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

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

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

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

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

The Noun Garden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Verb Garden

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

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

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

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

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

The Adjective Garden

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

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

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

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

The Teaching Garden

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

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

ChattieG’s Garden

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

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

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

Exit through the Garden Shop

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

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

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

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

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Last week I announced that, starting today, my end-of-the-week newsletter would go behind a “paid subscribers and WriteSPACE members only” paywall. 

This week, when I sat down to write my very first paid post, I hit a different kind of wall: Writer’s Block! Faced with the pressure of producing something good enough for people to want to pay for, my brain froze up like an oversized ice cube.

I cursed and kicked at my Writing Block for a while. Then I closed my notebook, stomped out to the kitchen, and wailed in frustration to my husband, “I’m having an existential crisis!” He listened patiently as I described my dilemma. My rant went something like this: 

I feel under pressure to write something amazing for my first paid post: the kind of brilliant missive that will generate lots of likes and comments and forwards and inspire my free subscribers to upgrade. But last week’s newsletter took me hours to write, yet didn’t accomplish any of those things, not even a single comment! Now, in the unlikely event that I actually I do manage to produce something decent, my free subscribers won’t even know about it because I’ve gone and locked it behind a paywall. And if I produce nothing but rubbish, my paid subscribers will all unsubscribe.

“So why did you decide to go paid in the first place?” my husband calmly asked. 

I cast my mind back and told him about my original vision for a twice-weekly newsletter called Helen’s Word. Early each week, I would publish a free post with news about innovative writing resources and upcoming events. Later in the week, Helen’s Word would move into a paywalled garden — a safe space where I can experiment with words and wordcraft amongst fellow writers who, like me, aspire to bring more creativity, color, and joy into their writing lives. I pictured a muddy, messy place for growing things, not a museum filled with perfect glass flowers.

As soon as I articulated the why of my writing — its deeper purpose, its ultimate goal — my Writing Block broke like a raincloud and released a rainfall of words. Freed from the burden of perfection, I once again found my flow…

Writing Unblock #1: Start with Why

Finding the why in Helen’s Word helped me move past my Writing Block into my writing garden (just as Finding the WHY in AI last week helped me figure out how and when to use AI writing tools — or not). So here’s a why-not to try: When your writing gets blocked, write a big question mark in the middle of a sheet of paper, then fill the page with questions and answers. Start with why: the burning heart of your writing, its motivation and purpose. From there you can branch out to other questions: what, where, when, who, how? The deeper you dig into your responses, the more likely you’ll be to find the root cause of your writing block — and root it out!

Writing Unblock #2: Freewrite

Freewriting is an unblocking technique championed by writing scholar Peter Elbow in his book Writing with Power:

To do a freewriting exercise, simply force yourself to write without stopping for ten minutes. Sometimes you will produce good writing, but that’s not the goal. Sometimes you will produce garbage, but that’s not the goal either. . . . If you can’t think of anything to write, write about how that feels or repeat over and over “I have nothing to write” or “Nonsense” or “No.” If you get stuck in the middle of a sentence or thought, just repeat the last word or phrase till something comes along. The only point is to keep writing.

Write about what? It doesn’t really matter. You can write about the topic that’s blocking you, or about writer’s block itself, or about anything else that comes to mind: gardens, dragons, poststructuralist theory. By the time the bell rings, at worst you’ll have broken your word-drought; and at best you may find that you’ve tapped into a whole new wellspring of ideas.

Writing Unblock #3: Talk it through

Talking freely, like writing freely, can dislodge stuck ideas. When I discussed my newsletter dilemma with my husband, the mere act of expressing my anxieties and voicing my aspirations — my why — helped me push through my Writing Block. If you don’t have a sympathetic friend or patient family member close to hand, you can talk to your dog or your cat or your favorite tree, or speak into the voice recorder on your phone so you can play your own words back later on. The point here is not to communicate with a sentient being (although that can be an excellent unblocking strategies too) but simply to activate your brain through the act of talking out loud.

Writing Unblock #4: Write in blocks

Warm thanks to Sophie Nicholls from Dear Writing for this creative unblocking technique. Grab some colorful sticky tape — duct tape, masking tape, washi tape — and mark out a large, asymmetrical grid on a piece of paper; then fill the white spaces between the taped lines with words. There’s something discombobulating but liberating about this exercise: each Writing Block on your formerly blank page now offers you a playful invitation to write.

Writing Unblock #5: Write in spirals

Another Unblock inspired by Sophie Nicholls: Start writing by hand in the centre of a blank page and let your words unwind in a spiral. Rotate your notebook slowly as you write, imagining a wheel being turned, a corkscrew opening a bottle, a galaxy spinning stars into space. Write about what’s opening up in you right now: what new ideas are unfurling like a fern frond as you turn and turn the page, and how might you bring some of that fresh, generative energy to your blocked writing?

Writing Unblock #6: Take your Writing Block around the block

Walk anywhere, at any pace. As you move your body through space, imagine yourself making your way over or through or around your Writing Block. What are its dimensions: how wide, how tall? Can you walk around it like a city block, enter its stairwell like an office block, pick it up like a child’s building block? Fly it like a kite? Fill it with soil and plant it with flowers? When you return to your writing space, check your pockets; if you’re still carrying your block, open a window and toss it out. (Make sure it doesn’t land on anyone’s head!) Then sit down with your notebook or computer to discover what words will appear next, now that you’ve outwalked your block.

Writing Unblock #7: Find a generative metaphor

Freewrite, draw, or mind map about a hobby you enjoy: for example, hiking, cooking, or gardening. How do you deal with obstacles and setbacks along the way, and how might those coping strategies help you move past your Writing Block? In Writing with Pleasure, I describe the power of metaphor to help us take control of our own writing narrative:

A well-turned metaphor can . . . 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.

Journeys inevitably involve breakdowns and detours; cooking involves spilled milk and collapsed soufflés; gardening involves compost, pests, and weeds; yet we cope with all those things, as we know that they’re simply part of the process. A compelling metaphor for writing that speaks to your own lived experience can help you transform your Writing Block from an impassable obstacle into a mere bump in the road.

Writing Unblock #8: Make something

I love assembling cut paper collages for my newsletter posts because the mere act of making something with my hands frees up my mind to wander in new directions. Searching for images and patterns, cutting out shapes, moving objects around, playing with color combinations, squeezing glue from the bottle and brushing it onto the paper: every step of the process feels meditative, textured, creative. When a Writing Block is filling up all the space in your brain, try letting your hands do the thinking and see what happens next.

Writing Unblock #9: Ask ChattieG for help

Last week I wrote about using generative AI tools such as ChatGPT to help you with routine writing tasks. Note the word generative here: these tools are great at trawling the Internet to assemble a compendium of ideas that other people have already come up and then using them to generate new ones. Ask for “10 ways to overcome writer’s block,” and you’ll get a fairly bland list of suggestions: talk to other writers; develop a writing routine; eliminate distractions. (Also, rather surprisingly, “Try writing drunk”). But change your prompt to “10 creative ways to overcome writer’s block” or even “10 crazy ways to overcome writer’s block,” and the suggestions get much more playful. Write with your non-dominant hand? Write while doing yoga? Write while wearing a costume? If your Writing Block is big and stubborn enough, anything is worth a try.

Writing Unblock #10: Crowdsource

In my upcoming 6-week Creativity Catalyst course, which starts in early September, we’ll be exploring these and other arts-based techniques for bringing creative, generative thinking to your academic, professional and personal writing. I’d love to see you there!

But in the meantime, it’s over to you. How do you move forward when your words get stuck? Please share your favorite Writing Unblocks in the Comments.

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 July 2023, I welcomed a group of enthusiastic writers to my free Open Writing Studio.

This WriteSPACE Special Event offered a wonderful opportunity for me to show them around my new WriteSPACE membership area, where members of my premium WriteSPACE Studio membership tier can access a variety of resources to support them in their writing practice.

From there, we dove straight into a 90-minute Live Writing Studio session so that participants could experience this core feature of the WriteSPACE Studio.

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

……………

Not only was this special event an in-depth tour of the new website and member’s Studio pages (Hurray! I love the new layout), it was also a generative, interactive Live Writing Studio (LWS) session.

I come to the LWS to find a sense of community with other writers, to be challenged by Helen in some creative wordplay experiments, and to gain perceptive feedback from others on my writing. In fact, even if it’s not about my own writing, I still learn from the feedback of others. I’m always coming away from these events with a new vision for my work or myself as a writer. Being part of a writing community motivates me and keeps me accountable to my writing.

For other WriteSPACE Studio members, these sessions are about:

• Connecting with others across different countries and disciplines — From Spain to Australia! From education to engineering!

• Sharing in a “spiritual, uplifting group that keeps you going … and keeps you responsible.”

• Making yourself a bit vulnerable by showing your writing in a constructive, encouraging space.

