We live with our feet on the ground and our heads in the sky. Sometimes all we want is to feel the comforting weight of gravity pulling us down to earth. Other times we long to fly.

In my book Writing with Pleasure, I coined the moniker “flying unicorn” to describe hybrid writing tools (e.g. digital notebooks, pen-like styluses, voice-activated software) that play to our modern desire to bridge the material and digital realms. Illustrator Selina Tusitala Marsh used the Procreate app on her iPad — a flying unicorn in its own right! — to draw herself gleefully riding astride that fanciful beast:

Illustration by Selina Tusitala Marsh for Writing with Pleasure

These days, I find myself scanning the skies for a different kind of flying unicorn: a fantasy creature that can bring the healing warmth of social contact to the heady magic of global digital outreach.

Indeed, I’m drafting this post while literally “in the sky,” winging my way home from a 5-week international trip that took me to on-the-ground meetings and workshops in California, Oregon, Colorado, Texas, Germany, and the U.K.

What a delight it was to drink coffee on Balboa Island with WriteSPACE member Karen; to celebrate a successful day of workshops in Fort Collins with Kristina, Kimi, and their colleagues in the CSU Writes program at Colorado State University; to tour San Antonio with Ebony and Molly from the The Collaborative for Learning and Teaching at Trinity University; to meet with Daniel from the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology and with Christelle from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in historic Heidelberg (where I also got to spend a whole week cuddling my new grandson Enrico 🥰); and to catch up with Amy, my wonderful WriteSPACE Events Manager, for a delicious Ottolenghi lunch in London.

But we don’t have to travel across the world to breathe the healing oxygen of human fellowship. As writers, we can celebrate both our roots and our wings: our beautiful handmade notebooks and our whizzy digital gadgets; our local friendships and our online communities.

Those flying unicorns are already dancing and wheeling all around us, if only we know where to find them.

For example, you could lift the ground up towards the sky by inviting a colleague to join you in person for a virtual workshop (perhaps our next WriteSPACE Special Event?)

Or you could anchor the sky to the ground by organizing a conference panel with fellow writers you’ve met online.

Or you could apply for a WriteSPACE Travel Grant designed to help you bring cloud-based resources to local colleagues and to send your earthbound writing partnerships soaring.

Ground or sky? Why not choose both?

I’d love to see you there — and in all the spaces in between!

Write with delight! For exclusive access to live workshops, craft-focused coaching, and premium writing and editing tools, join me and fellow writers from 30+ countries in the WriteSPACE, a vibrant international writing community and resource library. To try free for 30 days, click below and enter the discount code WSTRIAL-BP at checkout.

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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? Register to receive an email with a link to the video of the first hour.

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

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

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

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

……………

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Style

• Creativity

• Community

• Productivity

• Pleasure and play

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

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

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

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

See you again soon!

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy!

The first paragraph

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

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

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

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

The second paragraph

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

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

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

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

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

The third paragraph

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

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

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

The list

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

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

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

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

• the use of parallel syntax;

• the occasional planned surprise;

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

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

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

Thank you, Steve, for the examples and inspiration!

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

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

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

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

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

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

……………

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you again at the next event!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A young man in limbo. A heart behind wire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a brief tour of this SACRED SPACE.

Enjoy!

Sacred

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

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

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

Rebecca wrote:

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

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

Pam wrote:

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

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

Wai Ling wrote:

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

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

Hava wrote:

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

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

Sophie wrote:

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

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

Aditi wrote:

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

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

SPACE

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

• Socially balanced

• Physically engaging

• Aesthetically nourishing 

• Creatively challenging 

• Emotionally uplifting 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy!

Weeks 1-2

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

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

Week 3

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

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

Week 4

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

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

Week 5

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

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

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

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

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

Week 6

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

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

Week 7

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

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

Week 8

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

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

Week 9

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

• Arranging a meeting (red - 12)

• Thanks/acknowledgment (dark orange - 18)

• Question/request (light orange - 18)

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

• Other (yellow - 19)

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

The end of the trail

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy!

