Posts in September 2022
Seven Secrets of Productive Writers
 
 
 

My new Productivity Catalyst kicked off this weekend, and we are going to have a blast!  

It's not to late for you to register for this action-packed 8-week course.

The "seven secrets of productive writers" that I'll be revealing week by week aren't really secrets at all, of course. They're based on extensive scholarly research and my decades of experience working with academic and professional writers. I'll show you how to:

  1. Take Time
    Identify your personal time traps and acquire a toolbox of powerful techniques for spending time, befriending time, and bending time to your will.

  2. Make Space
    Design a nourishing physical and emotional environment where you can write new words, invite new ideas, and delight in new knowledge.

  3. Find Flow
    Discover the varieties of optimal experience as you try out new rhythms, rituals, and routines for finding and maintaining flow.

  4. Cultivate Craft
    Diagnose your weak points and sharpen your style as we focus on the pleasures, frustrations, and challenges of wordcraft.

  5. Cherish Community
    Identify, establish, and/or revive a supportive community of writers committed to nurturing each other’s writing practice.

  6. Spark Joy
    Infuse your writing with pleasure and passion by reframing your negative emotions about the writing process and reclaiming your positive ones.

  7. Bring Balance
    Integrate these principles into your own everyday writing practice through guided experiments, online interactions, and live small-group coaching.

Each week throughout the course, you'll have opportunities to meet with me and your fellow participants in the WriteSPACE Virtual Writing Studio for a live breakout room discussion. Best of all, WriteSPACE members get a 10% discount!

Come join us in the Productivity Catalyst and find out how to transform your writing habits — and habits of mind — forever.


Subscribe here to Helen’s Word on Substack to access the full Substack archive and receive weekly subscriber-only newsletters (USD $5/month or $50/year).

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $150/year). Not a member? Join the WriteSPACE now and get your first 30 days free.


 
Writing and Deep Practice
 
 
 

How can concepts such as deep practice, deliberate practice, and ultralearning help you become a more productive and confident writer?

I was lucky enough to get to discuss these questions and many others in my wide-ranging conversation with Professor Patricia Goodson on Wednesday September 7.

Pat is a Professor at Texas A&M University and the author of two excellent books on academic writing:

In the first hour of this live 2-hour WriteSPACE Special Event, we talked about Pat’s books, her extensive work with faculty and student writers, and her own deep dive into deep practice. The second hour featured a hands-on workshop in which we experimented with these concepts in our own writing.

Here’s WriteSPACE member Nina Ginsberg’s lively account of the live event:

…………….

What could be more inspiring than hearing two international experts of academic writing talking writing?? This session was an informative and entertaining romp through the various stages and phases of writing poise, practice and passion.

A few standout quotes from this session: 

  • “Paced, productive and powerful ...and pleasure! The connections between productivity and pleasure - and pleasure is as important a skill as all the other writing capacities.” 

  • “Learning how to like writing: connect to writers and learn from the masters.” 

  • “The more complex the (writing) task, the more complex the system you need to complete it.” 

  • “The more effortless the writing seems, the more work has gone into it.” 

We started by tracing Pat’s eclectic background from first studying Linguistics in Brazil, to researching Maternal and Child Health, to a Master of Philosophy of Education in Brazil (learning from and meeting Paulo Freire and his mentees), to another Masters (this time in Theology in the US), then to a PhD in Health Education. Phew! The moment she began her tenure journey as an Associate Professor was the moment writing pressure and a focus on writing began. Pat’s work on a graduate school peer-to-peer writing development support service she established morphed into a popular course, and it was from this project that her book Becoming an Academic Writer emerged. 

Pat talked about her latest book 90 days, 90 ways and showed examples of how it hones in on the connection between pleasure and productivity. I was surprised to find out that Patricia learnt how to self-publish this book on Amazon as I had just assumed it was a mainstream publication. 

It was especially interesting hearing Helen and Pat’s discussion on how their thinking about writing has changed over time and what experiences and research inform their approaches to writing. Helen uses metaphors and stories, promotes flexible and pleasurable ways of thinking about writing, offers the writing BASE to consider the dimensions of writing, questions the ubiquitous ‘write every day’ mantra, and posits that writing strategies are more like a smorgasbord than a formula. Pat mentioned the impact of decision fatigue, being aware of creative energy flows, how kinesiology research explains the link between writing and sleep within a 24-hour period, and the need to feed your writer’s unconscious mind with little bits of ‘food’ information – even if it is 5 mins a day. I liked Pat’s analogy of the writer’s mind being a hard-working graduate assistant. Pat explained how research into ‘complex adaptive systems’ and ‘complex dynamic systems’ helps her appreciate how complex writing is, and that using writing strategies in isolation is not particularly useful. Instead, she is working to develop a ‘systems approach’ or a set of elements that interact to progress writing, which she identifies as: 

A set of strategies – write every day, Pomodoros ... 