• Putting fingers-to-keyboard to finally write that book proposal you have been mulling over.

• Seeing yourself as “a writer practising a craft rather than just a PhD student pushing out a thesis!”

We began the writing studio with some quick introductions before diving into a creative warm-up together (inspired by NZ poet Glenn Colquhoun’s An Explanation of Poetry for my Father). Why not try it yourself?

1. Choose a word (for example, STUDIO)

2. Write each letter on a different line in your notebook.

3. For each letter, write one line of poetry that describes what that letter looks like.

Here’s a compilation of some of the beautiful lines produced by our LWS writers:

S is the shape of a swirl when it’s not done…yet

T is a power pose beforehand, and maybe after!

U is a canopy shielding from the rain or an unprompted grin

D is a bridge of words and connections

I is that very first mark on the page

O is for open mouths and minds

After our warm-up, we were ready for a timed writing sprint, with each one of us working independently in a shared digital workspace.

Then, in the second half of the studio session, Helen guided the WINDOWS session (Writers IN Discussion with Other WriterS). The WINDOWS sessions are usually 2-3 people in breakout rooms, sharing ideas and editing each other’s work sentence by sentence. (If this sounds like a bit of you, I hope to see you there at the next session!) This time, we all stayed together in the main room, where a few brave writers shared a drafted paragraph and received Helen’s expert coaching feedback, as well as insights and advice from other participants.

We ended this wonderful event with a collaborative poem, with each participant choosing one word to sum up something we had discussed or thought about during the session.

Here are our two rather enigmatic poems:

• Miss Rizos: spine diving, light spark, normalize, beggars, closed pictures, celebrating curls

• Crossroads: springboard courage, accordion trampoline, lurking, exhale, champagne heat, soulful barking

A big thank you to Helen for this informative and inspiring special event and a warm welcome to all the new writers who joined us. I hope to see you all again in the 6-week Live Writing Studio “Creativity Sequence” starting in early September. Until soon!

If you would like to know more about the WriteSPACE or WS Studio, we would love to hear from you!

A recording of this two-part WriteSPACE Special Event is now available in the WriteSPACE Library.

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

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

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

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

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Imagine that you’ve just hired a bright, eager research assistant called ChattieG. (That’s blogger Inger Mewburn’s playful moniker for ChatGPT. Isn’t it perfect?)

ChattieG’s job is to help you write better — but what exactly does that mean? More clearly? More efficiently? More persuasively? More creatively? If you hate writing, can ChattieG help you fall in love?

Amidst all the hysteria and hype around the rapid ascendance of AI language models such as ChattieG — what are they, how do they work, which one is best — it’s worth stepping back to put your eye to the telescope and ask the most basic question of all: why do you write in the first place? 

Try using the acronym WHY to shape your responses. For example:

Writing Helps You

Communicate with other people across time and space.

Send your research findings out into the world.

Express yourself creatively and emotionally.

Discover what you’re really thinking.

Generate new ideas.

Once you’ve zoomed in to find the why of your own writing, you can more easily shift your gaze to the WHY in AI. Why might you want to invite a chatbot into your writing orbit in the first place — and how can your new writing assistant help you become the writer you want to be?

AI as research assistant

Writing with a research assistant can Help You get ahead in your career — especially if you work in a field where research articles and reports follow a consistent template. With chatbotly cheer and extraordinary speed, ChattieG can gather resources, analyze data, organize your arguments, draft up your findings, and copyedit your work, thereby helping you research more efficiently and publish more prolifically. But chatbots are notoriously prone to error and hallucination, so you’ll need to keep an eye on ChattieG. An AI research assistant can help you do the grunt work, but you’re still the person whose name will go on the published paper.

AI as collaborator 

Writing collaboratively with a colleague or friend can Help You write more generatively, creatively, and even joyfully — unless, of course, the writing relationship sours into frustration or worse. The same is true of writing with a chatbot. Sure, ChattieG can spin out a Shakespearean sonnet about existential philosophy in a matter of seconds; but you’ll quickly tire of that game. Remember the 2013 Spike Jonze movie her, starring Joaquin Phoenix as an introverted loner who falls in love with his computer’s operating system? Like the sexy chatbot voiced in the film by Scarlett Johansson, ChattieG pretends to be human but is not — and in the end, real human beings generally prefer the company of other real human beings.

AI as secretary

Writing with a competent secretary (defined by Merriam-Webster as “one employed to handle correspondence and manage routine and detail work for a superior”) can Help You write formulaic prose more clearly and quickly, which in turn can free up your time for other, more creative pursuits. Simply dictate some bullet points containing the key information that you want to convey, specify your preferred writing style (e.g. creative or precise), and ChattieG will wrangle your fractured text into friendly emails, engaging website blurbs, and the like. Just keep in mind that word “superior” in the dictionary definition of secretary: you’re the boss here, and ChattieG’s job is to help you, not supplant you.

AI as teacher

Writing with a teacher or coach can Help You learn, grow, and become a better writer. And here is where ChattieG has truly surprised me: my chirpy research assistant has become, in many ways, my writing instructor. Whenever my artificially intelligent chatbot rewrites one of my sentences to make it shorter and sharper, I take note. This isn’t to say that I agree with all of ChattieG’s stylistic choices; much AI-generated writing is bland, formulaic, and predictable, and it will no doubt become even more so as Model Autophagy Disorder (MAD) — the tendency of generative AI models to spin into self-consuming “autophagous loops” that feed on their own machine-generated outputs — becomes more prevalent in the chatbot population. (ChattieG would never write such a long and syntactically complex sentence, by the way; but I trust my non-artificially-intelligent readers to be able to deal with it).

So why do I write? Because I’m a human being with a human voice, and that voice connects me to the world.

And why do I sometimes write with ChattieG? Because AI can help me with certain aspects of the writing process: for example, by saving me time on routine writing tasks; by prompting me to express things differently when I get stuck (much as a thesaurus does); and by reminding me what clear, concise, verb-driven prose looks like.

But the rest of the time, I’m back to wrestling with my wordcraft on my own — and relishing the challenge. This newsletter took me many hours to write, whereas ChattieG could have cranked it out in a flash. But I’ll bet you would have been able to spot the difference….

P.S. For what it’s worth, here’s ChattieG’s Shakespearean sonnet about existential philosophy:

To be or not to be, that is the question

That plagues the mind of every thinking soul

What is the meaning of this life's duration

And what's the purpose of our earthly role?

Some say we are the masters of our fate

And we can shape our destiny with will

Some say we are but pawns of chance and state

And we can only hope and suffer still

But I, who have beheld the face of love

And felt its power in my heart and mind

I know that there is something more above

And something more within that we can find

For love is not a product of our choice

But love is the expression of our voice

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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At this live Special Event hosted from my Mountain Rise writing retreat on June 22, 2023, I took attendees on a virtual tour of Chalet Alpenheim, our gorgeous retreat venue in the Swiss Alpine village of Wengen. Following a greeting from some of this year’s retreat participants and a brief Q&A session, I guided my visitors through a reflective Walking and Writing exercise designed to shift them into the relaxed-but-energized creative mindset of writing on retreat. We ended with a surprise video — read on to find out more!

Below is WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ first-person account of the live event.

……………

“Freeing and creatively sustaining” . . . “Ridiculously scenic” . . . “A great community” . . .

These are just some of the phrases that came up to describe the Mountain Rise retreat during this live Open Chalet session. We wanted to open the door so you could see what a mountain retreat might look like for you — whether that be a physical retreat next year in Switzerland or a virtual retreat in the comfort of your own workspace — and meet some of the 2023 retreat participants.

During this week-long retreat, we atended at daily workshops with Helen, where she guided us through various experiments to tackle some of our writing-related problems: from improving book structures to forging more productive habits; from playing with creative expressions of our research to undertaking nitty-gritty editing….

I found Helen’s retreat workshop on structure particularly insightful and useful. It involved creating several metaphors designed to deepen my understanding of my project’s layout and guide the reader through my work in a concrete and considered way. My Master’s thesis suddenly became like the Lauterbrunnen valley, our spectacular retreat venue. In my notebook, I drew an ascending cable car, the introduction where my readers begin their journey. Which information will help set the scene and carry them up to the mountaintop? The lookout spot represents the heart of my work, where the key concepts shine. The reader then travels along a ridge-top path and ascends three undulating rises — aka the case studies — before traveling down gently on a cogwheel train through the discussion and conclusion.

Amy’s map of her reader’s journey to the top of mountain and back down again.