Show and tell (2012)

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

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

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

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

Metaphors to write by (2017)

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

Arthur Quiller-Couch, “On Style,” 1914

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

William Morris, “The Beauty of Life,” 1919

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

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

Mining the language of metaphor (2018)

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

By the seat of my pants.

Sink or swim.

How do they get their writing done?

Fifteen minute jam sessions.

My writing comes in waves.

How do they feel about their writing?

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

The road to satisfaction is paved with less enjoyable emotions.

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

I love to immerse myself.

(But immersion can lead to drowning).

I always know I’ll get to lift off.

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

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

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

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

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

I walk my thoughts together in the forest.

It feels like jumping into a river.

Words are like gold.

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

Metaphors of frustration (2018)

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

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

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

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

Some invoked metaphors of patience:

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

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

Some called on magical thinking:

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

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

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

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

The feedback loop (2019)

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

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

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

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

The mosaic path (2022)

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

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

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

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

The SPACE of metaphor (2023)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

……………

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

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

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

• Q: What is risky writing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As one participant noted in the comments:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you again at the next event!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy!

The Simplon Pass

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

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

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

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

The mountains of the mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming down the mountain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy!

Mindful walking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writingful walking

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walkingful reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Just two months after launching Helen’s Word on Substack, I’ve found that locking away my essays and experiments behind a paywall doesn’t sit well with me — so I’ve flung the gates of my Writing Garden wide open. Even if you’re a free subscriber, you can now find the full texts of all recent posts on my Substack homepage and here on my website blog.

To my precious paid subscribers, including my entire WriteSPACE community: thank you for your continuing support!

Moving forward, I plan to publish a series of monthly podcasts called “Swordswings”: short, easy-to-digest audio snippets in which I’ll address readers’ questions about writing and wordcraft. My very first Swordswing, coming up in early October, will respond to a query from Stephanie, a PhD student in Art History in Australia:

I am looking for some exercises / information / instructionals on how to write good transitions: I particularly struggle with the transitions between the big movements in my argument and sections within chapters. I am keen to read or watch any articles, books, etc that you could recommend.

These podcasts will be available to paid subscribers only. There are three ways to get access:

1. Sign up for a monthly or annual paid subscription to Helen’s Word ($5/mo or $50/yr).

2. BEST VALUE: Sign up for an annual WriteSPACE subscription ($150/yr), which includes unlimited access to hundreds of extra writing resources, weekly prompts, live workshops, and exclusive tools, all for just $12.50/mo.

3. Sign up for a monthly WriteSPACE subscription for $15/mo, or $45/mo if you choose the premium WS Studio plan. Click the button below for a free 30-day trial.

I’d love to see you there on the other side the playwall.

Be dramatic!

This week, in the “Be dramatic” module of my 6-week Creativity Catalyst, we’ve been playing with ways of bringing dramatic elements and techniques such as dialogue, roleplay, and theatrical staging into our daily lives, our writing lives, and our personal and professional writing.

I’ve been laughing out loud (and sometimes crying, too) reading the brilliant experiments that the course participants have been sharing in the online forum. It’s been so inspiring to watch these brave academic and professional writers pushing themselves so far outside their creative comfort zone!

Imagine presenting the Results section of your design education article as a series of children’s games from a Brueghel painting; or exploring theories of identity via a creepy carnivalesque drama dubbed Identity Theatre; or staging a conversation at a philately conference between stuck-up characters called General Duffer and Dr. Smartyskirt.

Pam, a social work researcher in Australia, was generous enough to allow me to print in full a satirical piece that she wrote, as she put it, in “a moment of frivolity” while responding to a Creativity Catalyst prompt called “Stage a Scene”:

Write about your research in the form of a screenplay or stage script. Describe the setting, props, and costumes; write dialogue for your characters; specify stage directions, camera angles, lighting, and sound effects. What famous actors would you recruit to play the lead characters in the movie of your research? Could it be adapted into a Broadway musical?

Enjoy!

