Do I really have what it takes to do scholarly work? What’s even the point of trying to create scholarship in this messed-up world? What difference could my work possibly make for me or the people I care about?

These are questions that many of us worry about as we work to create and share knowledge in a world that often feels hostile to it. Articulating these hard questions from inside our own scholarly lives is how we (Helen and Margy) first invited you to subscribe to this newsletter back in our introductory post, “All About #AcWriMoments.”

What is an AcWriMoment exactly? Here’s how we defined them in our first prompt:

Lofty definition: “Precious stretches of uncounted minutes when we sink into a sense of cohesion, even sublimity, and find pieces of encouragement or insight that enable us to return to the workaday world with the courage to carry on.”

Practical definition: “Any moment where you cultivate connection with your academic writing—whether an individual project, your larger body of work, or the person that you are as a thinker and writer—[by paying] attention, not only to the task in front of you, but also to its potential for larger meaning.”

AcWriMoments serve a practical purpose in our scholarship by helping us make progress on intangible “metrics” such as clarity of purpose and connection with our readers — not to mention that they tap into the intrinsic motivation we so dearly need in order to see this process through!

We’ve shared a lot of prompts with you since launching #AcWriMoments back in late 2023. Forty-two to be exact! The first 30 prompts were bite-sized ones that could be thoroughly explored in a single writing session or contemplated over time. After that, we shifted to offering monthly prompts designed to structure an entire month. Throughout this ambitious project, our goal has been to help you cultivate AcWriMoments large and small in your life so that you can do the work that matters to you most.

Here we are approaching 2025, and with this phase of #AcWriMoments drawing to a close, our goal feels more pressing than ever. So we now bring you two ways to continue — or start! — taking beautiful care of your Self in the coming year by cultivating AcWriMoments.

1. Revisit #AcWriMoments any time

We’ve turned the #AcWriMoments prompt collections from 2023-24 into two evergreen resources that you can access any day, hour, or moment. Bookmark these pages! Share them with your friends! Send them to your writing group so you can all try them together!

• 30 Days of #AcWriMoments: Daily prompts for finding courage, clarity, and purpose in your scholarly work, contributed by writing scholars, coaches, consultants, and editors from around the world.

• A Year of #AcWriMoments: Monthly prompts that suggest a unique theme for each month of the year and encourage you to integrate that theme into your daily life and work.

We may announce future iterations of #AcWriMoments at some point, so please stay subscribed!

2. Check out our next project … drumroll please … Tarot for Scholars!

On January 1, 2025, we’re thrilled to be launching a new public resource to help scholars integrate the deep wisdom of tarot into their daily life and work. In our free Substack newsletter, Tarot for Scholars, we’ll offer reflections and prompts to help you use tarot to explore your own inner world and unlock the unique creative power of your scholarship (or whatever kind of writing and thinking you do).

This labor of love has been years in the making. Margy first introduced Helen to tarot in 2020, and since then we’ve both increasingly come to believe in its power as a tool for illuminating and energizing many different facets of intellectual and creative work. Whether you’re on the rationalist end of the spectrum, like Helen, or the more mystical end, like Margy, we hope you’ll join us for this new adventure.

Get free Tarot for Scholars emails!

Here’s how Tarot for Scholars will work:

• Every day in January, we’ll email you a concise (10-15 minute) video introducing you to a randomly drawn tarot card, interpreted through a scholarly lens. Each post also includes a textual summary and some journal prompts for reflection.

• Then, through the remainder of 2025, we’ll share a new tarot card post each week. By the end of the year, we will (hopefully!) have covered all 78 cards in the deck.

• To kick things off, we’ve created a juicy video called “A Scholar’s View of Tarot,” which provides an overview of the whole deck as well as ideas for how and why you might integrate this magical tool into your scholarship.

Fittingly enough, it was our collaborate work on #AcWriMoments that laid the foundation for Tarot for Scholars. Isn’t that how these things so very often go in scholarly life! Check out Helen’s recent essay, “Magic Wands for Writing,” for the secret tarot-laden backstory behind #AcWriMoments.

Thanks for being here. We look forward to keeping up with you over at Tarot for Scholars in 2025!

Yours in scholarship,

and

Subscribe to Tarot for Scholars

Welcome to #AcWriMoments, an evergreen writing resource created by writing experts Margy Thomas (ScholarShape) and Helen Sword (WriteSPACE).

The 12 beautiful prompts in our A Year of #AcWriMoments series offer you a unique theme to focus on for each month of the year, along with simple prompts for integrating that theme into your daily life and work.

For more prompts to guide and inspire you in your scholarly life:

• Check out the daily prompts in 30 Days of #AcWriMoments, contributed by writing scholars, editors, and coaches from around the world.

• Subscribe to Helen and Margy’s new collaborative venture, !

Thank you for being part of #AcWriMoments, a collection of daily and monthly prompts for finding courage, clarity, and purpose in your scholarly work. To help others discover this evergreen resource, please forward this message to friends and colleagues. If you’re reading this on Substack, would you drop us a heart and a restack too? We’re so grateful to have you here! 🙏

and

Welcome to our penultimate #AcWriMoments post, the culmination of a yearlong experiment in purposeful scholarship creation. On the first day of each month in 2024, we’ve offered you a guidepost with a unique theme and simple prompts for living out the theme as a scholar and a human. We’ve invited you to return to the guideposts all month long, anytime you needed support for cultivating SACRED (strategic, artisanal, creative, reflective, embodied, delicious) moments of communion with yourself and your work. We hope these offerings have encouraged you in your pursuit of whatever goals and visions you deem worthy of your attention—the most precious resource you have. Read on to learn what we’re planning for 2025!

Theme for December 2024: ENVISION

How do you plan in times of high uncertainty? When all you can see ahead are unknown unknowns, is it possible to access a visionary frame of mind? These are apt questions at this particular new-year transition, when apprehension is the pervasive mood for many of us. At such a time, how can we conjure a vision to guide us into 2025 with courage and hope?

A clue is nestled in last month’s #AcWriMoments post. The theme of the month was CONJURE: “create space and moments to leave your mark.” We shared the following experiment:

Choose an inspiring image to guide your next conjuration. In magic, a sigil is a powerful image, usually a pictorial symbol, that guides the process of manifestation. Choose an image that evokes how you want to feel in your work or what you want to create. It could be ancient or modern, abstract or culturally specific, printed from online or copied by your own hand. Place the image somewhere you’ll see it often. Meditate on it regularly. Notice how the image guides, nourishes, and course-corrects your process over time.

This prompt articulates one of the ways your agency can never be taken from you. No matter where you are or what’s happening around you or to you, you can choose which symbols and scenes to hold in your mind. And as you take charge of your own imagination, the effects can ripple outward in unexpected ways. By being a real and genuine presence in the world, you can become the change you wish for.