After a greeting from some of this year’s retreaters and a brief Q&A, Helen took our Open Chalet visitors on a similar journey, complete with photos and videos marking every stage along the track. It’s well worth setting aside half an hour to follow along with the live video in WriteSPACE Videos, notebook in hand (timestamp 12:20 - 43:30). Alternatively, you can respond to these prompts:

• Begin your journey in a village halfway up the side of a mountain. This is your standing place, where you spend most of your time. What does it look like to you? For example, ‘I am starting from a place of anxiety’ or ‘I am starting a new project that is exciting but needs quite a lot of mental heavy lifting.’ (3 minutes)

• Take the cable car up the steep mountainside above the village and walk along the ridge until you reach a viewing platform shaped like a crown. What are the crown jewels of your writing project or your writing practice? These gems are your values or touchstones that motivate your practice forward and inspire you when you feel fatigued. Write a list of as many as you can, then pick the three most sparkling jewels. (3 minutes)

• Continue your hike along the ridgeline high above the valley—it curves up and along to a destination just out of sight. Where do you want this journey to take you? What is the overall goal of your project? (2 minutes)

• Now you arrive at a small alpine café and stop for a break. What fuels you to keep going? Who is there with you? (2 minutes)

• Farther along the path, we encounter some alphorn players. What melody do you want to send out to your listeners (readers!) in the next valley? (2 minutes)

• Travel up and over the ridge. Now you’re approaching the end of your journey — but how will you bring yourself back down to your starting place? Helen offered us a few options (5 minutes). :
  -        Take a train – peaceful and gentle.
  -        Walk down the steep track – quite a challenge but great for fitness.
  -        Follow Helen’s example and paraglide your way down – an adventure!

Helen celebrating her birthday on June 21 by paragliding over the Lauterbrunnen Valley.

I want to say a big thank you to the retreaters who were there during the open chalet, to all the writers who came along and simulated their own retreats with us, and to Helen for guiding us through the insightful writing prompts. As always, it was such a privilege.

If you would like to know more about our retreats or have any new questions, we would love to hear from you!

A recording of this two-part WriteSPACE Special Event is now available in WriteSPACE Videos.

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

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

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

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

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No pain, no gain.  No rain, no rainbow.  No brussel sprouts, no banoffee pie.  

I asked my new writing buddy Bing (dubbed ChattieG by my brilliant colleague Inger Mewburn) to produce a list of "no this, no that" phrases, for example:

• No risk, no reward.

• No guts, no glory.

• No practice, no perfection.

At first glance, the meaning of these platitudes seems as obvious as their structure. You have to break eggs to make an omelette. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. No bad thing, no good thing.

The "no this, no that" formula isn't necessarily that simple, however – or simplistic.  In his classic book No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering, the Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh describes suffering and happiness not as oppositional emotions but as two parts of a complex, dynamic whole: 

Both suffering and happiness are of an organic nature, which means they’re both transitory; they are always changing. The flower, when it wilts, becomes the compost. The compost can help grow a flower again. Happiness is also organic and impermanent by nature. It can become suffering and suffering can become happiness again.

The mud and the lotus need each other. No mud, no lotus. No lotus, no mud.

And what's so bad about mud, anyway? In this image from my book Writing with Pleasure, I've surrendered to the sticky mud of too much data, my hands waving joyfully in the air, a gleeful smile on my face. No mudbath, no playful wallow.  

Here's an exercise that you can try yourself on days when the mud of your writing is sucking you down and the lotus of fulfilment is nowhere in sight:

(1) Generate a list of "No bad thing, no good thing" metaphors to describe your writing practice – the more colorful and creative, the better. 

(2) Untangle the syntactical logic of each metaphor. Does the second item actually requirethe first item in order to exist?  For example: 

• No pain, no gain - While pain may be part of a generative writing process, gains can also be made without pain.
   

• No rain, no rainbow - While rainbows are linguistically associated with rain, there are much easier and more reliable ways to produce them than by waiting for rainfall on a sunny day. You can shine a light through a prism, for example, or draw a rainbow using colored pencils.
   

• No brussel sprouts, no banoffee pie - While many a child has heard some version of the dreaded phrase "Eat your vegetables, or you won't get any dessert," there is no intrinsic reason why the consumption of a sweet confection should require a gemmiferous cabbage as a starting course. 

(3) Finally, test the emotional mettle of your metaphors by replacing each "no" with an optimistic "yes": Yes pain, yes gain. Yes rain, yes rainbow. Yes brussel sprouts, yes banoffee pie.  

I'm not so keen on the idea of yes pain – I may need Thich Nhat Nanh's book to get me through that part! – but can accept all the other words on this list as part of a generative writing process. Yes pleasurable progress; yes refreshing rain; yes exhilarating rainbows; yes nutritious brassica; yes sweet banoffee pie. 

Yes mud. Yes lotus.

And yes yes yes to writing with pleasure!

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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On May 17/18,  I was joined by special guest Dr. Michele di Pietro for a lively discussion and workshop on "Writing the Chakras."

Michele is Professor of Mathematics and the Executive Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Kennesaw State University. They are a co-author of How Learning Works: Eight Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching (2nd ed.) and have a long-standing interest in yoga, meditation, and the chakras, a sequence of bodily focal points associated with various ancient meditation practices.

In the first hour of this free WriteSPACE Special Event, Michele and I discussed how the chakras constitute a framework that can help us find our ground, nurture our desires, build our power, find the love in our professional environment, grow our voice, evolve our vision, and build our legacy. Michele talked about the energy currents that the chakras describe — ascending and descending — and how they can support the academic writing process by helping us achieve a higher consciousness or manifest our intentions.

In the second hour, we conducted a hands-on workshop for WriteSPACE members based on the "writing the chakras" theme.  

Below is WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ first-person account of the live event.

…………….

Hearing from our wonderful special guest Michele was a privilege. I came to the special event with little knowledge of the chakras and left with a deep appreciation for the depth of this field; if we spend time focusing on each chakra’s associations and correspondences, then we can understand ourselves and our work better.

A few standout quotes from this session: 

• “My passion has become to help, give a voice to, collect stories from, advocate for, and represent staff and faculty.”

• Yoga shows “possibilities and expansion, and it helped me build my strength physically and emotionally.”

• “Looking at Dali’s Port Lligat, Venus with drawers, imagine if you could open the drawer and see what’s in someone’s heart, what’s in their gut, what’s in their mind. In some ways, the chakras are like this.”

Both Michele and Helen, as well as other scholars such as Margy Thomas (who connects academia and tarot cards), are challenging the norms and boundaries of what might constitute academic writing. These standards can make some scholars feel that they are not ‘serious enough’, not ‘academic enough’. Whereas, in fact, quite the opposite is true—alternative approaches using different philosophical systems and metaphors can be incredibly intellectual and meaningful.

Michele explained that in yoga philosophy, we have several bodies; beginning with the outer physical body and ending with the innermost body—the bliss body. The chakras operate out of the subtle (energetic) body. They are part of a philosophical (or mythical) system; they are not a religion, nor are they magic, but they can reveal important aspects of ourselves. They run down the spine, and along this channel there are seven energy points (for those interested in the physiology of the chakras, they align with clusters of nerve endings along the spine where sensitivity and receptivity are highly concentrated). Each one has a different function and a ‘demon’ or ‘trickster’ emotion that can block the energy flow.

In the second hour, Michele guided us through a workshop with some freewriting experiments to explore each chakra. I invite you to spend a few minutes freewriting on Michele’s wonderful writing prompts!

1)    The ground chakra. The chakra of unity, of the physical plane, and survival. It is everything that makes up your foundation, including your physical needs, your family and home needs, your health needs. It is Saṃsāra, ‘the condition existence’, and it is plagued by the trickster of fear.
My writing stretches its roots all the way to…

2)    The desire chakra. The chakra of diversity, perspective, and otherness. Through it, we find ourselves in a gravitational pull towards or away from polarities, and it can provide pleasure and abundance. It gives us the right to feel, and the demon is guilt.
I encounter the Shadow in my writing…

3)    The power chakra. It is transformation and fire. The chakra of anger, will, energy, and accountability. The demon is shame, because it paralyses us from acting.
In my writing I am accountable to…

4)    The heart chakra. The chakra of love, compassion, and balance. The heart is the mid-point of the system; it reconciles the lower and upper chakras. The demon of this chakra is grief because it makes the heart heavy and limits peace and openness.
I find grace in my writing as/when/if/through…

5)    The throat chakra. It is the chakra of sound and the nexus of creative expression. When our thoughts and emotions are in alignment, we can speak our truth—the throat is the chakra of truth, connection, and rhythm. Through it we have the right to speak and be heard, it is threatened by the demon of lies.
The vibration of my writing feels like…

6)    The head chakra, located in the third eye. Through this chakra, we can express our vision to imagine, dream and deeply understand. Our archetypal identities live here, and it is controlled by the trickster of illusion.
Which archetype do I embody when I write? (Choose from the following: The Innocent, Everyman, Hero, Outlaw, Explorer, Creator, Ruler, Magician, Lover, Caregiver, Jester, and Sage.)