STAYING ALIVE: A comedic drama in one part

Setting

A cold hard pavement near a busy road. Discarded papers blow about in the gritty breeze. Laughter, singing, shouting, and occasional applause can be heard intermittently in the background.

A thesis (dissertation) lies gasping on the footpath. People rush past on either side, intent on their own research, teaching, service . . . barely pausing to notice the near-death experience happening at their feet.

Soundtack

The soundtrack to this scene is “Staying Alive” by the Bee Gees. The Bee Gees have been around for a long time and some of the group have passed into a different life, and yet they still have some influence. It is not accidental that First Aid teachers use this track to help people learn the correct rate of compressions in CPR.

Props

The set is sparse and unwelcoming. There are few props — just a battered rubbish bin and a single streetlight. The set's colour scheme is monochromatic, inspired by brutalist architecture in many shades of grey.

Costumes

The thesis is wearing a royal blue coat, with silver details and a classy ribbon that matches the coat. Pam is in her pyjamas from waist down, but wears a neutral top and has brushed her hair and applied just enough makeup to keep people from telling her she looks tired. The First Aid team (Helen, Amy and Victoria) are in exuberant contrast: they are wearing bright colours, streamers and ribbons in their hair, with dramatically confident stage makeup. The cast of onlookers who stop to offer assistance are a varied bunch, their costumes ranging from tender pinks to vivid purples, one cast member in artistic black setting off the bright burnished orange of another’s outfit.

Lighting

The action takes place in the glare of the single streetlight, with the background movement taking place in subdued shadows.

Staging

The audience is seated a little distance away from the stage, grouped in various seating positions, and looking up at the elevated ivory-hued stage. A long delay occurs between the curtain going up and the start of any action, and the audience becomes restless. A few start to move towards the door, having little patience for academic/dramatic processes.

Scene 1

[The thesis is lying awkwardly on the pavement, one arm raised to attract attention, while shadowy crowds bustle to and fro in the background.]

Thesis (gasps): Help! Help! Please, someone...down here. I can’t hold on much longer.

Pam: Oh my goodness, it’s you! Thesis! What happened!

Thesis: I’m getting old and frail. I haven’t been getting enough sunlight. I haven’t had much exercise and I’m suffering from neglect, as you can probably tell. Where did you go?

Pam: I got caught up in marking! I feel so bad about this, but I had to earn a living, and, academia, you know . . .

[Pam clutches her pearls]

Thesis: Hack, cough, splutter.

Pam: Someone! Call an ambulance! There isn’t much time!

[Pam remembers her own phone, and dials frantically.]

Thesis: I’m so glad you’re back, though. If I don’t make it, promise me you’ll do something with our work. All those parents who shared their stories . . .

Pam: No, you mustn’t talk like that! We can still get something happening. I just need some fresh ideas.

Thesis: Maybe we should try to . . .

[The thesis collapses in Pam’s arms.]

Pam: No! I won’t let it happen! I will resuscitate you!

[In the distance, approaching sirens can be heard.]

Pam: Someone help! Why isn’t anyone paying any attention?

[A bystander pauses and speaks in Pam’s ear.]

Pam: Yes, yes, I know the marks are due in tomorrow. I know the university’s international ranking depends on student experience. I know I need to respond to the staff satisfaction survey and give my email address on the last page and of course I’m confident that all data is treated with the utmost confidentiality and no adverse employment consequences will occur. But Thesis is dying here! Help me roll it on to its back and start CPR!

[The bystander shakes their head sadly and moves back into the crowd. At this moment, an ambulance screeches to a stop at the edge of the stage, and Helen, Amy and Victoria jump out.]

Helen: It’s ok, we know what to do. Amy, Victoria, bring the tools!

Pam: Oh my goodness, how colourful! How vibrant! I feel a new energy. I might even break into dance!

[Other Creativity Catalyst classmates emerge from the crowd. One offers refreshment. Another calls encouragingly from the sidelines. A third passes a new tool to Helen and the group cheers.]

Thesis: Wha..? Where…? Who…? Oh, I’m feeling a little better. The creative energy is reviving me! Pam, we should start to work together again!

