucky me, I said – who said?
Theirs is work no one misses
Traffic, more traffic
The road never ends
Under the madman’s strict orders
The black man’s back bends
White skin, black magic
Whose photo is that?
Don’t try it with logic
Don’t eat that bat
Fieldwork is sweating
The big stuff, the small
It’s learning to sit with
The ache of it all
Fieldwork is heart work
Sometimes it’s fun
And always in Ghana
The sun, the sun.

Be dramatic

In the Drama Gallery, you’ll find an array of experiments with dramatic techniques such as dialogue, scriptwriting, and role-playing, all aimed at uncovering the human heart of a story.

Jasmine (Aotearoa New Zealand) brought in visual elements to ramp up the drama, “staging a scene” both figuratively and literally:

This created image was inspired by one of Helen’s experiment prompts: “Regulars in a Bar” could possibly show my struggle of diving into the various philosophical worlds for my PhD study. Instead of imagining those representative figures of different schools gathering in my mind, I decided to visualise them and let them have some “real” fun together while enjoying the alcohol. The incongruous splendour reflects the collision and confluence of varied ideologies.

The figures from left to right are Nietzsche, Adorno, Foucault, Marx, Barthes, and Derrida. By the way, the name of the bar is “Soul.”

Move around

The Moving Gallery, as its name implies, is a place of motion and emotion where writers move their own bodies through space and nudge their readers into new ways of thinking.

David (Norway) was inspired by this week’s prompts to highlight the sensory details in a series of interviews with victims of violent crime:

Memories were often expressed in visual terms: “What I remember is the tragedy […], a city in flames and constant alarm. A time of not knowing when there would be another attack, another bomb; the sensation of going out in the streets and finding corpses lying there” (male schoolteacher, late 40s).

Memories were also connected to sound: “there was the noise of the bombs and the ambulances around the city all the time; there was constant tension” (taxi driver, early 50s). Smell also played a significant role in the accounts of direct witnesses: “I remember going to school […] and there were corpses there, I could smell the blood, but I had to keep walking because I did not want to see if the body was of someone I knew” (unemployed man, early 40s). Intertwined with memories of suffering were recollections of considerable economic activity: “a lot of pain, a lot of fear, many murders, but also a lot of money” (housewife, late 60s).

Make stuff

For the exhibitions in the Making Gallery, participants turned off their digital devices and got out paper and scissors, colored pencils and glue. They let their hands tell them what and how to write.

Catalina (UK) used the intersecting genres of paper collage and poetry to reflect on the interplay of mapping, making, and emotion in her disciplinary area of urban planning:

Maps cultivating gut feelings

Writing as storytelling
Connecting the emotions of the mundane

Writing as visual poetry
Layering meaning and beauty

Writing as dramatic plot
Revealing the epic tensions of everyday

Writing as embodied movement
Dancing lines of thought

Writing as metaphorical craft
Turning lame into velvet

Writing, a golden thread stitching
the hand playing with shapes and images

the heart beating words

the mind weaving ideas

the body breathing meaning

Mix in metaphor

In the Metaphor Gallery, we witness vivid demonstrations of how metaphors can convey complex ideas to readers and help writers re-story their own emotions.

Patrick (USA) used the metaphor of boxing to reflect on his own fraught relationship to the writing process:

When I am writing at my best, I would say I am a boxing contender on the night when they become champ. The document is an opponent that has possibly underestimated just how prepared I am for the moment. I am walking my opponent into the punches I want to throw. I am not reacting but rather I am dictating the terms of engagement. I am leading the dance so to speak. To think about the metaphor during times when I am not writing well, I am just reacting. I am being walked into traps—traps in the literature and traps in the individual sentences. It is at those points that I am not quite clear how I got into a corner and I don’t know how to get out. I am fighting at my opponent’s pace, while I can win fight their pace (getting something written that can be published), I am not usually pleased with the outcome. I only got stuff done but I did not necessarily excel. . . . When I am loving writing, I am in a groove. I am seeing the punches before they are thrown. I am able to side-step and account for anything that is thrown at me. I am also able to riff. When I get stuck writing, I have the most success when I go back to the basics. In boxing, it’s how do you throw a 1-2 or a jab and right hand. When I am stuck, it’s about getting back to writing simple but clear sentences.