If you can return to your own creative vision again and again as your life unfolds, then over time, your life becomes an unmistakably meaningful one, held together by threads of coherence. And you remain always at the center of your own story, making the meaning.

For this penultimate #AcWriMoments post, we offer you the theme of ENVISION. The word refers to the imagining of future possibilities, connoting positive ones. To live this theme, you don’t actually have to believe that good things will happen: you can envision yourself as the good thing happening. You are happening right now, and you will continue to happen for as long as you’re alive and living on purpose. This is the energy that can lead you through 2025 and beyond.

We’ll be back in touch at the end of December with some end-of-the-year announcements.

In the meantime, here are some Reflection Questions and Experiments to wrap up 2024 and set the stage for an intentional 2025, full of meaning…

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. Trace a through-line. Who have you always been? What have you always valued? Where do you come from? What have you been working on for years? These questions help you trace a through-line of your identity. Choose a through-line, and think of one small way you can help yourself remember this thread of your identity in the days ahead.

2. Revisit a monthly theme or prompt. Remember you can always return to past #AcWriMoments posts from 2024 whenever you need help envisioning a monthly theme to live by. Or, for a quick writing prompt to facilitate a single SACRED moment, check out the prompts from our 30-day #AcWriMoments experiment in November 2023.

EXPERIMENTS

The sunset of #AcWriMoments marks the dawn of a new initiative: Tarot for Scholars!

• On December 16/17, we’re excited to host a live Zoom conversation and workshop exploring tarot as a tool for navigating scholarly life. Register here to attend this free WriteSPACE Special Event or to watch the replay afterwards.
  

  Register for Tarot for Scholars

• On January 1, we’re launching a new Substack newsletter, also called Tarot for Scholars, to help you integrate the deep wisdom of tarot into your scholarly process. Subscribe to receive daily posts throughout the month of January, followed by weekly posts through the remainder of 2025 (and beyond?)

As we close the year with the theme of ENVISION, what is one thing you intend to do or be in the months ahead? What resources do you already have on hand to help you in this process?

Thank you for joining us for #AcWriMoments! We’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a comment to let us know what you’re learning, trying, and discovering this month.

&

Leave a comment

COURSES & MEMBERSHIP: Write more, right now! Join Helen and fellow writers from around the world in the WriteSPACE, the ultimate membership site for scholarly and professional writers who aim to lift their writing game. To try free for 30 days, click here and enter the discount code SNEAKPEEK.

CUSTOM WRITING SUPPORT: Imagine and build your unique body of work with support from ScholarShape. As the creator of ScholarShape, Margy offers a suite of resources and services designed to help you cultivate and share your scholarly genius. Click here to learn more about Story-Argument Support Services.

Subscribe now

Welcome back to #AcWriMoments, a yearlong experiment in purposeful scholarship creation. On the first day of each month in 2024, we offer you a guidepost with a unique theme and simple prompts for living out the theme as a scholar and a human. Return to the guidepost all month long, anytime you need support for cultivating SACRED (strategic, artisanal, creative, reflective, embodied, delicious) moments of communion with yourself and your work. May these offerings encourage you in your pursuit of whatever goals and visions you deem worthy of your attention—the most precious resource you have.

Theme for November 2024: CONJURE

With a flash of your magic wand — aka, your pen or pencil — a word appears on the page. Then a whole sentence, a paragraph, a book! Words work magic by making the invisible manifest, materializing unseen ideas. Through words, you can remake your world: if not always your outer environment, then surely the unmapped lands within.

Words can CONJURE a feeling, an image, a memory. A concept, a narrative, a description of reality. A novel framework. An explanation. Words can sketch a tiny fragment or construct an entire parallel (or possible) universe.

This month, we invite you to CONJURE! Use your words to make something happen or appear. 🌱 Elicit an effect. 💥 Call something new into existence. 📣 Summon a dream into the waking world. 💭 Produce a result. 📈 Exercise your agency. 💪 Express your desire. ❤️‍🔥 Impose your vision upon the world in some small way! 🎨

You can’t control the outcomes or reactions to your efforts, but you can choose to create space and moments to leave your mark.

Here are some Reflection Questions and an Experiment to get you started!

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. Choose a daily prompt. Back in November 2023, we launched this #AcWriMoments experiment by delivering a series of 30 prompts, one per day, created by a range of contributors. Now we’ve gathered those prompts onto this evergreen #AcwWriMoments page so they’re easy to revisit anytime. Select a prompt that resonates with you today and dive in!

2. Revisit a monthly theme. Throughout 2024, we’ve been sharing one #AcWriMoments post on the first of each month with a theme to guide your work that month. Choose one of the previous #AcWriMoments themes to revisit. If there’s one that you missed this year and have been meaning to try out, now is a perfect time! How can this theme guide your conjurings in the days to come?

3. Meditate on the Ace of Wands tarot card, which was our inspiration for this month’s theme of CONJURE. The card pictures a hand reaching down from the clouds, offering a magic wand that symbolizes the gift of creative inspiration. What auspicious new beginning might this moment hold for you? What do you feel moved to say or do? How are you expressing your unique creative self? What place or activity can you seek out to help you access your creative power?

EXPERIMENT

• Choose an inspiring image to guide your next conjuration. In magic, a sigil is a powerful image, usually a pictorial symbol, that guides the process of manifestation. Choose an image that evokes how you want to feel in your work or what you want to create. It could be ancient or modern, abstract or culturally specific, printed from online or copied by your own hand. Place the image somewhere you’ll see it often. Meditate on it regularly. Notice how the image guides, nourishes, and course-corrects your process over time. (In our final #AcWriMoments post next month, we’ll share about a new resource that can help you integrate the magical images of tarot into your scholarly process throughout 2025: TAROT FOR SCHOLARS. Stay tuned for details!)

As you live the theme of CONJURE this month, what materializes before your very eyes? What do you learn about your own capacity to shape your world?

Thank you for joining us for #AcWriMoments! We’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a comment to let us know what you’re learning, trying, and discovering this month.

&

Leave a comment

COURSES & MEMBERSHIP: Write more, right now! Join Helen and fellow writers from around the world in the WriteSPACE, the ultimate membership site for scholarly and professional writers who aim to lift their writing game. To try free for 30 days, click here and enter the discount code SNEAKPEEK.

CUSTOM WRITING SUPPORT: Imagine and build your unique body of work with support from ScholarShape. As the creator of ScholarShape, Margy offers a suite of resources and services designed to help you cultivate and share your scholarly genius. Click here to learn more about Story-Argument Support Services.