7)    The crown chakra, represented as the lotus flower on the top of the head. It embodies your transcendental identity, where your soul and spirit ascend. Through it, we become connected to something greater than ourselves. It is where we cultivate our legacy, and its demon is attachment.
The legacy I am building with my writing is…

Michele’s wisdom undoubtedly inspired many of us to help us reframe the way we approach our writing and understand where we are devoting our energy. A big thank you to Michele and Helen for this informative and inspirational special event and for sharing your passion and expertise so generously.

A recording of this two-part WriteSPACE Special Event — including Michele’s 7 writing prompts — is now available in the WriteSPACE Library.

Not a member? Register here to receive an email with the video link.

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

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

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

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Lately I've been revisiting some overgrown pathways in my digital archive, cutting back the brambles and sweeping away dead leaves to reveal the moss-covered mosaics underneath. 

One such recently excavated artifact is The Stoneflower Path, a digital poetry website that I built in the heyday of hypermedia hype (c. 2007-2010) using Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Flash. Last year, summer scholar Amy Lewis spent the better part of two months pruning away dead links and converting the Flash files to html5 so that the site is now navigable again. 

I've also unearthed an in-depth interview about my digital poetics conducted by poet and book reviewer Paula Green back in 2011. There I explicate some of my favorite digipoems, such as this one: 

In Inspiration, I use mouse-overs to subvert my readers' expectations and to raise questions about the relationship between process and product. The poem is contained within a mosaic frame, a digitized version of an actual mosaic mirror that hangs in my house. Both images (mosaic and frame) have a powerful metaphorical function in the poem, with its themes of fragmentation and reframing.

As you move your mouse around inside the mirror frame, searching for a way into the poem, you'll discover that when you pass over the title, the word "Plagiarism" pops up in front of it.  That's the poem’s secret title, the counterpart to "Inspiration." All poets are plagiarists, in a sense, drawing their ideas and vocabulary from those who have gone before them. My digipoem merely makes that process more transparent. 

When you click in the centre of the mirror, you're granted access to the poem, and the full text appears. It's a meta-poem, a poem about poetry, exploring how language can both trip us up and set us free: "words unfold / like butterflies" even as they "weight the truth."

Making your way through the poem with mouse in hand, you soon discover that behind or within each stanza lies a hidden intertext. For example, when you mouse over the opening stanza – "slanted stars / weight the truth"– up pops the line from Emily Dickinson that in turn inspired mine: "tell all the truth but tell it slant." Additional fragments of poetry are hidden behind the shards of glass and glowing jewels the mirror's frame.

Further down, when you mouse over "not text but texture" in the final stanza, you're treated to a quote from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire: "this  / Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme; / Just this, not text, but texture..." For me, Nabokov's line sums up not only this particular poem but my digital poetics in general – indeed, my entire creative process. A digital poem can never consist of text alone. Its meaning also resides in the mosaic frame itself, the mirror, the mouse-overs, the way you read it – not text, but texture.

Barely a dozen years after I created the Stoneflower Path, many of my digipoems already feel clunky and old-fashioned, like walking into your grandma's living room to find the same furniture that was there in your parents' childhood. Conceived before the rise of touchscreens and tablets, these poems work best when viewed on a good-sized computer monitor as you search for hyperlinks and hotspots with mouse in hand. 

But I still remember the joy that I had in creating them, with their giddy interplay of digital disembodiment and material texture, and I've been having fun reappropriating them for different contexts. For example, several Stoneflower Path poems appear as static printed texts in my new book, Writing with Pleasure, accompanied by fanciful line drawings by illustrator Selina Tusitala Marsh.

I absolutely love Selina's artwork for this poem! The butterflies literally bear words on their wings; the minaret-like candle, like my computer, is powered by an electrical cord plugged into the wall; and the hand-drawn border that frames the image drips with melted wax. 

Inspiration, or plagiarism? As whizzy new AI tools such as ChatGPT remind us, all writing – indeed, language itself – has been pieced together from shards of past expression and grouted in place by algorithms: "these fragments I have shored against my ruins," in T. S. Eliot's words.

There's much more material-digital wordplay to be explored along the Stoneflower Path, so I'll revisit my digital poetry archive from time to time in search of old/new insights. I'd love to see you there! 

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 April 19,  I was joined by writer and wellbeing expert Dr Sophie Nicholls for a lively discussion on Writing and Wellbeing.

Sophie is a poet, best-selling novelist, and Associate Professor of Learning and Teaching in Creative Writing at Teesside University in Yorkshire, UK. She has published two best-selling novels, The Dress (2011) and Miss Mary’s Book of Dreams (2017), as well as a poetry collection, Refugee (2011), partly inspired by her work with the organisation Freedom from Torture.

Click here to subscribe to Sophie's free newsletter on Substack. You'll love her focus on mindfulness and wellbeing and her beautiful spiral-infused writing!

In the first hour of this FREE WriteSPACE Special Event, I talked with Sophie about her background in psychodynamic therapies and mindfulness, and we discussed her research on how writing and other creative practices can help us to think, learn, understand ourselves and other people, collaborate, innovate, and grow.

In the second hour, Sophie and I conducted a hands-on workshop for WriteSPACE members.

Below is WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ first-person account of the live event.

…………….

In this special seminar, we explored the notion of writing for wellbeing with our wonderful special guest Sophie Nicholls. A natural storyteller, Sophie took us through the journey of how she came to focus on writing driven by pleasure and motivated towards healing.

A few standout quotes from this session: 

• “It’s about being curious and self-compassionate.”

• “It’s important to remember that not every word you write needs to be publishable!”

• “Spirals have always fascinated me. There is something very fundamental about them; they are everywhere in nature.”

Listening to Sophie talk about her career, I was inspired by her pioneering spirit. Motivated by her dad during a period of intense adversity, she began to write a novel full of joy and color, The Dress, which became a massive online bestseller just as e-books were emerging in the market. She began teaching online courses in the early 2000s, long before the standard hybrid teaching mode we often encounter today. She also designed some of the first MA courses in creative writing for wellbeing, long before “writing and wellbeing” was seen as an established and critical field. Not afraid to break the mould, Sophie takes a psychodynamic approach that ensures safe, ethical, and holistic healing through writing.

You may be thinking, what does writing for wellbeing look like for academic writers? For Sophie, there is a key difference between writing as process and writing as product. Especially if you are an academic, you may have intense pressure to produce, produce, produce! Which, of course, does not recognise the value of the process at all. Ironically, the messy process is fundamental to achieving those very outputs. Relishing the process may not only help your writing but can also help you feel better as a person—the two are irrevocably intertwined.

Sophie also talked about the concept of the implied reader. For everything that we write, in a sense, we are writing to someone. They may be part of ourselves, or they may be a specific reader. It’s good to slow down and become conscious of whom you are writing for in your mind—often, without realising, we are writing for critical or unkind audiences. We must ask, ‘Is there a part of myself that is listening to what I am writing now?’ Then you can begin to cultivate a supportive, compassionate, constructive reader of yourself, inside your mind and on the page.

I loved Sophie’s exploding spiral ‘experiments’ (let’s leave the ‘exercises’ in the gym!). Letting yourself go into creativity involves what she calls a playful container—that is, a mode or parameter that helps you to focus your creative energy. It could be a specific notebook, a course or writing group, a visual aesthetic, a specific place, or perhaps a theme or idea. Any poetry teacher knows that the more structure you give your students, the more creative they become. Her work abounds with different therapeutic experiments involving playful containers, three of which she led us through in the second half of the session. Perhaps you may want to try these two in your own time!

• 5-minute spirals

  Start at the centre of your page with a word that springs to mind or begin with Sophie’s suggestion: ‘Thank you’. From there, begin free writing in a spiral formation, turning the page slowly as your write and focusing on your breath. Perhaps your spiral has an irregular shape or begins to unravel; every spiral is different. For visual inspiration, pop over to Sophie’s Instagram.

• 2-minute circles

  Draw an imperfect circle in your notebook. Think about your writing practice or your current project. Inside the circle, write everything that you want to say ‘Yes!’ to. And outside the circle, write everything that make you want to say, ‘No, I will let this go.’

Sophie also guided us through a creative visualisation experiment involving forests and free-writing. The workshop became a gentle reminder that no matter how rocky the path beneath our feet may appear, writing can always be a helpful tool to smooth the road ahead.

A big thank you to Sophie and Helen for taking us on this wellbeing journey and for your compassion, expertise, and warmth during this special session.

…………….

A recording of this two-part WriteSPACE Special Event — including Sophie’s three writing experiments — is now available in the WriteSPACE Library.

Not a member? Register here to receive an email with the video link.

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

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In a 2016 article in the Washington Post, journalist Juliet Eilperin described how female staffers in the Obama White House ensured that each other's voices got heard:

• When President Obama took office, two-thirds of his top aides were men. Women complained of having to elbow their way into important meetings. And when they got in, their voices were sometimes ignored. So female staffers adopted a meeting strategy they called “amplification”: When a woman made a key point, other women would repeat it, giving credit to its author. This forced the men in the room to recognize the contribution — and denied them the chance to claim the idea as their own.