[The cast line up across the stage and in unison strike a pose, pointing with one extended arm to the sky. They break into song.]

All: Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Staying alive, staying alive! Ah, ah, ah, ah, staying aliiiiiiive!

[The curtains close, to rapturous applause.]

You may have recognized several of the characters in Pam’s drama as members of my indomitable WriteSPACE Team. My only disappointment is that Freddie, our Cuddles Manager, didn’t get to join us to help save the day.

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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I’ve borrowed today’s title and tagline (“What poetry brings to research writing”) from two of my favorite books:

• Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross (Random House, 2023)

• What Poetry Brings to Business by Clare Morgan (Univ of Michigan Press, 2010)

The poetry snippets in my paper collage come from an Academy of American Poets calendar that I cut up several years ago; a quick Google search reveals the poets to be, from top to bottom, Brenda Shaughnessy, Erica Hunt, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo.

In a fascinating overview of recent neurocognitive research on how poetry affects the brain, Magsamen and Ross observe:

A poem that truly resonates with us does so at a neurological level by stimulating the areas of the brain that are associated with meaning-making and the interpretation of reality. Poetry, at a cognitive level, can help us make sense of the world and consider our place in it. (Your Brain on Art, p. 79)

This week in the “Play with Poetry” module of my Creativity Catalyst, I’ve been encouraging writers from a wide range of disciplines and genres to incorporate poetry into their daily lives, their writing lives, and their personal and professional writing. The excitement amongst the participants has been palpable. When we contemplate our academic research (or anything else!) through the opaque-yet-clarifying lens of poetry, we discover things that we didn’t know we know.

One seasoned scholar — a public health researcher — experienced an intellectual ephiphany when she composed her very first research poem:

This week's exercise caused my office desk sparkling fireworks, that's how it felt. While I was thinking and writing a poem! about public health expenditure! I could feel the sparks coming out, like from the friction of two radically different and strong metals. [The] two different sides are the technical/academic and sentimental/poetic sides of me. And I’ve never cared to join them, thinking they were so different.

Another reflected on the cognitive value of compressing complex ideas into poetic language:

I think poetry is a form of writing with great benefit to academic writers. Condensing our ideas is difficult, especially the more complex they are. But the more complex, the more we need to be able to condense them. [Poetry] can help us with understanding our main point, generating important words, and redrafting our thoughts into a clear point that the reader will appreciate.

As promised, I’ve been playing along with this week’s poetry experiments. Below are two of my own research poems, along with the prompts that generated them. Try them out for yourself if you want to see fireworks sparking from your writing desk — and your writing brain!

Looking for more inspiration? Check out last year’s poetry experiments in the 2022 Creativity Catalyst Showcase….
Enjoy!

1. To My Darling Research

This week in my Live Writing Studio, I asked the participants — an eclectic group of writers from across the disciplines and around the world — to introduce themselves by holding up to the camera an interesting object found on or near their desk. Here’s the list that we collectively generated (you can probably guess which item was mine!):

Freddie the fluffy dog, koru (fern frond) earrings, shiny phone, tiny elephant, sprig of rosemary, red coin purse, a pack of cards, driftwood collage, hand cream

Next, I asked them to describe their current writing project in the Zoom chat and to explain why it interests or excites them. Finally, as a creative warmup before we turned to our “serious” writing, I prompted them to draft a short poem about a person, object, or topic central to their writing.

The Prompt

(Note: If you’re not an academic researcher, feel free to replace the word “research” with “writing.”)

1. (2 minutes) Jot down a list of objects that you see around you in your writing space — or, better yet, ask someone else to generate a random list of concrete nouns for you.

2. (3 minutes) Describe your current research topic. What are you writing about, and why? What interests or excites you about your topic?

3. (5 minutes) Write a poem addressed to a person, object, or topic central to your research, starting with the words, “To My Darling ___________.” For an extra challenge, incorporate some or all of the objects on your list into your poem!

The Poem

I’m not currently working on a research project myself, so I decided to write instead about my online writing community, the WriteSPACE.