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.

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Have you noticed a recent proliferation of clever verbal formulations created using the suffix “-ification”? 

If yes, you’re not alone. In a recent New Yorker article titled “The -ification of Everything,” journalist Lauren Michele Jackson offers an impressive list of neologistic nominalizations — that is, nouns formed from other parts of speech — including:

• the “flu-ification of covid policy” (in The Atlantic);

• the “merch-ification of book publishing” (in Esquire);

• the “Gen Z-ification” of Harry and Meghan (in the Daily Beast); 

• the “hoax-ification” of the Trumpian right (in the Washington Post); 

• the “‘You’re doing it wrong’-ification” of TikTok influencers (in Vox);

• the “woke-ification” of various U.S. institutions (by Florida politician Ron DeSantis);

• “le Big Mac-ification” of French life (in The New Yorker — a phrase that sounds best when pronounced with a bad fake French accent in the manner of Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau).

Quoting the obscure New Zealand scholar who first described nominalizations as zombie nouns, Jackson notes:

Where many other zombie nouns sound stuffy (contextualization, systematization), the “-ification” creations are cheeky about their unwieldiness. As Sword put it, “They’re trying to get your attention.”

Jackson’s article certainly got my attention. It also got me wondering: Why do we “-ify” some nouns and “-icize” others? For example, why did it feel right for me to title this newsletter post Zombification rather than, say, Zombicization or Zombization (or, for that matter, Zombie-ification)? 

Linguists may well have an easy answer to the -ify versus -icize question. If they do, I hope they’ll leave an explanation in the Comments section below. (Yes, I’m looking at you, @lynneguist!)

In the meantime, I decided to have some fun playing around in the sandpit of my paywalled garden with if(f)y verbs such as liquefy, petrify, Disneyfy (which means something quite different from Disneyize, apparently), and muntify (no, you won’t find that one in any dictionary).

Despite the frantic promptings of my Commonwealthified spellcheck, I’ve opted for the American spelling -ize/ization rather than the British -ise/isation, for the purely aesthetic reason that the z in nominalization resonates so beautifully with the z in zombie noun.

Enjoy!

Liquefy

Spend a few minutes contemplating the verb forms of the noun liquid, and you may find your brain starting to liquefy.

But wait, what just happened there? Why is it spelled liquefy, not liquify?

To make matters more confusing, there’s also the verb liquidize (roughly synonymous with liquefy, but often associated with a food processing machine called a liquidizer) and liquidate (which means to sell off all the assets of a failing business or, colloquially, to murder someone).

Things get even weirder when you start conjugating. For example, the past participle of liquefy — “to make or become liquid” — is liquified with an i, whereas liquefied with an e means something subtly different, at least according to the experts on Google.

So what happens when we transform these liquid verbs into lumbering zombie nouns? Confusingly, neither liquification nor liquidization — the logical candidates for abstract nouns created from liquefy and liquidize, respectively — can be found in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary. The nominalized form of these two verbs turns out to be liquefaction, a word you may well be unfamiliar with unless you work as a materials scientist or live near an earthquake zone, where it refers to a potentially catastrophic phenomenon whereby a solid substance (such as the ground beneath your house) temporarily behaves like a liquid.

Are you feeling mystified, perhaps even stupefied, by the oddities of the English language? Keep reading!

Petrify

Let’s move from liquids to solids. The English word that signifies “to turn into stone” — whether literally, like an ancient forest that has been mineralized over time, or figuratively, like a person too frightened to move — has a Greek noun (pétros) rather than a familiar English object as its root. Meanwhile, the equivalent English nouns (stone or rock) don’t generate verb-ified equivalents: Medusa didn’t stonify or rockify her victims, she petrified them. (She could also have stoned or rocked them; but those would have been quite different gestures).

