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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be dramatic!

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy!

STAYING ALIVE: A comedic drama in one part

Setting

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

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

Soundtack

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

Props

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

Costumes

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

Lighting

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

Staging

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

Scene 1

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

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

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

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

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

[Pam clutches her pearls]

Thesis: Hack, cough, splutter.

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

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

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

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

Thesis: Maybe we should try to . . .

[The thesis collapses in Pam’s arms.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[The curtains close, to rapturous applause.]

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

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

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

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On September 13, I invited Jane Rosenzweig, Director of the Harvard College Writing Center, to join me for a lively conversation on "Writing Critically with AI".

In the first hour of this free WriteSPACE Special Event, Jane and I discussed the risks and rewards of writing and teaching writing in the age of generative AI. In the second hour, we led a hands-on discussion and workshop for WriteSPACE members, digging deeper into some of the questions addressed in the first hour.

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

……………

This popular live Special Event featuring Helen Sword and Jane Rosenzweig offered a thought-provoking and insightful journey into the world of Generative AI and writing. Or should that be GenAI versus writing? While the jury may still be out on the impact that new AI writing tools are having on authors, students, and teachers, this in-depth conversation afforded a great opportunity to hear both sides of the debate.

Some memorable quotes from Jane:

• We survived Facebook, which was born and raised at Harvard while I was there … Then things were peaceful for a while, and now we have ChatGPT.

• I started becoming quietly horrified by myself at my computer. And I kept thinking, I need to write about this, look what this can do!

• Just because you can outsource your writing to a machine doesn’t mean you should.

Now that artificial intelligence is competent enough to research and write — and grade — for us, can we all just head to the beach? Jane and Helen were pretty clear that before you don your bikini, it’s important to consider the repercussions. Writing helps us develop critical thinking skills; so writers (particularly student writers) who use AI text generators may be missing out on learning those crucial skills.

Helen and Jane expertly weighed up the benefits and drawbacks of generative AI, which I’ve cut into bite-sized morsels for you.

The good news!

1. If you know how to be cautious about fact-checking the content, GenAI tools can play great research assistants. They deliver shortcuts to obtaining key facts and summarizing long passages into helpful abstracts, and they excel at writing very plain business emails and strategies (helpful for writers who want to prioritize their time so they can focus on more creative tasks).

2. For teachers, the conversations around ChatGPT can spark debate and challenge students. GenAI also offers opportunities for collaborative work, illuminating discussions, and comparisons of writing styles.

The bad news:

1. Students are using these tools for things like brainstorming, style edits, and even, in the most alarming cases, for drafting work that they intend to pass off on their own. If they haven’t yet learnt the skills necessary to critically assess the output, they may produce work that is less creative, nuanced, unique, or even accurate than what they could and should have done on their own (ChatGPT is notorious for “hallucinating” and falsifying quotes!)

2. Is GenAI really ethical? In simple lay terms, large language models use algorithms that function a bit like predictive text messaging, using large data sets to predict the most likely answers. But we don’t know much about how these GenAI systems are trained. Which part of the internet is their training data coming from? Because companies like OpenAI are not disclosing this information to us, there is a risk that serious violations of copyright are being perpetrated by the bots — to say nothing of their perpetuation of cultural biases and stereotypes.

3. These systems require tons of water to be powered, quite literally! For each conversation of roughly 20-50 questions and answers, ChatGPT needs to 'drink' a 500 ml bottle of water. Now imagine the water usage with billions of curious users. What’s more, the servers are often located in countries that can’t afford to see their water supplies depleted so drastically. Check out this article for more.

4. The human labor training element of GenAI systems is often outsourced to developing countries where workers experience unfair working conditions. Jane recommends the recent New York Magazine article Inside the AI Factory.

And if that’s not enough to contend with already, here are a few more unsettling questions for the future:

• Can ChatGPT get a kind of mad cow disease for chatbots? As the chatbots pump more and more material into the body of sources that ChatGPT is drawing on, the range and quality of the new content will likely degrade. ChatGPT will eventually start consuming its own content (the only kind of recycling I’d hate to see, and one that is already starting to happen).