TO MY DARLING WRITESPACE

You’re my daily companion,
the fluffy white dog snoozing by my desk.
You unfold like a koru,
a spiral of awakening.
You sharpen my senses
like a sprig of rosemary.
I play you like a pack of cards,
carry you around like a coin purse.
You whisper in my ear like a shiny phone
and soothe my cracked spirit
with the healing handcream
of community.

Wild and serendipitous as driftwood,
you’re bearing me away to someplace new —
but where?

In your presence,
I feel as shy and brave and certain
as a tiny elephant.

2. Research Haiku

My friend and colleague Margy Thomas, founder of ScholarShape, encourages academic writers to identify the “Story-Argument” that underpins their research. A few years ago, while I was working on my book Writing with Pleasure, I wrote a 5-7-5 syllable haiku summing up the Story-Argument of each of my chapters, plus the preface, introduction, section headings, and conclusion. So here it is: my entire book condensed down to a sequence of 15 haiku!

The Prompt

Choose a meaty piece of prose such as a book, a chapter, or an article, then express its main idea as a haiku: 5 syllables / 7 syllables / 5 syllables. For a further challenge, commit to using only concrete language — no abstractions. Taking a fractal approach, you can repeat this exercise for every chapter of a book, every section of an article, or even every paragraph or sentence of a complex argument.

The Poem

WRITING WITH PLEASURE

Preface: Why Pleasure?

Writing with pleasure
is better, wouldn’t you say,
than writing with pain?

Introduction: The SPACE of Pleasure

I’ve laid out this book
as a pleasure smorgasbord
for you to feast on

PART I: Pleasure Principles

Social, Physical,
Aesthetic, Creative,
Emotional: SPACE!

Chapter 1: Society and Solitude

The social pleasures:
society, solitude,
and intimacy

Chapter 2: Body Basics

Physical pleasure:
writing bodies revel in
senses, motion, place

Chapter 3: On Beauty

Aesthetic pleasure: 
beauty in writing about
beautiful writing 

Chapter 4: The C-Curve

Creative pleasure:
cognition, challenge, and choice
are the waves we ride 

Chapter 5: States of Mind

Writing emotions:
passion, playfulness, and praise
hatch happy penguins

PART II: Pleasure Practices

Find joy in writing
through tools, processes, cultures,
and a balanced life

Chapter 6: On the Ground

The hand on the page,
the page in the book, the book
in the hand: delight!

Chapter 7: In the Sky

Skytools, skywriting,
skyspace – but still we long for
flying unicorns . . .

Chapter 8: Wind, River, Stone

How can we channel
whirlwind and wordflow into
lines written in stone?

Chapter 9: Star Navigation

Follow your own star;
share your food; strive to be both
teacher and learner

Chapter 10: On the Island

Rest in the hammock,
surf in the waves, but write in
the littoral zone

Conclusion: The SPACE of Writing

Grounding, broadening,
deepening: let’s make SPACE for
writing with pleasure!

There’s so much more that I could say here about research poetry! These two poems were never intended for an audience; my purpose in writing them was to open my mind to a deeper understanding of my topic. But poetic inquiry is a well-established research methodology in its own right, supported by a robust body of scholarly publications that employ poetry as a mode of data collection, argumentation, presentation, persuasion, and more.

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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The Creativity Catalyst kicked off in early September, beginning with Module One, “Tell Your Story.”

I’ve been having a great time reading the writing experiments shared by this year’s amazing cohort as they play around with character, plot, setting, and other classic narrative elements.

Just in the past few days, for example, participants have posted snippets of (among other things):

• a personal memoir written from the viewpoint of a cell in the author’s body; 

• an academic article imagining the inner lives of two pieces of furniture; 

• a scholarly book chapter that opens like a scene from a Victorian romance or a detective thriller (it’s not yet clear which way that particular plot is going to twist!)

And, as promised, I’ve been playing along. During this week’s Live Writing Studio sessions, I free-wrote in my notebook in response to a Story prompt titled “Talk Back”:

Write back to the characters in your favorite stories, or let them write back to you. For example, what might Aladdin advise you about taking risks with your writing? What would the Little Prince tell you about “writing like a grown-up?”