Having already navigated the confusing transition of liquid (noun) to liquefy (verb) to liquefaction (noun), it’s a relief to note that the zombie noun associated with petrify is petrification, not petrifaction. But here’s a final paradox to ponder: in the computer game World of Warcraft, players can protect themselves from harm by imbibing a Potion of Petrification, which renders them temporarily safe from physical attacks and spells — but also unable to move or perform any action.

In the World of Words, a noun can give birth to a verb that in turn gets swallowed by a noun.

And in World of Warcraft, a liquid can turn you to stone.

Disneyfy

Nominalizations of the proper noun Disney — typically used to signify not just an individual person, Walt Disney, or a corporation, the Walt Disney Company, but the entire entertainment industry that Disney founded — date back at least to 1999, when Alan Bryman published an article in the Sociological Review called “The Disneyization of Society.”

Five years later, organizational scholar Philip Hancock published a review of Bryman’s 2004 book of the same title. In his review, “Disneyfying Disneyization,” Hancock scathingly writes:

[N]ot only is this an immensely bland book about a very colourful topic, it manages at the same time to take on a curiously Disneyfied quality of its own – note I said Disneyfied not Disneyized. Bryman is himself at pains to mark a clear distinction between the idea of Disneyfication and his own Disneyization thesis. For while his own concern is with describing a globally pervasive process of institutional isomorphism, Disneyfication he argues is a far more radical and, one gets the feeling that in the author’s eyes less systematic, body of cultural criticism.

Did you follow the logic there? Apparently Bryman, in his book on Disneyization, critiques the concept of Disneyfication, which is what Hancock in turn accuses him of. Or something like that?

When it comes to warring zombies, the World of Warcraft has nothing on the Wonderful World of Disney!

Muntify

As I’ve already noted, you won’t find the word muntify in any dictionary. It’s formed from the past participle munted, which, in New Zealand and Australian slang, means “broken beyond repair” (or “badly intoxicated,” depending on context) — as in, “I dropped my phone, and now it’s munted.”

Normally, the suffix -fy turns nouns into verbs: liquefy, petrify, Disneyfy. But my kids, when they were young, threw logic and grammar out the window and transformed the implied verb munt (which doesn’t exist) into a longer, fiercer verb, muntify — as in, “We muntified the other rugby team.”

From there, it was just one easy step to muntification, with its delicious echo of mummification — as in, “The muntification of our opponents is now complete.”

Which brings me back to my earlier question: Why has “the -ification of everything” become a cultural trope worthy of a New Yorker article, whereas “the -ization of everything” has not?

Lauren Michele Jackson notes in her article that the suffix -ification “rarely announces good news”:

Nobody wants “app-ification,” “Uber-ification,” “Airbnb-ification,” “Marvel-fication,” or “Walmart-ization,” except, perhaps, shareholders. All of these nominalizations, rather, seem to point to interrelated worries about the monopolizing, homogenizing pattern in which our culture is moving.

So here’s my theory: I think there’s something more potent, more defiant, in that extra syllable (if-i-ca) — that fricative f, that hard c — than in the gentle glide of iza. When we subject an object, person, or concept to -ification, we really feel as though we’ve done something to it, changed its state somehow.

Those same fierce f and c sounds can be heard in the punning portmanteau zombie noun Californication, which brings in a clever twist of humor to soften the aggression. California-fication just doesn’t have the same ring — or staying power.

In other words: it’s all in the poetry!

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.

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Word-nerd that I am, I love taking sentences apart to figure out how they work. 

Stephen Pinker calls this process “reverse-engineering” and recommends it as an effective — and highly pleasurable — way to hone your sense of style:

Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose. . . . Savoring good prose is not just a more effective way to develop a writerly ear than obeying a set of commandments; it’s a more inviting one.

(Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century). 

In a new series of posts subtitled “Spotlight on Style,” I’ll be inviting you from time to time to savor some stylish sentences and paragraphs with me. We’ll look at how they work, why they work so well, and what we can learn from their vocabulary, structure, and syntax. 