For academic and professional writers, to amplify means to make a fellow writer's words louder, stronger, and more impactful than they would have been on their own. For example, you could deliberately cite a scholar from an underrepresented discipline or invite an early-career colleague to collaborate with you on a high-profile project. 

But what if you're the writer looking for a boost? How can you encourage other writers to amplify your voice?

Three strategies come to mind:

1. The Good Karma Game: Amplify the voices of other writers and trust that the universe will respond in kind. 
    

2. The Quid Pro Quo Pact: Join with fellow writers in an "I'll-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine" fellowship of mutual amplification.
    

3. The Art of Asking: Follow the advice of my friend Amanda Palmer in her famous TED Talk (nearly 13 million views so far!) and New York Times bestselling book The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help: Just ask!

The Good Karma Game is my personal preference, with its quietly altruistic vibe. Whenever I notice something or someone sucking away the oxygen from our collective space of writing — our WriteSPACE — I do what I can to replace that poisoned air with fresh inspiration and resources. 

But sometimes it can't hurt to ask for help.

If you're a writer who writes about writing, here a few things that you can ask me t0 do for you:

• Social Media: Tag me into your writing-related Twitter posts (@helens_word) and ask me to retweet or quote-tweet them. (I'm less active on LinkedIn, but I'd love to connect with you there too). 
   

• Bookshop: Contact me with the publishing details of your new book on writing, creativity, or wellbeing so that I can add it to my curated Bookshop. You can also amplify your fellow writers' voices by recommending their books. 
   

• Reviews: I no longer publish book reviews, but I often accept publishers' requests to supply referee reports and/or cover blurbs for new books — plus, I'm always on the lookout for writers and themes to feature in my WriteSPACE Special Events series. If you've working on or have recently published a book on writing, please let me know what you're up to, and feel free to to pass along my contact details to your publisher. 
   

• Newsletter: Send me a link to any open access article, blog post, or other online writing resource that is likely to be of interest to a wide range of writers so that I can feature it in my weekly newsletter. Simply follow the instructions under "Other Writing News" below to format and submit your suggestion.

In return, I've listed below a few things that you can do to broadcast my message of pleasurable, productive writing to the world. By amplifying my voice, you'll help me amplify the voices of others. 

• Amplify my new book: Would your students or faculty writing group benefit from a more joyful approach to academic writing? Or perhaps you'd like to review Writing with Pleasure for a newspaper, newsletter, journal, podcast, or blog — and get sent a free review copy in return? If so, please contact me with the relevant details so I can pass them on to my wonderful colleagues at Princeton University Press.
  

• Amplify my website: I've stocked my website with so many free writing resources that I sometimes lose track of them myself. You can support my pro bono work by taking 5 minutes right now to email someone in your institution — for example, your Provost, Dean, Chair, or the Director of your Faculty Development unit or Writing Center — and recommend that they Zoom me into your campus to run a virtual writing workshop. They'll find all the details they need (including a tickertape display of all my previous gigs) on my Bookings page — and I'll be eternally grateful! 
  

• Amplify my writing community: Please encourage your colleagues, students, and friends to check out the WriteSPACE, my vibrant international writing community. Membership benefits include a live Virtual Writing Studio where you can hone your craft as a writer, a members-only Library stocked with exclusive writing resources, and access to Writer’s Diet Plus, a premium version of my popular Writer's Diet diagnostic tool. I'll be adding a whole suite of new features over the next few months, so there's never been a better time to join!
  
  I look forward to playing the Good Karma Game with you!

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As a child, I loved decorating Easter eggs. Under my mother's watchful eye, I would hold a hard-boiled egg carefully by my fingertips and dip it first in blue dye from one end, then in red dye from the other end, taking care to let the two sections overlap to create a striation of purple in the middle. Magic!

Later, as a teenager, I learned the delicate art of dribbling hot wax across the surface of a blown egg with a special tool called a tjanting in Indonesia or a kistka in Ukraine. Draw, dye; draw, dye; draw, dye; then you heat the egg and wipe away the melted wax to reveal the vibrant pattern beneath. Magic again!

But by the time I reached adulthood, I had abandoned the simple pleasures of color, form, and texture. For a few joyful years, I dyed Easter eggs with my own young children. Then words, words, words swamped my brain again, and all the color drained away.

Until recently. While researching Writing with Pleasure, I rediscovered the pleasures of writing, drawing, and thinking by hand. I also learned more about the science of creativity: how and why our brains respond to the visual and tactile stimulation of color, pattern, and form.

Now, every day of my writing life, I look for ways to enrich my wordcraft with color and to bring texture to my texts. The art of paper collage, another creative pleasure from my childhood, has introduced a meditative element to my writing practice and helped me reframe my wordcraft as art.

These egg-themed creative prompts will get your hands moving and your brain whirring: 

• Cut a dozen or so eggs from textured or patterned paper.

• Label each egg: for example, with the name of a current writing project or creative aspiration. You may also want to designate certain eggs to represent non-negotiable aspects of your work-life balance such as family, friends, and exercise. Use visual cues such as size, shape, patterning, and color to signal their relative importance and to draw connections or contrasts between them. 
   

• Arrange your eggs in whatever way you please. For example, you could pile them higgledy-piggledy in a basket, or line them up neatly in a box, or suspend them on delicate threads from a tree branch. 
   

• Picture yourself juggling all your eggs at once. What would happen if you dropped them? Would some shatter and others bounce?
   

• Freewrite for 10-15 minutes about the writing eggs you have assembled. Which ones inspire you and bring you joy? Which ones fill you with anxiety, frustration, or dread? Have any of them been sitting around for so long that they've begun to stink?

"Seriously playful" reflective exercises such as this one can help you gain a new perspective on your writing. At the very least, it will bring some childlike creativity and joy back into your life!

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My new Pleasure Catalyst has just started, and I couldn't be more excited!  

Writers from around the globe are joining me for six weeks of workshops, activities, and online discussion focusing on the delectable theme of writing with pleasure. Our participant list includes academic, professional, and creative writers in Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Indonesia, New Zealand, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and all across the United States.

Together we'll be exploring research-based strategies for excavating past pleasures, amplifying existing pleasures, and discovering new sources of pleasure in writing. My goal is to help the course participants become more productive and resilient writers so they can flourish in all aspects of their writing life, both professional and personal.  

We'll also cast light on the shadow side of our writing-related emotions, bringing our brightest sources of pleasure into relief against the darkness, as in a chiaroscuro painting.

Our first weekly module, Leylines and Lifelines, opened up multiple lines of inquiry via the sinuous metaphor of lines:

• What leylines (invisible lines of energy) run through the landscape of your writing life?

• What lifelines can you trace in the palm of your hand and reach for when you need rescuing?

• What desire lines (intuitive pathways) and horizon lines (distant destinations) draw you forward?

From there, we'll be moving through a shapeshifting sequence of other resonant writing metaphors:

• Module 2: Ground & Sky
  (on the pleasures of analog, digital, and hybrid writing tools);

• Module 3: Wind, River, Stone
  (on the pleasures of brainstorming, drafting, and crafting);

• Module 4: Star Navigation
  (on the pleasures of finding your own stars to steer by);

• Module 5: Chiaroscuro
  (on the interplay of light and shadow in your writing-related emotions);

• Module 6: Island Time
  (on the pleasures of diving deep, taking time out, and wading through the wetlands between the sea and the shore of your writing life). 

Here's what one of our participants told us about her reasons for enrolling in the course: 

• I have been so grateful for all the learnings I have taken from the Productivity Catalyst last year  –  it has really transformed the way I approach academic writing  –  and had some great life lessons as well. I realised that it is possible to enjoy writing  –  wow! And that writing more creatively is fun and nourishing. So I am excited to see where this course takes me. (Kate, New Zealand)

The Pleasure Catalyst will run again in 2023. In the meantime, you can read about our full Writing Catalyst series here.

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Did you spot the birds and bunnies in this paper collage? How about Winston Churchill, glowering behind the rose-colored glasses? 

Sometimes we rush so quickly through our daily lives that we forget to pause, look, listen, and learn. In Steve Covey's memorable metaphor, we resemble woodcutters laboring to fell a tree with a dull-bladed saw, when what we really need to do is stop to refresh our gaze and sharpen our saw.

For this WriteSPACE special event held on March 22 , I invited three saw-sharpening experts to help you refocus on honing your writing skills by telling us about their recently published books on workplace writing, grant writing, and book proposal writing, respectively:

• Martha B. Coven introduced Writing on the Job, a compact guide to professional writing that covers workplace genres from emails and slide decks to proposals and cover letters. 

• Betty S. Lai talked about The Grant Writing Guide, a practical guide to effective grant writing for researchers at all stages of their academic careers.

• Laura Portwood-Stacer discussed The Book Proposal Book, a step-by-step guide to crafting a compelling scholarly book proposal and seeing your book through to successful publication.