• We unconsciously suggest that these bots have intelligence when we say ‘ChatGPT told me…” Is it helpful to anthropomorphize these machines? Should we be calling this technology cute nicknames like ‘ChattieG’ and ‘Claude,’ or should we refer to chatbots generically as ‘artificial text predictors’? Jane recommends Dr Emily Bender’s linguistic take on this question; check out her podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000.

• Do people want to consume creative content (like TV or films) that is generated by AI? What does this mean for artists and designers? What new laws will be needed to protect creatives’ intellectual property? On a broader scale, will jobs be lost to AI? Or will they just become more alien and tedious? Will we need to implement a universal basic income in the future?

In the second hour of this intriguing session (for WriteSPACE members only), we delved into practical problems faced by writers and teachers alike, with Jane providing her insightful expertise as a professor who tackles these problems on a daily basis. Colleagues ask her questions such as the following:

• “As head of the department, I’ve got to take a stand on GenAI; what should I advise to the faculty?”

• “How can I ensure that students know the dangers of using these tools for their assignments?”

• “What is the difference between plagiarism and GenAI text?”

A big thank you to Jane and Helen for this informative and thought-provoking Special Event, and thank you to all the participants for sharing your positivity and unique opinions. For more of Jane’s insights, subscribe to her newsletter Writing Hacks.

See you again at the next event!

………..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. To My Darling Research

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

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

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

The Prompt

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

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

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

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

The Poem

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

TO MY DARLING WRITESPACE

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

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

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

2. Research Haiku

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

The Prompt

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

The Poem

WRITING WITH PLEASURE

Preface: Why Pleasure?

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

Introduction: The SPACE of Pleasure

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

PART I: Pleasure Principles

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

Chapter 1: Society and Solitude

The social pleasures:
society, solitude,
and intimacy

Chapter 2: Body Basics

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

Chapter 3: On Beauty

Aesthetic pleasure: 
beauty in writing about
beautiful writing 

Chapter 4: The C-Curve

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

Chapter 5: States of Mind

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

PART II: Pleasure Practices

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

Chapter 6: On the Ground

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

Chapter 7: In the Sky

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

Chapter 8: Wind, River, Stone

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

Chapter 9: Star Navigation

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

Chapter 10: On the Island

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

Conclusion: The SPACE of Writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My life with The Little Prince

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

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

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

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

The Little Prince’s warning

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

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

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

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

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

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

Praise from the Prince

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Tell your story

2. Play with poetry

3. Be dramatic

4. Move around

5. Make stuff

6. Mix in metaphor

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

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

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

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

Step into the Showcase

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

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

Tell your story

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

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

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

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

My first stab at a detective-like feel was:

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

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

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

Play with poetry

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

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

SALT

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

Be dramatic

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

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

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

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

Move around

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

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

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

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

Make stuff

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

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

Maps cultivating gut feelings

Writing as storytelling
Connecting the emotions of the mundane

Writing as visual poetry
Layering meaning and beauty

Writing as dramatic plot
Revealing the epic tensions of everyday

Writing as embodied movement
Dancing lines of thought

Writing as metaphorical craft
Turning lame into velvet

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

the heart beating words

the mind weaving ideas

the body breathing meaning

Mix in metaphor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy!

Liquefy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Petrify

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

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

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

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

Disneyfy

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

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

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

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

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

Muntify

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gillian Beer on the impact of new scientific theories

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

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

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

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

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

[Excerpted from Stylish Academic Writing, p. 50]

ChattieG on the impact of new scientific theories

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

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

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

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

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

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

ChattieG gets drunk on Beer

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

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

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

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

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

ChattieG as sonneteer

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

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

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

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

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

Can someone please teach ChattieG how to scan?!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still Life with Alzheimers

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

---

2. the stoneflower path

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

---

3. at the end of the path

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

The Garden of Metaphor

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

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

1. In the garden of your _______ . . .

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

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

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

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

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

Helen

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Noun Garden

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Verb Garden

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

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

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

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

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

The Adjective Garden

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

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

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

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

The Teaching Garden

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

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

ChattieG’s Garden

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

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

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

Exit through the Garden Shop

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

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

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.

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“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.

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 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.

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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.

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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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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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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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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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