Welcome to #AcWriMoments, an evergreen writing resource created by writing experts Margy Thomas (ScholarShape) and Helen Sword (WriteSPACE).

The 30 beautiful prompts in our 30 Days of #AcWriMoments series were contributed by writing scholars, coaches, consultants, and editors from around the world. (You can read all about them on our Meet the Contributors page).

For further resources to guide and inspire you in your scholarly life:

• Check out the 12 monthly prompts of A Year of #AcWriMoments.

• Subscribe to Helen and Margy’s new collaborative venture, !

Thank you for being part of #AcWriMoments! To help others discover this resource, please forward this message to friends and colleagues — and if you’re reading this on Substack, would you drop us a heart and a restack too? We’re so grateful to have you here! 🙏

and

See all Contributors’ bios

Subscribe now

Welcome back to #AcWriMoments, a yearlong experiment in purposeful scholarship creation. On the first day of each month in 2024, we offer you a guidepost with a unique theme and simple prompts for living out the theme as a scholar and a human. Return to the guidepost all month long, anytime you need support for cultivating SACRED (strategic, artisanal, creative, reflective, embodied, delicious) moments of communion with yourself and your work. May these offerings encourage you in your pursuit of whatever goals and visions you deem worthy of your attention—the most precious resource you have.

Theme for October 2024: HARVEST

After a long wait, the rich rewards of Harvest season come at last. Wherever you are in the world, Northern Hemisphere or Southern, the month of October can be a time of harvest — because harvest is anytime you gather the fruits of labors past. For scholars, harvest season comes whenever we generate writings, materialize ideas, or turn plans into knowledge products. Just as the fecundity of the Earth generates the food that sustains our bodies and the flowers that decorate our living spaces, the fecundity of our shared knowledge ecosystem generates new insights and ideas that expand our understanding of the world and guide our efforts to repair it.

The word HARVEST derives from Indo-European root words meaning “pluck” and “fruit,” and it can be either a verb referring to the act of gathering ripe crops or a noun referring to that which is gathered or to the season of gathering. This month, see what fruits and flowers you can pluck as you nourish the larger cycles of planting-and-sowing in your body of work.

Whether the term HARVEST conjures autumn vegetables or freshly cut flowers, the gathering of provisions for winter hibernation or the gathering of sunlight and spring rain, we hope this #AcWriMoments theme helps you savor the delights of the season and gather nourishment for the days ahead.

Here are some Reflection Questions and an Experiment to get you started!

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. Appreciate harvests present. What fruits and flowers are ripening or blooming in your life and work right now? Maybe the word count of your draft has been swelling each day like a harvest pumpkin, or your thesis is blossoming like spring flowers? Perhaps your scholarly reputation has been strengthening, or your relationships with students or colleagues have been deepening? Make a list of everything around you that’s ready to be harvested: that is, turned into nourishment or inspiration for future work.

2. Anticipate harvests future. What seeds can you plant right now in anticipation of future rewards? Listen to what your body (of work) is hungry and thirsty for in this phase of life and career. What do you need more of, and what is the embryonic or seed form you can bury and tend in your little corner of the world?

A HARVEST EXPERIMENT

• Create a Mood Board for a Desired Harvest. A mood board is a flexible and expansive way of orienting toward the future. Compared to a traditional goals list or strategic plan, a mood board is intuitive and open-ended, while still focusing your intentions. Create a mood board for your body of work. As you go about your life, notice images and phrases that catch your imagination and hint at what you’d like to have or make, or who you’d like to become. Collect all these pieces in one place, whether a literal poster-sized, cardboard mood board or in a journal. As the pieces accumulate over days, weeks, or even months, arrange and rearrange them and see what themes emerge. How do these meanings help you clarify or revise your more prosaic to-do lists and mundane goals? How does your mood board help you cultivate your next harvest?

As you live the theme of HARVEST this month, what fruits and flowers fill your figurative cornucopia? What seeds are you planting for harvests future?

Thank you for joining us for #AcWriMoments! We’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a comment to let us know what you’re learning, trying, and discovering this month.

&

Leave a comment

COURSES & MEMBERSHIP: Write more, right now! Join Helen and fellow writers from around the world in the WriteSPACE, the ultimate membership site for scholarly and professional writers who aim to lift their writing game. To try free for 30 days, click here and enter the discount code SNEAKPEEK.

CUSTOM WRITING SUPPORT: Imagine and build your unique body of work with support from ScholarShape. As the creator of ScholarShape, Margy offers a suite of resources and services designed to help you cultivate and share your scholarly genius. Click here to learn more about Story-Argument Support Services.

Subscribe now

Welcome back to #AcWriMoments, a yearlong experiment in purposeful scholarship creation. On the first day of each month in 2024, we offer you a guidepost with a unique theme and simple prompts for living out the theme as a scholar and a human. Return to the guidepost all month long, anytime you need support for cultivating SACRED (strategic, artisanal, creative, reflective, embodied, delicious) moments of communion with yourself and your work. May these offerings encourage you in your pursuit of whatever goals and visions you deem worthy of your attention—the most precious resource you have.

Theme for September 2024: REFLECT

The Moon gathers light from the hidden Sun and reflects it onto Earth. As our lunar lantern illuminates the shadowy world by night, its surface becomes a mirror by which, in the darkness, we can glance toward a solar center of coherence that’s beyond our line of sight.

The scholarship creation process has its sunny moments of radiant clarity, but so many of its phases feel like the waxing and waning of the Moon. On we write in dim and uneven light, generating and revising material, feeling the gravitational pull of a thesis that we haven’t yet articulated: a golden truth that, for now, remains on the other side of the world. Eventually, we trust, it will circle around and shine overhead.

In the collage above, the Moon is both reflective and reflected. Its face in the night sky reflects the Sun’s light to Earth, and in the water below, its face is reflected on the rippling surface. The resulting yin-yang image hints at the Moon’s non-dual nature. Within darkness, illumination. Within mystery, coherence. Within process, product. A reflection of a reflection is not an illusion, but a promise that the original object being reflected really does exist. If it can’t be seen directly right now, that doesn’t mean it never will be.

This month, we invite you to REFLECT: to notice coherence, or the possibility of it, even in confusing or ambiguous times. Coherence comes from within: it’s your own inner light reflected back at you from the surrounding world. The scholarship you create is one of many reflective surfaces on which you can glimpse your light, your golden truth, made visible in the world and glowing back at you.

As you Reflect on our theme this month, ponder how your scholarship can express who you are and what you believe is true. And consider how, in the pale light of lunar landscapes, you can glimpse insights that are invisible by the light of day.

Here are some Reflection questions and experiments to get you started!