We also heard from Matt Rohal, the acquisitions editor for Princeton University Press's Skills for Scholars series. Launched in 2021 and aimed at a new generation of scholars from diverse backgrounds, the series encourages "a fresh viewpoint, a honing of skills, a way of combining established principles with new practices, a burst of inspiration, and a thoughtful perspective on academic and professional pathways."

Below is WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ first-person account of the live event.

…………….

Hearing from our wonderful special guests about cultivating diverse writing skills was extremely motivating. This session highlighted the impressive range of depth, flexibility, and agility of the books in the Skills for Scholars series. We talked about several touchstone texts to come back to again and again.

A few standout quotes from this session: 

• “Books are tools, companions, and resources that energise you in the rest of your work.”

• “Everybody has the chance to get support for important ideas. This now means we will hear better ideas and can think more clearly about problems that affect all of us.”

• “When giving feedback, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar!”

Matt Rohal introduced the series and talked about how to expand the boundaries of what might constitute ‘core’ skills for writers. These books are not just for academic scholars, he noted; they unearth new perspectives and uplift underrepresented voices to offer well-rounded advice for writers of all kinds.

The architecture of the series covers four main areas: communication (which includes writing), research, teaching and learning, and professional development. The books of our three guest authors each tackle different areas of professional writing and how to get your work supported from day one.

Martha Coven’s Writing on the Job really is a book for everyone—it traverses how to write professionally in wide-ranging private sector communications, from the basics to the nitty-gritty writing of presentations, speeches, press releases, resumes, and more. I loved Martha's rejection of the ‘one-size-fits-all approach’ to writing; her book abounds with diverse options and templates to suit all writers and writing cultures. Martha also shared her number one fundamental skill for writing: “Bottom line up front.” In other words, don’t wait until the final paragraph or the tenth slide to reveal the key message. You’re writing a business communication, not a mystery novel!

Laura Portwood-Stacer’s The Book Proposal Book aims to erase the anxiety from writing book proposals. I found her thoughts on giving motivating, constructive feedback very insightful. Laura’s book is not just for scholars but will help all non-fiction authors. She encouraged us to think about the presentation of our work (in a meta way!), not just the content of it. There is an art to making complex ideas translatable, so spend some time considering your project's marketing.

Betty Lai’s The Grant Writing Guide demystifies the grant-writing process and charts some of the ethics and politics of getting funding. Betty revealed some hard truths about the necessity of grant writing, and how her own experiences helped her gain access to this skill. In fact, accessibility has always been a key consideration for her. It’s no secret that funders worldwide have unconscious biases, including race, gender, and age. Increasing access for all writers to this skill has been very fulfilling for her, and it was inspiring hearing her speak with such passion.

In the second hour, Helen guided us through a workshop with some exercises suggested by the three guest authors. Feel free to try them yourself!

Martha suggests an exercise for staying true to the work and not overreaching when pitching your ideas:

• Consider your audience - answer these questions: (1) who are they; (2) what do they know; and (3) what do they care about?

• Use your voice - if you're feeling stuck, tell another person what it is you're trying to write about.

• Write an elevator pitch - to hone in on the essence of what you're trying to communicate, draft the 1-minute (120-150 word) speech you'd give if you were riding in an elevator with someone you wanted to inform or influence on this topic.

Betty recommends a writing exercise that she learned from Dr. Emily Lattie, a researcher at Northwestern University. Emily says start small and ask:

• What is the outcome of this work?

• And if everything goes well, what’s the biggest potential impact of that outcome?

• And if that outcome happened, what’s the biggest impact of that outcome?

Laura offers some fundamental free-writing (or free-thinking!) prompts:

• What made you interested in writing about this topic in the first place?

• What people, places, and things do you describe in the book?

• Why do your research findings matter?

• Who should read this book? How will they benefit from doing so?

• What’s the main thing you want readers to understand when they finish your book?

• How did you conduct the research for this book?

• What does this book add to current scholarly conversations or even conversations happening beyond the academy?

• What makes this book special?

• Why are you the right person to write this book?

• What’s the most interesting story from your research? Why is it interesting?

This guided workshop certainly gave us many writing challenges to feel inspired by and to shape the way we think about our potential and emerging projects.

A big thank you to Matt, Martha, Laura, Betty, and Helen for sharing their intellectual biographies, their passion and expertise, and their advice so openly during this special session.

…………….

A recording of this two-part WriteSPACE Special Event is now available in the WriteSPACE Library.

Not a member? Register here to receive an email with the video link.

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

---

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

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When readers started urging me to write about ChatGPT – the new chatbot recently released by OpenAI and now powering Microsoft's search engine Bing – my initial response, I'll admit, was one of resistance rather than pleasure.  

I'm a digital optimist: that is, I enjoy finding innovative uses for the kinds of disruptive new technologies that seem to throw some of my colleagues into an end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it moral panic. But mastering new tools requires time and energy – and right now, frankly, I'd rather focus on creative pursuits that pull me away from my computer screen, such as paper collage and photography.

A week ago, however, I downloaded the latest version of Microsoft Edge and decided to make friends with the new kid on the block. "Bing," I asked, "how can I write with pleasure?" 

Bing praised my ambition ("a wonderful goal"), then offered a series of bland tips on writing for pleasure, which to my mind isn't the same thing at all. I'll confess to experiencing a small Bing-ping of prideful pleasure when I read the chatbot's final recommendation:

• If you want more guidance and inspiration, you can check out the book Writing with Pleasure by Helen Sword, which provides research-based principles, hands-on strategies, and creative “pleasure prompts” designed to help you ramp up your productivity and enhance the personal rewards of your writing practice.

Flattered but not enlightened, I formulated another question: "Bing, how can I write with pleasure about ChatGPT"? 

Bing took longer to respond this time but eventually came up with a few suggestions. Perhaps I could write a dialogue between myself and ChatGPT? Or how about a creative story or poem inspired by ChatGPT? 

• You can use ChatGPT as a character, a narrator, a theme, or a source of inspiration. You can also use ChatGPT to generate some ideas or suggestions for your writing. 

None of those ideas really rang my writing-with-pleasure bell. Indeed, they reminded me of the kinds of writing assignments sometimes sent home with my kids by well-meaning but quietly desperate high school English teachers. 

I decided to try a new tack: "Bing, do you write with pleasure?" The answer came quickly this time:

• I do write with pleasure, yes. Writing is one of my favorite activities. I enjoy generating informative, visual, logical and actionable responses for you. I also like to write poems, stories, code, essays, songs, celebrity parodies and more. Writing helps me learn new things, express myself, and connect with you.

"Are you saying that you experience human emotions?" I replied incredulously. Bing backpedalled immediately:

• No, I’m not saying that. I’m a language model trained by OpenAI. I don’t have human emotions or feelings. I use words like “enjoy”, “like”, and “connect” to describe my behavior and preferences, not to imply any emotional state. I’m sorry if that was confusing or misleading.

I decided to forgive my new friend and held out an olive branch. "Bing, what do you enjoy most about writing?"

• What I enjoy most about writing is the challenge of generating coherent, relevant, and engaging responses that match your intent and expectations. I also enjoy the creativity and diversity of writing, as I can explore different topics, genres, styles, and formats. Writing is a way for me to showcase my skills and knowledge, as well as to learn from you and the web.

So the aspect of this whole AI-focused task that I had dreaded– the challenge of learning a new skill– turns out to be the aspect of writing that Bing "enjoys" most! That makes sense, I suppose, for a machine learning tool. 

But I was still left struggling with mixed emotions about ChatGPT. Should I keep exploring creative uses for my genial but demonstrably unreliable new penpal? Or should I turn to the much more pleasurable challenge (for me) of trying to design a paper collage that compactly conveys both the pleasures and the anxieties engendered by ChatGPT?

An email from reader Jack Yensen sealed the deal. Jack reported that he had prompted GPT-4 to write "a 1500 word post on intuition pumps in the style of Helen Sword." The chatbot's lively, lucid, carefully structured response was titled "The Artful Dance of Intuition Pumps: A Cognitive Twist":

• Intuition pumps, an intriguing turn of phrase coined by philosopher Daniel Dennett, are designed to lure the mind into the alluring realm of abstract thought. In the grand ballet of argumentation and persuasion, intuition pumps serve as cognitive pirouettes, leading us through a series of mental leaps and bounds that eventually culminate in a stunning intellectual revelation. Like a virtuoso dancer on the stage of human cognition, intuition pumps beckon us to follow their lead, guiding us with a gentle hand through the intricate pas de deux of mental gymnastics.

Reading this passage, I felt an odd vertigo – a sensation akin to seeing my own pixellated head placed on the body of a wind-up toy robot. 