I’ll also shine some light on the stylistic foibles of ChattieG, aka ChatGPT (with continuing thanks to Inger Mewburn for this resonant moniker). 

As acronyms such as LLM (Large Language Model), GenAI (Generative Artificial Intelligence), and ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer — yes, really!) worm their way into our collective consciousness, we need to find ways of treading lightly but carefully among them. I’m here to help!

If you have an example of a stunningly stylish sentence or an egregiously awful paragraph that you’d like to put to the Sword (so to speak), please contact me with the text, and I’ll consider using it in a future post.

This week’s Spotlight on Style features a paragraph by literary historian Gillian Beer about the revolutionary impact of major scientific theories — a beautiful example of clear, concrete, carefully paced academic prose. ChattieG’s version? Not so much…

Gillian Beer on the impact of new scientific theories

Most major scientific theories rebuff common sense.  They call on evidence beyond the reach of our senses and overturn the observable world.  They disturb assumed relationships and shift what has been substantial into metaphor.  The earth now only seems immovable.  Such major theories tax, affront, and exhilarate those who first encounter them, although in fifty years or so they will be taken for granted, part of the apparently common-sense set of beliefs which instructs us that the earth revolves around the sun whatever our eyes may suggest.

(Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Fiction)

Academic writers often assume that abstract thought demands abstract language.  Literary historian Gillian Beer lays that misconception firmly to rest.  In the opening paragraph of Darwin’s Plots, a study of the relationship between nineteenth-century science and literature, she vividly describes how scientific theories rebuff, call on, overturn, disturb, and shift other forms of thinking; they tax, affront, and exhilarate the people who encounter them.

Beer packs plenty of abstract nouns into this paragraph – theories, common sense, evidence, reach, relationships, metaphor, beliefs – but takes care to balance them with appeals to sensory experience: senses, world, earth, sun, eyes.  Her writing helps us see how ideas and theories can take on energy and agency, a life of their own.  

Beer’s attention to style is evident also in the structure and pace of her prose.  She starts off the paragraph with a short, compact sentence (7 words) followed by two slightly longer ones (15 and 12 words) and another very short one (6 words).  Then, just as we are getting used to her almost staccato rhythm, she tosses in a long, sinuous sentence (47 words) that requires us to concentrate in quite a different way.

[Excerpted from Stylish Academic Writing, p. 50]

ChattieG on the impact of new scientific theories

New scientific theories have a profound impact on people, triggering curiosity and discussions. They prompt us to reevaluate our beliefs, fostering intellectual growth and technological innovation. However, they can also create uncertainty, challenging norms and encouraging adaptation. Overall, these theories catalyze personal and societal transformation, promoting ongoing learning and evolution.

In response to my prompt, “Write a paragraph on the impact of new scientific theories,” ChattieG initially delivered a paragraph containing 141 words, significantly baggier than Beer’s slick 87-word paragraph. “Make it half as long,” I commanded. (I’m gradually learning to resist my impulse to beseech ChattieG with a polite “Please can you?”)

The resulting 50-word paragraph — apparently Chattie G doesn’t know how to count! — is syntactically unimpeachable but stylistically bland.

Like Beer, ChattieG grants agency to abstract ideas by positioning scientific theories as the grammatical subject of all four sentences and ascribing to these theories an array of personified behaviors: they trigger curiosity, prompt a reevaluation of beliefs, fosterintellectual growth, catalyze transformation, and promote ongoing learning even while also creating uncertainty, challenging norms, and encouraging adaptation. But what I miss here is the sense of surprise and delight inspired by Beer’s less predictable verb choices — rebuff, overturn, tax, affront, exhilarate — which have clearly been drawn from the fertile brain of a voracious reader and wide-ranging thinker, not from a chatbot’s online word bank of frequently-used academic verbs.

I also miss Beer’s musical sense of rhythm and flow, as evidenced by her virtuosic transition from short staccato sentences to sinuous legato prose. All four sentences in ChattieG’s effort have essentially the same length (11 to 14 words) and structure: “[Scientific theories] [verb] [object], [verb]ing [object] and [object].”