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. Reflect on your current project. What truth or belief have you been trying to express? Where, or in what sense, does the truth feel unknowable, or at least complicated, nuanced, or shades-of-grey? Where does your project need you to honor its lunar (shadowy, shifting, ambiguous) quality, and where does it need you to bring in some solar clarity and coherence for balance?

2. Reflect on your body of work. In your work more broadly, what kind of phase do you feel like you’re in right now? Do you feel like you’re waxing, growing in size and building momentum with an eye toward the future? Do you feel as full of light as you’ve ever been, shining for all to see? Do you feel you’re in a waning phase, marked by pruning, purging, restructuring, and consolidating gains? Or perhaps you’re in a New Moon phase, lying in wait for the next waxing to begin? See if you can identify when your current “lunar cycle” began, and sketch out a timeline of its unfolding so far. What insights do you find when you ponder this sketch of the larger process you’re living out?

PRACTICES & EXPERIMENTS

1. Waxing reflections. Jot down on separate scraps of paper 3-7 pieces of positive feedback, large or small, that you’ve received over the years about your work — that is, any intellectual, emotional, or physical labor you’ve performed, in or out of academic roles. This feedback represents various ways that your light has been reflected back at you by the world around you, and it could come from anywhere: colleagues, students, peer reviewers, editors, friends, family, etc. Next, on a flat surface, arrange the pieces of feedback in chronological order, with the oldest feedback on the left and the newest on the right. Imagine that what you’ve laid out is a record of your waxing: a process of growth, gaining strength and light. Consider what threads you see running through all the feedback, and note any hints of how you’ve changed over time. Finally, choose a word to describe what it is that has grown in you — your unique “light” that represents your self, your spark of life, your sense of identity. Have you grown in courage? wisdom? patience? subject-matter knowledge? conflict resolution skills? It could be any virtue, quality, or ability whose growth you see evinced in your “waxing” sequence. If choosing just one word feels limiting, you can create a word cloud instead.

2. Waning reflections. When you’re ready, perhaps after a break, return to your waxing sequence with fresh eyes. This time, imagine your line of feedback is a record of your waning: a process of pruning, distilling, consolidating, and purifying. What have you let go of over the course of this sequence? See if you can choose one word (or word cloud) that captures what you’ve shed, a sort of spiritual “mirror reflection” of your waxing word. Create a simple reminder of your words on a page in your journal, or a note to self that you place somewhere you’ll see it when you need a reminder of who you are, who you’ve always been, and who you’re becoming.

As you live the theme of REFLECT this month, what becomes clear to you? What are you coming to trust about yourself and your process?

Thank you for joining us for #AcWriMoments! We’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a comment to let us know what you’re learning, trying, and discovering this month.

&

Leave a comment

COURSES & MEMBERSHIP: Write more, right now! Join Helen and fellow writers from around the world in the WriteSPACE, the ultimate membership site for scholarly and professional writers who aim to lift their writing game. To try free for 30 days, click here and enter the discount code SNEAKPEEK.

CUSTOM WRITING SUPPORT: Imagine and build your unique body of work with support from ScholarShape. As the creator of ScholarShape, Margy offers a suite of resources and services designed to help you cultivate and share your unique scholarly genius. Click here to learn more about Story-Argument Support Services.

Welcome back to #AcWriMoments, a yearlong experiment in purposeful scholarship creation. On the first day of each month in 2024, we offer you a guidepost with a unique theme and simple prompts for living out the theme as a scholar and a human. Return to the guidepost all month long, anytime you need support for cultivating SACRED (strategic, artisanal, creative, reflective, embodied, delicious) moments of communion with yourself and your work. May these offerings encourage you in your pursuit of whatever goals and visions you deem worthy of your attention—the most precious resource you have.

Theme for August 2024: CLARIFY

The perfect word choice flashes through your mind like lightening. An apt structural design emerges through a careful process of reverse-outlining your manuscript. However and whenever clarity comes into your scholarly process, it defines what it is that you create. Through sudden flashes or through long hours of toil, chaos gives way to order; data coalesces into meaning; study and contemplation give rise to effective action.

The sword in the collage above, slicing decisively through dreamy clouds, evokes the role of mental clarity in the creative process. Your “swords” are the strategies, practices, and mental tricks that help you access clarity as you work to create scholarship.

This month, we invite you to CLARIFY your ideas by giving them shape and form. It’s a fitting theme for a month named after an agentive emperor and assigned to the fiery, expressive zodiac sign of Leo. As you focus on your creative process this month, notice the ways that clarity emerges and shapes what you create — and the strategies that help you cultivate clarity when you need it.

Here are some reflection questions and experiments to get you started!

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1. What are your favorite strategies for sorting out your thoughts when your brain feels muddled? What is a new strategy you might try this month?

2. Reflect on a recent moment of clarity, large or small, in your creative process. The clarity may have come spontaneously, or you may have sought it. How did that moment of clarity help define the project you were working on, or your larger body of work? What does this moment tell you about how you might cultivate more clarity in your creative process in the future?

PRACTICES & EXPERIMENTS

1. Create a wall map of your work-in-progress. In the center of the map, put the guiding question for the project as a whole: what one question are you most hoping to answer through this project? Arrayed around that central question are pieces of paper for all the sections of your project, whether book chapters, essay sections, or another type of subdivision. On these pieces of paper, write the (sub-)guiding questions, or topics, for each of the project parts. Once you have this basic structure in place, feel free to add other elements and information such as key terms, data sources, and claims. As you create the wall map, notice how this process, in itself, invites clarity into your project. You can refer back to the map again anytime you feel confused (and update it as needed). When you do, notice how the map facilitates clarity by re-centering you in your purpose.

2. Talk your way through. When you hit a wall in your writing project, imagine being asked this powerful question by an insightful coach, mentor, or friend: “If you could wave a magic wand right now and fix anything about your project, what would you change?” This question can help you uncover what you already know and believe, deep beneath those feelings of confusion and stuck-ness. Pull out your phone, hit “record” to create a new voice memo, and start talking. As you talk, pretend you’re replying to your coach/mentor/friend, and speak in your own natural voice — no need for performative professional language here. Using your own voice will help you be really honest with yourself. Talk as long as you need until you run out of things to say. If your talking gives rise to new questions, respond to those too, if you want. Once your voice memo is complete, listen back and take notes. What new insights do you glean about your project? You may try listening to the recording again in a few days or weeks too, to see what else you notice. The mere passage of time can be the most powerful clarifier of all!

As you live the theme of CLARIFY this month, what becomes clear about your project and yourself? What decisions can you make to bring structure to your process?

Thank you for joining us for #AcWriMoments! We’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a comment to let us know what you’re learning, trying, and discovering this month.