A set of tools – online or other resources writer's use (Pro Writing Aid, Grammarly...) 

A set of support – feedback, and other social, emotional, and instrumental help .... 

Pat finished off the first hour by explaining how (re)learning classical guitar online helped reinforce the principles of Contextual Interference and Deep Deliberate Practice (DDP). Patricia outlined the three key features of DDP and noted that she is now applying these to writing. The three DDP features are: 1) it slows you down and so helps with focus, attention, and intention, 2) establish a mini goal for that practice session, and 3) get immediate feedback (if you can build it in). The discussion then went into the ways practice encourages us to go deeper with our writing and how some strategies can force you to focus on becoming a better writer, but doing it in ways that might not be that difficult. 

After a break, we dove straight into the writing workshop. We explored how we might use Contextual Interference for academic writing. Pat recommended Helen’s Creativity Catalyst as a place to find provocative and inspiring academic writing activities. Pat suggested a few activities that play with contextual interference in academic writing, such as; write a journal article purpose statement as a short poem, write every other word within a sentence, or write your work backwards, or start by writing what you think will be the last sentence of your paper, then write the sentence before it, and work your way backwards. The idea with this is to make writing more difficult because this often gives clarity that was not there before.  

And finally, Pat ran us through a 15-minute activity to highlight how we practice in writing sessions. Using a triangle with three words (one word at each point): plan – do – reflect, we iteratively cycled around the triangle pushing to learn more. This process focuses on improving the quality of our writing – and improving ourselves as a writer. It was a remarkably interesting experiment to do – give it a go yourself! 

This session certainly gave us lots of interesting ideas and writing challenges to take away and ponder. 

A big thank you to both Pat and Helen for sharing their ideas and expertise so generously during this event. 

A recording of this WriteSPACE Special Event is now available for members in the WriteSPACE Library.

Not a member yet? Register here 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 (USD $5/month or $50/year).

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $150/year).


 
Under the Twitter Tree
 
A collage depicting a garden with a tree and a log cabin
 
 

NEWS FLASH: After many years as a certified Twitterphobe, I've finally caved in and signed on to both Twitter and Instagram.  (I'm also on LinkedIn; but I'm holding the line with Facebook).

My mission is to bring creativity, color, and pleasure to the world of academic and professional writing, one Twittertweet or Instatreat at a time. Please follow me @helens_word.  

If, like me, you're a newbie in the Twittersphere/Instaverse, you're welcome to hang back and watch as I take my own halting baby steps. But if you're already a confident power user – as I know many of you are – I'd be grateful if you could work some of your social media magic to help me grow my audience.

I've just posted a bouquet of old newsletter collages and blog links to both platforms so that you'll have plenty of fun stuff to like, share, and retweet. Next I plan to publish my 10-part Write Like Freddie series, with some bonus photos at the end.

But but but but but but – have I mentioned my lingering sense of dread? The anxiety about professional self-sabotage that hangs around me like a black cloud? My fear of being sucked into the social media muck and losing all sense of proportion – to say nothing of time?  

To reframe my negative emotions, I've turned to paper collage and its creative cousin, metaphor.

If I visualize my website as a colorful garden where I happily potter around most days – nurturing seedlings, pulling out weeds, watering and fertilizing and pruning – I can see Twitter as just another tree in a much larger landscape, one that I have planted for its capacity to attract avian life. Sure, I'm a bit worried about all the noise. Did you know that the English word jargon comes from an Old French word denoting the sound made by twittering birds?  

I've reimagined Instagram's squareish camera logo, meanwhile, as the door to my garden shed / log cabin / mountain chalet / writing studio. That wonky, welcoming Instaportal gives me another metaphor to ponder: perhaps my collage is trying to tell me something about the creative relationship between society and solitude?

As soon I've built up a respectable Twitter/Insta following, I hope to use both platforms to crowdsource future newsletter material. For example:

  • What metaphors for writing does this week's collage invoke for you?

  • What tips and tricks can you recommend to others for writing more productively, playfully, pleasurably, [choose your own adverb]?

  • Most pressing for me at the moment: How do you make the most of Twitter and Instagram without going insane?!

A special shout-out to all the generous colleagues and friends – Michelle Boyd @InkWellRetreats, Karim Khan @KarimKhan_IMHA, Inger Mewburn @thesiswhisperer, Amanda Palmer @amandapalmer, Steven Pinker @sapinker, Margy Thomas @ScholarShape, and Pat Thomson @ThomsonPat, among others – who have encouraged or inspired me to take this scary step.

I hope to see you soon in the newest patch of my garden!


Subscribe here to Helen’s Word on Substack to access the full Substack archive and receive weekly subscriber-only newsletters (USD $5/month or $50/year).

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $150/year). Not a member? Join the WriteSPACE now and get your first 30 days free.