When asked to revise their original 50-word paragraph to include a mix of short and long sentences, ChattieG punched up the word count from 50 to 83 and nudged the shortest-to-longest-sentence ratio from 11:14 to 9:20 — still a far cry from Beer’s spectacularly varied sentence-length ratio of 6 (shortest) to 47 (longest) in a single paragraph.

ChattieG gets drunk on Beer

Large language models like ChatGPT are pretty good at producing coherent, well-structured prose formulated in short, actively phrased, easy-to-read sentences. There’s a chronic lack of character, and you’ll need to do some fact-checking; but the structure and syntax aren’t bad.

When you ask a chatbot to write in a more poetic, playful, or individualistic style, however, the systems go haywire. Here’s what happened when I directed ChattieG to rewrite their original 50-word paragraph in the style of Gillian Beer:

New scientific theories possess an innate power to disrupt established modes of thought, provoking a symphony of curiosity and discourse. As these nascent ideas unfurl, they unfailingly beckon us to recalibrate our cognitive compasses, leading to a nuanced cultivation of intellectual expansiveness and technological marvels. Yet, interwoven within their intricate tapestry is an undeniable current of uncertainty, inviting us to traverse uncharted waters and redefine the boundaries of convention. Such theories, orchestrating a dance between upheaval and adaptation, ultimately choreograph a ballet of personal and societal metamorphosis, an evergreen ode to perpetual learning and growth.

Our eager writing assistant extols the virtues of “perpetual learning and growth” but has apparently never learned about the dangers of purple prose. In this hodgepodge of metaphorical nonsense, nascent ideas unfurl and beckon, intricate tapestries are interwoven with the currents of uncharted waters, and scientific theories orchestrate dances and choreograph ballets, which eventually metamorphose into evergreen odes.

“In the style of Gillian Beer?” Hardly. But good for a laugh.

ChattieG as sonneteer

Speaking of falling over laughing, I’ll end with ChattieG’s Italian sonnet on the impact of new scientific theories:

New theories in science, a realm profound,
With power to shift established thought's embrace,
Ignite our minds and spark a vibrant chase,
In quest of truths, in depths yet to be found.

They urge us to reevaluate the ground,
To shed old skin and seek a higher space,
Innovation blooms, a swift-paced race,
Yet uncertainty can often then abound.

Amidst this dance of change and adaptation,
We find a symphony of transformation,
A call to learn and grow, a ceaseless flow.

These theories, like a river's endless tide,
Guide us along life's intellectual ride,
In quest of knowledge, ever on we go.

Can someone please teach ChattieG how to scan?!

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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My meditations last week on gardenly grammar — garden as noun, verb, and adjective — got me thinking about mythical and metaphorical gardens: the garden of Eden, the Garden of Forking Paths, the garden of the mind. 

The German Romantic poet Jean Paul famously wrote that “Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be driven.” But Jean Paul was wrong. Memory is a fickle Eden, a garden full of unexpected exits both divine and demonic. 

More than a decade ago, I wrote a three-part poem called “Still Life with Alzheimers” as a way of making sense of what was happening in my mother’s brain — and my own heart — as I watched her short-term memory loss bloom into full-blown dementia. In the later years of her disease, when she could no longer recall what she had eaten for lunch that day, she could still describe the blue flowers painted on her family’s Depression-era china. Those ceramic flowers became part of the stoneflower path that wends its way through the poem, a permanent memorial to the impermanence of memory. 

It’s a privilege to share my hitherto unpublished poem with my subscribers in my paywalled garden of love and trust.

At the end of the poem, there is a short sequence of writing prompts for designing your own poetic garden of remembrance. Not a poet? You can adapt those prompts to freewrite about any topic that involves a challenging transition: starting a new research project, negotiating with a stubborn co-author, responding to a negative peer review. The language of metaphor will help you surface unspoken emotions and discover things you didn’t know you know.