&

Leave a comment

CREATIVITY CATALYST: Aug 24 - Oct 3, 2024. Get your creative juices flowing with this 6-week online course for academic and professional writers who aspire to write with more clarity and panache. Join writing expert Helen Sword and other writers from around the world as we explore arts-based techniques for infusing your “serious” writing with creativity, color, and delight. Learn more and register here.

CUSTOM WRITING SUPPORT: Clarify your scholarly purpose through Story-Argument support from Margy Thomas, creator of ScholarShape and the Story-Argument model. Try the Story-Argument Foundations Service Package for customizable one-on-one support, and for a communal experience, consider booking an interactive, on-site Story-Argument Workshop tailored to the needs and goals of your group. On the info page for each service option, you’ll find an inquiry form where you can request a free, no-obligation discovery call!

Subscribe now

Welcome back to #AcWriMoments, a yearlong experiment in purposeful scholarship creation. On the first day of each month in 2024, we offer you a guidepost with a unique theme and simple prompts for living out the theme as a scholar and a human. Return to the guidepost all month long, anytime you need support for cultivating SACRED (strategic, artisanal, creative, reflective, embodied, delicious) moments of communion with yourself and your work. May these offerings encourage you in your pursuit of whatever goals and visions you deem worthy of your attention—the most precious resource you have.

Theme for July 2024: DREAM

The Periodic Table of the Elements coalesced for chemist Dmitri Medeleev in a dream. Philosopher Rene Descartes recounted three dreams through which his take on the scientific method emerged. Today at MIT, researchers at Project Dormio, following in the footsteps of Edison, Tesla, Poe, and Dalí, are exploring the creative possibilities of hypnagogia, “a semi-lucid sleep state where we all begin dreaming before we fall fully unconscious.” The researchers note that in this state of free association and distorted space-time, inventors and artists alike have long found a “window of opportunity” where otherwise impossible insights and syntheses can take shape.

The scholarly enterprise across the centuries is bursting with examples of knowledge-builders who have reached beyond strictly scientific techniques when constructing knowledge within the parameters of their disciplines. Alongside the dreams of sleep that come unbidden are the dreams of daytime that can be consciously cultivated: states of free association and distorted space-time that occur in the midst of waking life. Waking and sleeping alike, dreams are spaces of possibility and creation.

Entertaining as we may find anecdotes about the rare revelatory dreams of famous thinkers and writers, both sleep-dreams and daydreams can guide our everyday writing lives too. The windows of opportunity offered by dreaming are open to all of us if we look out for them.

This month, we invite you to DREAM. Capture your night-dreams the moment you wake up so you can ponder the secret wisdom they may hold, or let your mind wander through imaginal realms during daytime reveries, and see what progress (tangible or intangible) your visions inspire. Let go of the possible/impossible binary for a spell, and simply dream. There’s no telling what insights might find you in that liminal space.

To aid in your dream explorations this month, we offer you seven writing prompts based on our theme of DREAM. Several are inspired by the visual image above: seven goblets, as July is the seventh month of the year. Please feel free to replace or supplement our prompts with your own variations!

7 PROMPTS FOR JULY

1. Notice your daydreams. Set a timer for 7 minutes and write about an image you find inspiring. We suggest using the collage of seven goblets above or the 7 of Cups tarot card. What dreamscapes do you see in each of the goblets? What scholarly ambition, fantasy, or fear does each goblet represent for you?

2. Notice your night-dreams. If it works for you, keep your phone by your bed so you can grab it the moment you wake up and record a voice note describing whatever you can remember about your night’s dream. Alternatively, you can capture your dreams in a notebook. (You may have to try for a while until you have a morning when you actually remember your dream upon waking.) Revisit your voice or text notes later and consider how your dreams relate to waking life. Do they shift your attention? Show you a priority to focus on? Reveal a secret wish?

3. Build a daydream. Draw your own set of 7 goblets and fill each one with a picture, pattern, or design representing a dream that you hold for yourself and your writing. Label each goblet if you wish — or let the images speak for themselves. Keep your creation in a place where it will occasionally catch your eye and inspire you.

4. Trace dreams through time. Consider the dreams that you once held for yourself as scholar, the dreams that sustain your writing life today, and the dreams that guide your way forward. Which of those dreams have come true already? Have any thwarted dreams led to new, unexpected opportunities? What do you learn about yourself and your work by tracing your dreams through time?

5. Create a dream-catcher. Designate a space to record night-dreams, daydreams, or both in the coming months. This may be a special journal or a small box where you stash dreams scribbled on separate scraps of loose paper. Start with the ones you capture via prompt 2! Situate your dream-catcher physically near your more conventional research and writing materials to remind yourself that all your ways of knowing are intertwined.

6. Engage with your dreams. Dream up your ideal article, thesis, or book — a scholarly endeavor that (so far) exists only in the realm of fantasy. What’s stopping you from realizing that dream, or at least taking a step toward it?

7. Live the dream. What is one tiny, simple step you can take today to align your scholarly life more closely with your most dazzling dream for the world?

As you live the theme of DREAM this month, what shifts in or out of focus for you? How might you DREAM more deeply, more delightfully, and more audaciously as you move through the rest of the year?

Thank you for joining us for #AcWriMoments! We’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a comment to let us know what you’re learning, trying, and discovering this month.

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STYLISH WRITING INTENSIVE: Do you dream of writing more stylish and engaging scholarly prose? Transform your writing style in just 3 days with Helen’s signature Stylish Writing Intensive, which runs over three non-consecutive weekdays on Mon July 22, Wed July 24, and Fri July 26, or over three consecutive days in October. SPECIAL OFFER: Sign up for the Stylish Writing Intensive in July 2024 and get Helen’s 6-week Creativity Catalyst course for free (a $550 value). Learn more and register here.

CUSTOM WRITING SUPPORT: Cultivate your unique scholarly genius through Story-Argument support from Margy, creator of the Story-Argument model. For a one-on-one service option, check out Margy’s Story-Argument Foundations Service, and for a communal experience, consider booking an interactive, on-site Story-Argument Workshop customized to the needs and goals of your group. Set up a free call today to explore possibilities!

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Welcome back to #AcWriMoments, a yearlong experiment in purposeful scholarship creation. On the first day of each month in 2024, we offer you a guidepost with a unique theme and simple prompts for living out the theme as a scholar and a human. Return to the guidepost all month long, anytime you need support for cultivating SACRED (strategic, artisanal, creative, reflective, embodied, delicious) moments of communion with yourself and your work. May these offerings encourage you in your pursuit of whatever goals and visions you deem worthy of your attention—the most precious resource you have.

