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

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

Enjoy!

The Pleasures of Wordcraft

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

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

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

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

The Pleasures of Be-ing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still Life with Alzheimers

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

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2. the stoneflower path

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

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3. at the end of the path

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

The Garden of Metaphor

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

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

1. In the garden of your _______ . . .

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

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

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

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

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

Helen

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

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Last week, I received an email from John in North Carolina with the subject line "Love the tool, hate the metaphor":

• Dear Professor Sword,

  I enjoy reading your work and love using the Writer's Diet tool. However, I did want to share my extreme hesitation to use this with my classes. The idea of lean vs. flabby prose promotes a fat-phobic environment. I try to cultivate a place where writers of all sizes feel comfortable, including mentioning in class that the writer's diet is unnecessarily fattist. Have you ever considered updating the image with something more affirming or neutral?

I replied as I usually do, thanking John for taking the time to write and offering a few comments and suggestions:

1. The phrase "flabby or fit" is meant to refer to muscles, not to body types, and the overall message is a positive, health-focused one: If you want to develop strong muscles, it's best to eat a healthy diet and exercise regularly; likewise, if you want to develop strong sentences, you need build them up with good, nutritious words (not empty calories/clutter) and put them through a vigorous workout.

2. If, despite this explanation, you and your students still disapprove of the Diet and Fitness metaphor, you can use the blue Settings wheel to change the theme: for example, to Clear Skies ("cloudy or clear?"), Solid Ground ("swampy or solid?"), or Clean House ("cluttered or clear"?).  

3. Ideally, the online Writer's Diet test should be used as a supplement to the book, not as a stand-alone tool.  At the very least, I would encourage you and your students to spend some time reading my free online User Guide, which explains the key principles behind the test and offers lots of handy hints for getting the most from the tool.

4. Members of my WriteSPACE virtual writing community get access to a premium version of the Writer's Diet test that produces a customized Action Plan for every sample submitted -- using their preferred theme, of course!  You can try out the Writer's Diet Plus tool by using the discount code WRITERSDIET to get your first month of membership for free.  

But John's question got me thinking. What other metaphors for writing and editing do writers frequently employ, and which of these, like the Writer's Diet, might be open to ontological critique?  

• Cognitive load:  If you attended my WriteSPACE Special Event last week with psycholinguist Steven Pinker, you'll have heard us talk about cognitive load, a phrase used by psychologists to describe the amount of working memory required by the brain to complete a given task. Long, difficult sentences -- those filled with abstract language, disciplinary jargon, parenthetical phrases, subordinate clauses, and the like -- place a heavy cognitive load on our readers, thereby sapping their mental energy and reducing their comprehension. 

• Left-branching vs. right-branching sentences:  In an illuminating blog post titled How to Write a More Compelling Sentence, Inger Mewburn (aka the Thesis Whisperer) explains the difference between what linguists call "right-branching" versus "left-branching" sentences: right-branchers start with a subject-verb-object cluster and then add supplementary information, whereas left-branchers pile on all the extras before we even know what the sentence is about. Steven Pinker offers this example of a left-branching sentence, the subject of which, policymakers, does not appear until more than halfway through: "Because most existing studies have examined only a single stage of the supply chain, for example, productivity at the farm, or efficiency of agricultural markets, in isolation from the rest of the supply chain, policymakers have been unable to assess how problems identified at a single stage of the supply chain compare and interact with problems in the rest of the supply chain."  (Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century). 

• The Lard Factor: In his book Revising Prose, Richard Lanham encourages writers to calculate the Lard Factor of an edited piece of prose by subtracting the number of words in the edited sentence from the number of words in the original, then dividing the difference by the original.  For example, if we were to trim the 63-word behemoth quoted above down to 43 words, the Lard Factor (or percentage of excess words eliminated) would be 32%. 

Viewed through a certain kind of critical lens, all of these metaphors are problematic. Cognitive load suggests that light is good, heavy is bad.  The branching sentences metaphor depicts right as good and left as bad (a sinister sign of an implicit bias against left-handed people?) Lanham's Lard Factor exercise labels lean as good and fatty as bad (another "fattist" metaphor?) 

Yet each of these metaphors also reflects a physical reality.  Heavy loads are harder to lift than light ones; the English-speaking brain favors sentences that read, like words on the page, from left to right; lean meat is healthier to eat than fatty meat (unless you're a vegetarian, in which case you probably find the entire Lard Factor metaphor deeply unappealing).

Metaphors can shape us or empower us, lift us up or let us down.  Arthur Quiller-Couch infamously urged writers to murder your darlings -- that is, to commit infanticide against your most cherished sentences.  But we don't need to succumb to that kind of self-punitive advice; nor should we confuse a healthy diet of well-chosen words with an anxiety-inducing starvation diet.  Editing can be a joyful act, with affirmational metaphors to match.

That woman about to be crushed by weighty words?  Take another look.  Maybe that falling boulder is a beachball filled with air, and she's playing beach volleyball!    

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