Still Life with Alzheimers

1. in the garden of your mind
   
   the jasmine vine
   trails its sweet scent
   summer and winter
   the hummingbird always
   sips from the same cup
   and the full moon stares
   night after night
   at a tideless ocean
   that has already tossed you
   every seashell
   it will ever give up

---

2. the stoneflower path

zigzags from the bay
to the kauri cottage
in a country far away
where your daughter grouts
a hard green cross
between the brick boxes
of her potager
and lays a wreath
of smashed souvenirs
to mark the border
where clay meets clay

---

3. at the end of the path

the whitest flowers bloom
from the plates you stored in
the walnut chiffarobe
of your childhood: each blank
expectant face ringed by
a penumbra of hand-
painted blossoms blue as
your forget-me-not eyes
your starry memories
crazing now to silence
and bedded down in stone
in homage to the lost arts
of fire and bone

The Garden of Metaphor

Here’s a sequence of writing prompts that you can use to process your feelings about a person you miss, a transition you’re facing, or any other challenging situation. The “you” addressed in the opening line may be a real person, an imagined character, or even you (a useful rhetorical device for distancing yourself from your own subjectivity).

Start by writing each prompt at the top of a blank notebook page, then keep your pen moving to find out where your words carry you: a poem, a letter, a mind map, a drawing, a prose fragment, a song?

1. In the garden of your _______ . . .

   [What does the garden represent: a person’s mind, heart, brain, body, soul? What grows there, or fails to grow?]

2. The ________ path . . .
   [What kind of path leads into or through the garden? What materials is it made of? What route does it follow?]

3. At the end of the path . . .
   [Where does the path take you — or not?]

I’d love to hear what words, ideas, and emotions you discover in your garden of metaphor. Please leave a comment at the bottom of this page, or at least plant a heart.

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

Helen

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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Last week, I described my vision of Helen’s Word, my subscription-only newsletter, as a paywalled garden:

— a safe space where I can experiment with words and wordcraft amongst fellow writers who, like me, aspire to bring more creativity, color, and joy into their writing lives . . . a muddy, messy place for growing things, not a museum filled with perfect glass flowers.

This week, I decided to go wild with the writing-as-gardening metaphor — first in my muddy, messy notebook, then on this colorful digital page. 

In the spirit of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson’s famous garden at Sissinghurst — where you can wander through the White Garden, the Summer Garden, the Herb Garden, and many more — I’ve arranged my plantings in a sequence of garden rooms, each with a character and color scheme of its own. 

Helen’s Word subscribers can ramble through the Noun Garden, the Verb Garden, the Adjective Garden, the Teaching Garden, and ChattieG’s Garden (a Barbie-inspired version of the kind of garden that I imagine ChatGPT might plant). No perfect glass flowers here— but plenty of fountains and follies amongst the garden beds…

The Noun Garden

The Noun Garden blossoms with concrete nouns rooted in nature — some pretty, some prickly: annuals ants bees  blossoms  branches buds  compost  dirt earth fertilizer  flowers  fruit  grass hedge herb mud mulch perennials pests roots  shrubs soil thorns  trees  vegetables weeds worms . . .

And then there are all the tools that humans have invented to help us tame the wilderness and make our gardens grow: gloves greenhouse hoe hose rake shears shovel spade trowel watering can weedwhacker wheelbarrow . . .

So many kinds of gardens! annual garden desert garden flower garden perennial garden rock garden succulent garden tea garden vegetable garden walled garden zen garden . . .

I especially love the vocabulary of garden design and decor: arbor bed bench birdbath conservatory courtyard decking folly fountain gazebo orchard path patio pergola plot pond pot statue trellis tromp l’oeil wall windchime . . .

In fact, it’s no accident that the frolicsome phrase “fountains and follies” made it into two of my books on writing. In Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write, I describe the metaphorical “parks and playgrounds” that distinguish a functioning writing community from a flourishing one:

A functioning community requires a well-developed infrastructure to link its inhabitants together and keep them safe: roads and bridges, streetlights and sewers, power stations and watertreatment plants. A flourishing community supplements the necessities of modern life with amenities designed to lift the spirit and feed the soul: parks and playgrounds, walkways and footbridges, street art and skateboard ramps, fountains and follies. (p. 200)

And in Writing with Pleasure, I invite my readers to read with a non-linear metaphor in mind, one attuned to their own interests and affinities:

For example, you could approach this book as a pleasure garden: a place of meandering pathways and comfortable benches, shade trees and flower beds, fountains and follies, where you can wander and linger at leisure. (p. xvi)

The Noun Garden can help you see and appreciate your own writing (and writing life) as a complex organic entity: intricately designed, carefully structured, lovingly tended, and alive to the pleasure of writer and reader alike.