Theme for June 2024: CENTER

Picture a calendar year as a circle (or more precisely, an ellipse), inscribing Earth’s orbit around its gravitational Center, the Sun. By now, at the start of June, you’ve traveled nearly halfway around that circumference. Compared to the start of the year, you can now perceive the opposite side of the Center around which the year revolves. But it’s more than that: now that you’ve seen the Center from multiple angles, you can better imagine the whole. Centering, or reorienting toward the Center, with an eye toward situating within a larger whole, is a useful practice at any time, but especially in the middle of a process. If your 2024 feels messy so far, all the more reason to Center yourself within it now.

To Center is to draw a circle around a point, or more subtly, to situate something within a literal or metaphorical circle such that it is equidistant to every point on the circumference. The act of Centering defines what is essential, what is peripheral, and what is excluded. When you Center an object within a space (or an idea within an argument, or a character within a story), you claim its place in relationship to everything around it. And when you Center yourself in your own life, you claim your specific place in the world. Within your own set of boundaries, you act according to what is true and important to you.

Life is a push-and-pull away from and back toward your Center. You’re called outward to interact with others, expanding your awareness of the wider world, and back inward, remembering who you are. Through all these outward and inward movements, the Central point remains the same. At your Center are the values, ideas, and people most important to you — and when you focus on them, you find what you uniquely have to contribute to the world.

Our #AcWriMoments theme for June, CENTER, invites you pause and imagine yourself as the gravitational Center of your own life, much like the Sun within our solar system. Whatever the Center of your 2024 may be, you’re now in a better position to perceive it than you’ve ever been before, with enough of the year still remaining to make good use of your broadened perspective.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

• What goals and/or constraints have defined the circumference or structure of your 2024 so far? Has this circumference remained the same or shifted since January? Do you sense it may be time to redraw your circumference now?

• What ideas and ideals define the center around which the rest of your world revolves?

• What or whom have you intentionally included in your circle this year? Think physically, socially, professionally, and/or intellectually. What or who inhabits the periphery of the circle rather than the center? Are any adjustments in order?

• What or whom have you excluded from your circle this year? Where, if anywhere, have you felt excluded from others’ circles? What important information do these exclusions provide?

• What resources, relationships, or practices have helped you stay oriented to your center so far in 2024? How can you reinforce these sources of support?

PRACTICES & EXPERIMENTS

• Diagram your scholarly center. Draw three concentric circles. The outer circle represents the world at large, the middle circle is your discipline or academic discourse community, and the inner circle is your current project. Now, populate the diagram by filling in the questions and concepts that these circles revolve around. The largest circle can be about whatever broader context makes sense for you: humanity in general, the world of the 2020s, the scholarly enterprise, the current culture, etc. The middle circle can be about your discipline(s) broadly or about a particular scholarly conversation you participate in. The inner circle can be any project, large or small, in any stage of development, that you’re working on right now. As you situate your own work at the center of these larger circles, notice how this diagram helps you clarify or focus on your priorities.

• Diagram your personal center. Again, draw three concentric circles. The outer circle represents the world you live in, the middle circle is your immediate personal and professional environment, and the inner circle is you. Populate the diagram by filling in the values, beliefs, and debates that these circles revolve around and the people who inhabit each of its rings. As you situate yourself within your context, notice how this diagram helps you discern your particular place in the world.

As you live the theme of CENTER this month, what shifts into focus? Where and how can you reorient yourself toward your Center as you move into the second half of the year?

Thank you for joining us for #AcWriMoments! We’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a comment to let us know what you’re learning, trying, and discovering this month.

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COURSES & MEMBERSHIP: Center your writing practice with one of Helen’s many courses or retreats for scholarly writers, and join fellow writers from around the world in the WriteSPACE, the ultimate membership site for scholarly and professional writers who aim to lift their writing game. To try free for 30 days, click here and enter the discount code SNEAKPEEK.

CUSTOM WRITING SUPPORT: Receive one-on-one support in developing your scholarship through Margy’s Story-Argument Foundations Service. For a communal experience, consider booking an interactive, on-site Story-Argument Workshop customized to the needs and goals of your group. Set up a free call today to explore possibilities!

Subscribe now

Welcome back to #AcWriMoments, a yearlong experiment in purposeful scholarship creation. On the first day of each month in 2024, we offer you a guidepost with a unique theme and simple prompts for living out the theme as a scholar and a human. Return to the guidepost all month long, anytime you need support for cultivating SACRED (strategic, artisanal, creative, reflective, embodied, delicious) moments of communion with yourself and your work. May these offerings encourage you in your pursuit of whatever goals and visions you deem worthy of your attention—the most precious resource you have.

Theme for May 2024: GROW

As we move toward summer in the Northern Hemisphere, the earth is bursting with fresh life. The month of May is named for Maia, an earth goddess associated with the concept of increase (maius / maior = larger, greater). May is when germination comes to fruition.

To GROW is to increase in size or complexity, to mature, or to progress. Living beings grow (babies, forests) and so do intangibles like ideas and emotional connections. For scholars, manuscripts can evince both tangible and intangible forms of growth as increases in page counts hint at deepening understanding and expanded expertise.

The verb GROW can be transitive or intransitive, referring to an effect that you cultivate (“I grow manuscripts”) or to an experience you have (“I grow by writing manuscripts”). Either way, to effect or experience growth is to be alive to change — even when it happens imperceptibly to a body that is apparently at rest.

This May, look for growth in your life wherever you may notice it. See if you can loosen your grip on the imperative sense of the word “grow” (as in “grow up!” or “grow your impact!”) and instead sit with the growth that is already happening organically. Notice how and where you’re becoming stronger, wiser, more skilled, or broader in perspective.

Growth can be quick or slow, purposeful or spontaneous. Sometimes it’s attended by physical and emotional growing pains. However and whenever it comes, growth is what shows us our stories are still unfolding.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

• What has scholarly growth looked like for you in the past month or year? Think emotional, intellectual, or any other kind of growth. Be as specific as you can in describing to yourself the signs of growth.

• What do you hope scholarly growth will look like for you over the next month or year? What qualities or skills do you hope to strengthen? Note one specific strategy, resource, or relationship you can draw on to support your growth.

• How can you support the growth of others in your life? Think friends, family, colleagues, mentors. Whose growth do you want to invest in, and what is one resource or piece of guidance you can offer?

PRACTICES & EXPERIMENTS

• Notice the growth of your scholarship. Look over an old scholarly project of yesteryear and reacquaint yourself with the Younger You who created it. How have your ideas and skills developed since then? Notice too what Younger You knew that Current You has forgotten: how can your growth today be prompted by recovering and remembering something you used to know?

• Cultivate the growth of your scholar self. Invest in one new tool or resource that can help you grow in strength, skill, or wisdom this month. It could be a book, an experience, or anything tangible or intangible. It could even be something already in your possession that you just hadn’t put to use yet. Check in at the end of the month to see how much you’ve grown.