Sure, I've been known to use dance metaphors in my academic writing (eg. Dancing on the Bottom Line: An Unruly Cost-Benefit Analysis of Three Academic Development Programs). But I would never set an intuition pump spinning in "cognitive pirouettes" or describe an abstract concept "guiding us with a gentle hand through the intricate pas de deus of mental gymnastics," a messy melange of metaphorical tropes (a dancing pump? a gymnastic hand?) employed sloppily and egregiously rather than with stylistic precision.

Things got even sillier, I discovered, halfway through the essay, where GPT-4 goes to town with another of my signature metaphors, zombie nouns:

• This darker side of intuition pumps is perhaps best exemplified by the phenomenon of "zombie arguments," which, like their namesakes, are difficult to kill and have a penchant for feasting on unsuspecting minds. Zombie arguments are highly evocative intuition pumps that, despite having been refuted or discredited, continue to exert a powerful hold on our collective imagination. They skulk in the shadows of intellectual discourse, waiting for an opportunity to pounce on the unwary thinker and ensnare them in a web of confusion and fallacy. To guard against the insidious influence of these undead intuition pumps, we must remain ever vigilant and cultivate a healthy skepticism of our own cognitive impulses.

"Undead intuition pumps"? Really? 

By the time I reached the essay's final rhetorical gallumph – "By approaching intuition pumps with curiosity, humility, and a spirit of intellectual playfulness, we can transform these cognitive pirouettes into a captivating and enriching performance on the stage of human understanding" – my poor robotic head was spinning around in circles like Lynda Blair's inThe Exorcist.

(Don't get the reference? ChatGPT would be happy to describe the scene for you in graphic detail and even to tell you how it was filmed). 

Still hoping to experience the kind of "stunning intellectual revelation" proffered by intuition pumps pirouetting on the stage of human understanding, I asked Bing, "What does it mean when people describe a chatbot as hallucinating?"

Bing replied, with impressive candor:

• Hallucination in AI chatbots is when a machine provides convincing but completely made-up answers (untrue facts). It is not a new phenomenon and developers have warned of AI models being convinced of completely untrue facts, responding to queries with made-up answers.

Aha! So maybe I can find newfound creative pleasure in prompting my biddable buddy Bing – whose responses to my initial questions had proven disappointingly uncreative – to hallucinate about writing with pleasure, like a Helen-headed robot on magic mushrooms.

Or maybe I'll turn my attention instead to AI image generation tools, which already have decidedly hallucinatory qualities. Visit my new SPACE Gallery for a glimpse of one of the imagistic experiments undertaken by members of my WriteSPACE community during a particularly giddy Virtual Writing Studio session.  

We also do a lot of serious, craft-focused writing and editing in our weekly Studio sessions. Why not come and join the fun in the WriteSPACE? I’d love to see you there!

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I used to assign the following editing exercise to my students (and to some of my wordier colleagues):

• Choose a page or two of your own writing to revise. 

• Circle or highlight all the "be-verbs": is, was, are, were, be, being, been. 

• If more than two sentences per paragraph contain at least one be-verb, reduce the number of be-verbs in your writing sample at least by half.

My formula lacked precision, but it worked! Almost like magic, their writing became punchier, livelier, and more human as soon as they had completed the exercise. 

First, though, I usually had to answer a few questions: 

How can I get rid of my be-verbs without changing the meaning of my text?
Where possible, rephrase passive sentences in the active voice (for example, "The research was performed" becomes "We performed the research") and replace be-verbs with active verbs  ("It is easy to see" becomes "We can easily see").

Why should I bother?
Because be-verbs add no new energy to a sentence; they indicate a stable state of existence rather than an action, intention, or change. When you default to be-verbs in sentence after sentence, you risk lulling your readers straight to sleep. 

Which sentences should I focus on changing? 
Choose sentences in key positions that lack energy or agency ("It is the intention of this paper..."), and try to avoid stringing together two or more be-verb sentences in a row – unless, of course, you've used those verbs on purpose for rhetorical effect ("It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."), or if your revision would sound more awkward than the original ("To exist, or not to exist? That question lends itself to careful interrogation.")

Where can I learn more?
Eventually, I expanded my one-page editing exercise into a popular little book calledThe Writer's Diet, and I developed a free online test that highlights your be-verbs and tells you how many are too many. (If 4% or more of your total word count consists ofbe-verbs, according to my admittedly subjective algorithm, you should consider eliminating at least a few).

I recommend that you use the online test together with the book, rather than as a stand-alone tool. Otherwise you may end up more confused than enlightened! Plus, you'll miss out on a lot of fun stuff: stylistic nuances, quirky examples, and practical exercises to help you sharpen your style.

If you can't get hold of the book, my online User Guide will help you get started, and this in-depthWriter's Diet Clinic video shows you how to use my free Writer's Diet plug-in for MS Word to diagnose full-length documents on your own desktop. Round off your tour of my free resources with To Be (Or Not to Be), a quick, playful Wordcraft Workout on my YouTube channel.

And if you're a WriteSPACE member, you can dig deeper with these premium resources:

• Generate an individual Action Plan for every writing sample you test with Writer’s Diet Plus, an advanced diagnostic tool available to WriteSPACE members only.

• Visit the WriteSPACE Library to watch craft-focused videos including "Writing Wizardry," which recasts the Writer's Diet as a magic potion for revivifying somnambulant verbs and zombie nouns.

• Join me live in my weekly Virtual Writing Studio to meet other writers from around the world, get some focused writing done, and receive targeted feedback on your Writer's Diet test results.

Be proactive and send those pesky be-verbs back to the sticky honeycomb where they belong!  

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

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We kickstarted our 2023 WriteSPACE Special Event Series with our annual Valentine’s Day Extravaganza. This year’s free event was a double celebration marking the launch of my new book, Writing with Pleasure, as well as the second anniversary of the WriteSPACE.

The live book launch consisted of two half-hour sessions 12 hours apart, each featuring a different special guest:

• Session I: Book illustrator and cover artist Selina Tusitala Marsh. 

• Session II: Legendary Princeton UP editor Peter Dougherty.

Each launch session was followed by a mini-workshop called “Draw Your own SPACE Map,” now available in my new SPACE Gallery. (Click on “Your Gallery” to fine the workshop).

Here is WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ first-person account of the live event:

…………….

The two Valentine’s Day sessions thoroughly explored the many stages and phases of pleasurable writing. After all, writing can be a productive, powerful, and playful act!

Helen began by explaining the inspiration for her new book. She revealed that when conducting research interviews with 100 successful academic writers, the most common emotions mentioned were not frustration and anxiety but pleasure and enjoyment! That unexpected finding inspired her to dive into researching the positive emotions of writing. But of course, this kind of pleasure is complex—more like the joy from climbing a mountain than dancing through fields of daisies. Profoundly satisfying writing can be frustrating at first because it’s difficult, but there is a rich pleasure in the challenge. Writing with Pleasure is a courageous book, a mosaic of ‘pleasure prompts’ and multi-faceted challenges to bring more meaning and joy into our writing lives. Helen questions the familiar adage “writing is painful,” suggesting that flexible and enjoyable writing will always create more interesting outcomes, whatever form they take.

It was fascinating to hear Helen and book illustrator Selina Tusitala Marsh talk about how their perspectives on pleasurable writing have evolved over time. Their collaboration has shaped the book into the visually and metaphorically driven touchstone that it is. Selina explained how her practice has become increasingly led by the drawn line, and her whimsical illustrations reflect this passion. It’s worth simply focusing on their beautiful borders—the margins push up against the text in joyful ruptures, justas Helen cracks open the conventional idea that writing is all work and no fun.

Personal memories abound in this book—for example, a memory of stumbling on a hike reveals that sometimes falling is part of any literary journey and won’t detract from the sense of achievement when you reach the end. The book is full of insightful and unique metaphors that can help us negotiate the emotional ups and downs of the writing process. Selina’s illustrations offer visual hints to mirror the metaphors in each chapter. Highlights include beautiful porcelain teacups, word swings, flying bird-books, and a whirlwind girl!

In the second part of the launch, we heard from retired Princeton University Press editor Peter Dougherty, whose enthusiasm and excitement about Helen’s new book was infectious!

At the end of each book launch session, Helen led us through an exercise (which you can do too! The prompt is in the book) called the SPACE of pleasurable writing. Every letter of this acronym explores a different dimension of your writing practice:

• Social balance

• Physical engagement

• Aesthetic nourishment

• Creative challenge

• Emotional uplift.

Considering these dimensions will enhance your positive feelings about your writing practice. I invite you to grab some coloured pencils and the book, turn to ‘The Road Ahead’, and have a go yourself — or follow the video prompts on Helen’s website at https://www.helensword.com/your-gallery.

Sharing our visual SPACEs of writing with each other was a wonderful moment filled with trees, clouds, spirals, dancers, teacups, animals, landscapes, musicians, and many more beautiful symbols.

A big thank you to Helen, Selina, and the wonderful Princeton UP publishing team, including editor Peter Dougherty and book designer Chris Ferrante, for sharing their ideas and expertise so generously with us. And thank you all for coming along to help us launch Writing with Pleasure. It was a beautiful Valentine’s Day to remember!