The Verb Garden

If the Noun Garden points to the products of our writing, the Verb Garden is all about process. To garden is to transform things into actions, whether via transitive verbs that describing our own garden labor (we plant plants, shovel dirt with shovels, and compost leaves to make compost) or intransitive verbs that celebrate acts of nature (flowers flower, rain rains).

Not all gardening nouns double as verbs, of course: we can’t trowel with a trowel; trees don’t tree. Conversely, not all gardening verbs solidify into matching nouns: we don’t prune prunes or sow sows, although it might be fun to try.

Whatever the grammatical quirks of the Verb Garden, it’s clearly an action-oriented place where we make things, grow things, and transform the landscape: dig, fertilize, plant, prune, sow, transplant, water, weed, and so much more.

Any experienced gardener knows that you can’t just stick a seedling in the ground and expect it to flourish. You need to plant it in the right season, choose the right soil, and make sure it gets adequate sunlight or shade. As the roots begin to take hold, you must fertilize, water, and weed. The hardest part comes in late autumn, when you have to cut back even the most vigorous shoots to prepare your plant for winter and ensure abundant blossoms in spring.

To write is to garden: your hands in the soil, your face to the sky. Take heart.

The Adjective Garden

The Adjective Garden is a sparse and spindly place, less abundant than its neighbors.

There I found mostly compound nouns in which the noun garden modifies a second noun, doing the descriptive work of an adjective — for example garden party, garden shed, garden room. Interestingly, garden gets a different weighting in each of these pairings: a garden party is a specific genre of party that can only happen in a garden; a garden shed both inhabits and serves the garden; a garden room is a smaller garden within a larger one, not really a room at all.

Sometimes, as an adjective, garden gets a bad rap. Garden-variety writing is ordinary, not special. To lead my readers down the garden path is an act of deception, not generosity.

My brief tour of the Adjective Garden made me wonder what an Adverb Garden might look like. What would happen if you were to write gardeningly, or gardenishly, or in a gardenly mode?

The Teaching Garden

Gardening can serve a fertile metaphor for teaching, as the word kindergarten (children’s garden) reminds us. Equally importantly, the writing as gardening metaphor can teach us to become more resilient and resourceful writers. Gardeners don’t talk about “shitty first drafts” or “murdering your darlings” or “turbocharging your writing.” They talk about composting, pruning, and patience.

Gardening teaches us to take things slowly and to learn with our hands and hearts as well as with our heads. Liberated from the ching of a clanging cash register or alarm clock, the Tea(ching) Garden becomes a tea garden, a serene space of ritual and repose.

ChattieG’s Garden

I couldn’t possibly end my garden tour without a pitstop in the garden of ChattieG (aka ChatGPT).

Have you seen the new Barbie movie? In Barbieland, the beautiful, brilliant Barbies inhabit a perfect world of pink plastic houses, while the gormless Kens hang out at a place called Beach, where a big blue plastic wave hovers, unbreaking, over the plastic sand.

ChattieG’s garden is a place called Garden, where perfect plastic daisies bloom in perfect plastic flowerbeds. It’s a far cry from my writing garden, where worms ply the soil and scrappy flowers grow, flourish, and fade. I don’t mind visiting ChattieG’s Garden from time to time, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Exit through the Garden Shop

I’ve left out so much here: writing about gardens; writing in gardens; writers and their gardens! But it’s time for me to slip away from my paywalled garden and head back out into the wider world.

I’d love to hear about your own writing-as-gardening experiences, insights, and metaphors. Please leave a comment, or at least plant a heart.

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