• Encourage the growth of another scholar. Offer a leg up, a word of encouragement, or a more tangible gift to a fellow scholar this month. Choose something that can genuinely help them toward becoming the future self they want to be.

As you live the theme of GROWTH this month, what new possibilities open up for you? How can you GROW into the insights that you need to move in, with, and toward your purpose as a scholar?

Thank you for joining us for #AcWriMoments! We’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a comment to let us know what you’re learning, trying, and discovering this month.

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COURSES & MEMBERSHIP: Write more, right now! Join Helen and fellow writers from around the world in the WriteSPACE, the ultimate membership site for scholarly and professional writers who aim to lift their writing game. To try free for 30 days, click here and enter the discount code SNEAKPEEK.

SERVICES & WORKSHOPS: Receive one-on-one support in developing your scholarship through Margy’s Story-Argument Foundations Service. For a communal experience, consider booking an interactive, on-site Story-Argument Workshop customized to the needs and goals of your group. Set up a free call today to explore possibilities!

Subscribe now

Welcome back to #AcWriMoments, a yearlong experiment in purposeful scholarship creation. On the first day of each month in 2024, we offer you a guidepost with a unique theme and simple prompts for living out the theme as a scholar and a human. Return to the guidepost all month long, anytime you need support for cultivating SACRED (strategic, artisanal, creative, reflective, embodied, delicious) moments of communion with yourself and your work. May these offerings encourage you in your pursuit of whatever goals and visions you deem worthy of your attention—the most precious resource you have.

Theme for April 2024: LISTEN

“Listen to your life.” This is how our friend, writing retreat coach Michelle Boyd expresses the idea that a well-lived scholarly life isn’t just about chasing goals and checking boxes. It’s also about leaving space for the unknown and unknowable so that new insights can bubble up. Listening enables course correction and meaning-making amidst the uncertainties and confusions along the way.

To LISTEN is to pay attention: to devote effort to noticing and to being shaped by what you notice. The term especially applies to auditory inputs but can also include the still, small voice within you or subtle cues from the world around you. Listening requires being quiet and receptive, but it’s not a passive stance. When you Listen, you resist imposing your own will or implementing a pre-conceived plan; instead, you allow the wisdom of ambiguity to guide you.

As we move into April — a month whose name may derive from aperire, the Latin word for open — what messages are you holding yourself open to hearing or receiving? Which areas of your life are you Listening to?

Learning to Listen isn’t always easy for scholarly writers; we’re programmed to transmit our own words into the world for others to hear. To Listen is to let worlds both inner and outer speak to us instead — and to take the time to absorb and process what we hear.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

• What literal sounds do you most associate with your scholarly life? Think birdsong, music, children at play, the tapping of fingers on a keyboard—any sounds that comprise the soundtrack of your life and work. What new layers of meaning do you find in your work when you pay attention to its soundtrack?

• As a scholar, when do you find that listening comes naturally, and when do you find yourself tuning out, forgetting, or resisting receptivity? How might you cultivate a habit of paying closer attention?

• Where can you reliably find a place of outer tranquility that enables you to hear the quiet voice within?

PRACTICES & EXPERIMENTS

• Listen to your outer world. Pay attention to whatever inputs surround you right now, whether in the same room as you or echoing from a distance, and whether in person or through electronic inputs. Take note of which voices (human or nonhuman) feel discordant to you and which ones feel resonant. Do you want to shift the balance of the voices within your earshot? Notice what others’ voices can teach you, intentionally or inadvertently. Practice seeing your outer world as a rich source of information.

• Listen to your inner world. Find a quiet place where you can listen in solitude to your own inner voice. Close your eyes and focus on the beating of your heart and the rhythm of your breath. Let your mind wander where it will. Notice what you wish for, what you wonder about, what in your own self is calling for your attention. Practice seeing your inner world as a rich source of information.

As you live the theme of LISTEN this month, what new possibilities open up for you? How does Listening help you receive the insights that you need to move in, with, and toward your purpose as a scholar?

Thank you for joining us for #AcWriMoments! We’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a comment to let us know what you’re learning, trying, and discovering this month.

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COURSES & MEMBERSHIP: Listen to and learn about the nuances of scholarly prose in Helen’s new 6-week Wordcraft Catalyst course, which launches on April 6. WriteSPACE members get a 10% discount, and WriteSPACE Studio members save 20%.

SERVICES & WORKSHOPS: Receive one-on-one support in developing your scholarship through Margy’s Story-Argument Foundations Service. For a communal experience, consider booking an interactive, on-site Story-Argument Workshop customized to the needs and goals of your group. Set up a free call today to explore possibilities!

Welcome back to #AcWriMoments, a yearlong experiment in purposeful scholarship creation. On the first day of each month in 2024, we offer you a guidepost with a unique theme and simple prompts for living out the theme as a scholar and a human. Return to the guidepost all month long, anytime you need support for cultivating SACRED (strategic, artisanal, creative, reflective, embodied, delicious) moments of communion with yourself and your work. May these offerings encourage you in your pursuit of whatever goals and visions you deem worthy of your attention—the most precious resource you have.

Theme for March 2024: RISK

A RISK is a daring attempt, an uncertain effort, a leap of faith. As a verb, to Risk is to exert yourself in a difficult undertaking. Risk carries no guarantee of success, but its potential rewards can be immense: the chance to create a life that’s truly yours. As we March bravely into the coming month — which is aptly named for Mars, the Roman god of war — consider what is worth Risking in your scholarly life. And consider how you might cultivate within yourself a belief that if (or when!) you fall flat on your face, you’ll find the courage to get back up again.

An academic Risk can be as small as selecting a saucy article title or unusual metaphor, or as massive as committing to an unorthodox dissertation topic, research area, or career path. Of course, the choice to take Risks within the (at times, let’s be honest, rather stodgy) halls of academia is entirely yours. If you’d prefer to play it safe, that’s your call. But remember that adhering to convention is its own form of Risk. In this one life that you have to live, following all the rules can mean missing out on adventures both large and small.

Helen recalls the biggest professional risk she ever took:

The year that my husband and I both turned 40 — with three kids, a house, and two good jobs (in my case, I had tenure at top tier Midwestern research university) — we decided to sell the house, pack all our earthly belongings into a 40-ft container, and move to my husband’s homeland of Aotearoa New Zealand, with no jobs or likely job prospects in the academic fields we had left behind.

Those first few years were tough, as we struggled to find our feet personally and professionally. But eventually we both reinvented ourselves in new careers that suited us even better than the ones we’d left behind, and our children got to grow up amongst friends and family in one of the most beautiful countries on earth, a place with strong social and community values that we cherish. Not long after we moved here, I experienced an unexpected creative flowering as a poet and artist, like a rose bush blooming more abundantly than ever after a hard pruning, and I shifted from writing about modernist poetry to writing about scholarly writing.