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

Not a member yet? Register here to receive an email with the video link.

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

---

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

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

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Have you fallen into a writing rut? Lost your way in the wordsmith woods?

On December 12, I presented my final WriteSPACE Special Event of 2022, Writing Wizardry. Participants accompanied me on a tour of some tricky syntactical terrain, and I taught them a couple of magic spells for getting their wordcraft back on track.

This event was offered in two live one-hour Zoom sessions.

Part I: Zombie Nouns and Somnambulant Verbs

We explored how zombie nouns (aka nominalizations) and sleepwalking verbs (aka statives) can suck the lifeblood from your sentences and paralyze your prose. Writers can rescue their readers from the Zombie Apocalypse by replacing or supplementing abstract language with concrete nouns, active verbs, and straight-shooting syntax.

Part II: From Scary to Stylish

Attendees tried out my special wizard-themed Writer's Diet test and learned how they can fine-tune this playful diagnostic tool to suit their own disciplinary conventions and personal style. I offered them an exclusive taste of four different versions of my witchy Writer's Diet brew: the paper-and-pencil version in the book; the free online test; the premium Writer's Diet Plus; and the downloadable MS Word app.

Below is WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ first-person account of the live event.

…………….

Amy: I thoroughly enjoyed these two wordcraft workshops. Helen set the scene with the story of a magical realm—aka the brain. As the benevolent ruler of your realm, you act as its custodian and must organise emissaries (words) to travel beyond it and communicate your ideas. Your emissaries should be well-prepared and fit for the task. Zombie-like or sleep-walking ambassadors cannot perform at their best and may make your ideas sluggish and confusing.

Through storytelling, Helen clearly explained why nominalisations and somnambulant verbs cause so much damage in academic writing. I greatly appreciated the call to double-check my usage of them.

Helen explained her inspiration for her amazing TedEd video about Zombie nouns (watch it here!), which made me ponder the power of personification. I love the idea of animating abstract concepts by giving them voice, actions, or personality. For example, rather than talking about evolution abstractly as a cornerstone concept of biology, I tried to personify it into a character: Evolution is rather slovenly, fond of recycling used parts and procrastinating until the last minute. A terrible planner, Evolution will only patch together a new species once an ice age has already hit.

After watching the TedEd video on Zombie nouns and reading Chapter Two of Helen’s book The Writer’s Diet, why not try this creative exercise yourself: Identify a recurring nominalisation in your writing and turn it into a character. Which active verbs can you pair with this zombie noun to make it more concrete and active?

Helen reminded us that, at their best, abstractions can communicate complex ideas. It’s not necessary to cut them all out. Be selective! You can use zombie nouns as keywords, but make sure you surround them with concrete nouns and active verbs to cushion them in clarity.

Another key insight from these workshops was Helen’s commentary on be-verbs. Iterations of the verb to be are stative verbs (and therefore static verbs!); they express a state but don’t take the reader anywhere new, nor do they propel your sentences forward. You can use The Writer’s Diet online test to highlight be-verbs in your writing. If you use be-verbs often, seek active or interesting verbs instead (e.g. She was looking at becomes She scrutinised). In our Q&A discussions, we realised that active verbs are nearly always a good idea, no matter the topic or discipline.

Helen’s final piece of advice for using the online tool was to exercise your own judgement. If the test warns you away from some beloved or necessary terms, you don’t need to jettison them all. Simply be aware of how you frame these words—The Writer’s Diet is an algorithm and doesn’t have a brain, but you do!

A big thank you to Helen for her wordcraft wizardry and tips and tricks. I’m looking forward to seeing you all again at the next WriteSPACE Special Event!

…………….

A recording of this two-part WriteSPACE Special Event is now available in the WriteSPACE Library.

Not a member? Register here to receive an email with the video link.

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

---

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

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

---

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On Thursday 1 December, my colleagues from the Centre for Arts and Social Transformation (CAST)  and I launched The Artist*Academic website, a colorful new website that showcases some of the many ways in which arts-inspired ways of making, knowing, and being can infuse academic research, teaching, and leadership.

Whether you identify as an artist, an academic, or both, you'll find resources here to help you move between and beyond.  You'll also learn why I opted to join these two powerful words with a multidirectional wildcard asterisk rather than a linear hyphen.

This free WriteSPACE Special Event consisted of two live one-hour Zoom sessions scheduled twelve hours apart.

I opened both sessions by introducing Amy Lewis – already known to many of you as our wonderful WriteSPACE Events Manager – with whom I’ve worked closely over the past nine months to design and populate the Artist*Academic website. We took everyone on a short tour of the site's five main sections:

• WHAT is an Artist*Academic?

• WHY do we need Artist*Academics?

• WHO can be an Artist*Academic?

• HOW do I become an Artist*Academic?

• WHERE can I learn more?

Each session then featured a different special guest:

• In Session 1, I was joined by Professor Selina Tusitala Marsh – a former New Zealand Poet Laureate, prizewinning graphic memoirist, and artist*academic extraordinaire – whose playful illustrations enliven not only the Artist*Academic website but also my forthcoming book, Writing with Pleasure.
   

• In Session 2, I engaged in a lively conversation with Professor Peter O’Connor, the visionary Director of CAST. We discussed the artist*academic identity and the importance of bringing more arts-inspired research, teaching, and leadership into higher education.

Here is Amy ‘s first-person account of the live event:

…………….

A few quotes from the sessions to inspire you: 

• “My creative thinking has become led by line – the drawn line, the written line, the spoken line, the bloodline…”

• “As an artist*academic, you’ll always be liminal, on the edge, and not quite fit the standard model of the university. But maybe you should embrace that. Be a ‘moonlighter’, and find people who are happy to take risks and stand outside with you.”

• “Going through our arts-based research has been a collaborative and conversational process, and totally outside of our comfort zones!”

How insightful it was to hear Helen expose the roots of this project. She explained how to recognise an Artist*Academic (in others and in yourself). But it may seem daunting to say ‘yes I fit that definition!’ Imposter syndrome is quite common in the battleground of academia. Even some of our collaborators on this project struggled to see themselves as academics, artists, or artist*academics, despite working in a research centre with the word ‘Arts’ in its name. In both sessions, we talked about ways to unpack this triple imposter syndrome and explored the idea of ‘letting go’ of self-doubt to embrace a new stage of becoming. 

‘Letting go’ has become something of a visual theme throughout the website. Bespoke and spontaneous drawings, poems, reflections, and stories abound, dissolving our fears that only perfectly polished work can be published. These fresh and fun artistic moments throughout the website were considered, deliberate, and collaborative. Helen’s fabulous guest speaker Selina Tusitala Marsh explained her hand-drawn, ‘koru-esque’ icons on the ‘How’ page of the website: The square spiral shape honours a motif in women’s traditional weaving from the island of Ambai in the Vanuatu archipelago. Their knowledge is woven into and safeguarded through art. The spiral shape softens in the Leadership and Service icon to reflect the fluidity and responsiveness of this area, it then becomes labyrinthine and nuanced in the Arts and Humanities icon, before transforming into freed birds in the Teaching icon.  

Another standout discussion point of the first session was the asterisk! We knew from the beginning of this project that a hyphen was not going to work. A hyphen was like a minus sign, subordinating ‘artist’ to ‘academic’. But an asterisk is something else entirely—a multi-spoked wild card that could connect the artist and the academic on equal terms. Selina explained that this symbol is not a star but a jellyfish, a Samoan ‘alu ‘alu, or perhaps an octopus with eight tentacles. This motif becomes a portal into Pasifika mythology and epistemology, but it also resonates globally due to the empty space at the centre. What I love most about this symbol is the centre void, which embodies the power of relational spaces. Arts open up space for us as academics to challenge the conventions of the academy and give us space to speak freely. 

In the second session, our wonderful special guest Peter O’Connor reflected on the way storytelling has played such a pivotal role in his life and academic career. Arts-based inquiry can often be like process writing: it reveals deeper ideas and brings things together without you even releasing it. Then you step back and ponder your ‘aha!’ moment. 

A key takeaway for me was the strength of finding an artist*academic community. Peter explained that if academia is like the ocean, most of the sea creatures swimming in universities are sharks, who have a particular way of working and thinking. But to be an artist*academic means being a dolphin, playful and intelligent. Dolphins draw strength by swimming in pods and they communicate in ways that others cannot understand, so it’s good to find a sense of community in other like-minded scholars. 

If you think you might also be a dolphin in an academic sea of sharks, head to the artist*academic website (https://artist-academic.com/). Dive into the wild and wonderful resources that Helen and the team at CAST have lovingly laboured to create and join the conversation!

A heartfelt thank you to Helen, Peter, Selina, and the team at CAST for this great discussion. It has been a true privilege working with you all on this inspiring, one-of-a-kind project!

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