The “Talk Back” exercise was inspired by a writing retreat that I co-facilitated several years ago with my friend and colleague Dr. Evija Trofimova. Evija asked each of the retreat participants to bring along a favorite book from their childhood; then, following a lively show-and-tell, she invited us to open our notebooks and engage in conversation with a character from the book — a conversation in writing about our writing.

My life with The Little Prince

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was an obvious choice for me — not just because I have always loved Saint-Exupéry’s whimsical story of the proud little prince who fell from the sky, but because the book itself, as a material artifact, played an influential role in my early life. Back in the days before internet search engines and online marketplaces made such feats a bit easier, my mother assembled a collection of Little Prince translations in more than 40 different languages and dialects, including Yiddish, Latin, and Esperanto.

Lovingly exhibited on custom-built display shelves, the books took pride of place in our household while I was growing up and became an inevitable topic of conversation with visitors. I loved to take the books down from their shelves and flip through them one by one, fascinated by all the different languages, fonts, and cover images (including those on the pirated copies from Russia and China, which didn’t use the author’s original drawings at all).

I still associate The Little Prince with my mother’s wanderlust, her boundless hospitality, and her joy in the small pleasures of life. She loved nothing more than when a thoughtful guest brought her a copy of the book in a language she didn’t yet own. And I’ve no doubt that her remarkable collection, which I have since inherited, shaped my own passion for literature, my love of language, and my way of seeing the world.

So what did the Little Prince tell me about my writing that first time I asked? Well, it wasn’t very flattering . . . .

The Little Prince’s warning

The Little Prince wanted to know what I was working on, so I described to him the article I had been laboring over all morning: a scholarly account of how academic writers use metaphor to represent their writing process. I had amassed over three hundred examples of writing-related metaphors and was trying to figure out how to classify and theorize them.

“I’m developing a taxonomy of academic writing metaphors,” I explained, “based on scholarly principles of . . .”

“BORING!” interrupted the Little Prince. “You’re talking like a grown-up. You remind me of that businessman on Asteroid 325 — the one who was counting all the stars in the sky so that he could write the number on a piece of paper and lock it away in a drawer. He told me that he cared about ‘matters of consequence.’ But he knew nothing about the things that really matter in life: the beauty of sunsets, the love of a rose.”

“You’re right,” I replied, hanging my head. “But how else can I write this article, if not in the grown-up style I’ve been taught?”

“Tell stories,” the prince responded. “Write poems. Show us the real people in your research. Bring out the colors of those metaphors, their depth, their energy!”

The Little Prince was right. I had been burying all those wonderful metaphors under layers of deadening prose, when what I really needed to do was bring them to life. The published article did, in the end, include a “grown-up” taxonomic analysis of writing-related metaphors — but with a lyrical sensibility and a human heart.

Praise from the Prince

This week, when I opened up my notebook to renew our conversation, the Little Prince asked me where my travels had taken me since our last encounter. Here’s what I told him:

I’ve left behind that self-important little cluster of planets where I lived for so many years (aka The University), along with its inhabitants: the autocratic ruler who does nothing but boss people around; the businessman obsessed with counting things; the sad tippler who drinks to forget how sad his drinking makes him; and the harried lamplighter (aka The Typical Academic Writer) who is kept so busy lighting and extinguishing his streetlamp that he never has time to stop and admire the sunset.

Now I live on a beautiful planet called The WriteSPACE, where I’ve built a colorful home and a flourishing garden. I can’t do anything to stop the king and the businessman (aka University Administration) from bossing people around, counting their publications, and judging them by the numbers of articles they produce rather than by their human worth. But at least I can invite that poor exhausted lamplighter to visit my planet to watch the sunset and find renewed pleasure in academic writing. And I can bring together lamplighters from across the galaxy to form a supportive community of lamplighters who write in the glow of each other’s light.

The Little Prince smiled his radiant smile and gave my dog Freddie a cuddle. I think he’s pretty proud of me.

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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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.

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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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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