Would any of that have happened if we had stayed behind in our safe, comfortable life? Today, more than two decades after we took that leap into the unknown, our children have grown up into curious, confident adults, and I have learned to see risktaking as the doorway to transformation.

Margy reflects on how risk has shaped her life and work:

My hand shook as I pressed “send” on that fateful email to my beta testers back in 2019. With that one email, I was extinguishing the old ScholarShape, centered on editing services, without knowing whether the new ScholarShape I dreamed of would be born in its place: an original body of work advancing Story-Argument as an innovative approach to scholarship creation for the 21st century. In that email, I shared with beta testers the first version of the first video in a foundational Story-Argument resource that would lead to many more. Today, a revised version of that same video nestles within the ScholarShape Archives alongside many others I’ve created. Countless detours, catastrophes, and faceplants later, plus a few successes, here I am still building this body of work, more committed to it than ever.

How did I find the courage to send that first email back in 2019? I’m not an especially courageous person, so I use a simple trick that I call the Deathbed Test whenever I need to summon the will to leap off a cliff. The test is to ask myself, “If I don’t try this, will I regret it on my deathbed?” If the answer is Yes, I leap. The Deathbed Test has led me to every worthwhile place I’ve been over the years: into grad school and through it; across oceans and inside ancient ruins; in and out of marriages; and through many a grueling day’s work, some of which have paid off.

The thing about risk is that not every individual risk pays off. Yet somehow, on aggregate, all the risks taken together, with their assorted wins and losses, can add up to a life that feels worth living. There must have been easier ways than ScholarShape to support myself all these years. But looking back, none of the struggle feels wasted. Every moment fits into a larger story, the disasters and triumphs all bound up together in one intricate design.

We’d love to hear your stories too: of risks taken, deferred, or perhaps still dreamed of.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

• What is the role of risk in your scholarly work? What kinds of risks do you take most easily, and what kinds feel more difficult? Which risk has paid off for you the most, in expected or unexpected ways?

• How do you decide whether to take a risk? Is it a gut feeling, or the product of studied analysis, or some combination of intuition and intellect? Is there anything you’d like to shift in how you assess (and follow through with) risk?

• What resources and relationships are most supportive to you when navigating risky scholarly terrain?

PRACTICES & EXPERIMENTS

• Risk something small. A clever turn of phrase, a stylish expression, an unscripted conversation?

• Risk something big. A bolder thesis, a more ambitious proposal, a heart placed further out on your sleeve?

RISKY RESOURCES

• Watch Helen’s recent interview on “Writing and Risktaking” with risk-embracing criminologist David R. Goyes.

• Listen to “Your Writing Process as Epic Quest,” a 2021 podcast episode where Margy offers an early version of her Quest framing for navigating the process of scholarly Story-Argument creation. When you view your work as a Quest, the challenges become fascinating plot points, and every risk fits into a larger Story(-Argument). You’ll find a more recent iteration of the Quest framing in the free Scholar Magic course, and still another evolution is on the way for all who are registered for the free course.

• Read Helen’s book chapter on “Risk and Resilience” in her book Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write.

As you live the theme of Risk this month, what possibilities open up for you that you hadn’t noticed before? How does Risk, as a lens, help you commit to what you value and hold onto your purpose as you navigate the obstacles—and receive the gifts—that life sends your way?

Thank you for joining us for #AcWriMoments! We’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a comment to let us know what you’re learning, trying, and discovering this month.

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Leave a comment

COURSES & MEMBERSHIP: Trying to muster the courage to become the risktaking scholarly writer you’ve always wanted to be? Sign up for the Stylish Writing Intensive, Helen’s flagship 3-day online retreat for academic and professional writers who aspire to take their writing from stodgy to stylish — or from adequate to amazing — over the course of a single long weekend. Book before March 15 to get Helen’s new 6-week Wordcraft Catalyst bundled with your registration for FREE (a $550 value). Annual members of Helen’s WriteSPACE membership community take an additional 10% off.

SERVICES & WORKSHOPS: Ready for a leap into one-on-one support for developing your scholarly project for publication? Learn how Margy’s Story-Argument Foundations Service can support your process. For a communal experience, consider booking an interactive, on-site Story-Argument Workshop customized to the needs and goals of your group. Set up a free call today to explore possibilities!

Welcome back to #AcWriMoments, a yearlong experiment in purposeful scholarship creation. On the first day of each month in 2024, we offer you a guidepost with a unique theme and simple prompts for living out the theme as a scholar and a human. Return to the guidepost all month long, anytime you need support for cultivating SACRED (strategic, artisanal, creative, reflective, embodied, delicious) moments of communion with yourself and your work. May these offerings encourage you in your pursuit of whatever goals and visions you deem worthy of your attention—the most precious resource you have.

Theme for February 2024: DEDICATE

To DEDICATE is to set apart, especially for a sacred purpose. When we dedicate our time, energy, resources, or the fruits of our labor to a particular cause or object of devotion, we are showing ourselves and the world what we value. We’re investing in what matters most.

Writing doesn’t have to be at the center of your life to receive your Dedication. Even in stolen moments carved from the margins of your life, you can offer it your highest integrity and purest intentions. Fittingly, the name for this month, February, derives from an ancient Roman festival of purification.

Releasing your “finished” work to the world can be an act of Dedication too. When you offer your writing to someone or something beyond you — readers, family, community — your words can travel and transform in ways you might not have imagined. Your scholarship can be Dedicated to anyone and everyone whose mind is opened by your ideas.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

• What are you Dedicated to in your work? What feels “worth it” to you? What treasures, tangible and intangible, do you value most?

• How do you know when you’re on the right track as you head in the direction of your goals or dreams?

• When you focus on what you value most in your work, what falls away, revealing itself to be less important?

PRACTICES & EXPERIMENTS

• Dedicate a space. If you already have a physical space dedicated to your writing, take some time to clean and/or organize it this month. Pay attention to its shape, details, quality of light, or any features that strike you, and notice how they flavor your work process or product. If you don’t have a dedicated space for your work, see if you can clear out a corner of a room or a stretch of blank wall for this purpose. Consider this an opportunity to remind yourself that you believe in and value your work.

• Dedicate a document. If your current project exists in the form of multiple drafts, and you feel ready to distill and commit to a single master draft, try consolidating all of your drafts into one main document. The other drafts can become notes and source documents that you pull from as you build out your main draft and develop it into the version you’ll submit. Alternatively, if you’re in a messier phase of the process, see if you can consolidate some of your notes into a smaller number of documents to focus on. To what thesis might you Dedicate your newly assembled document(s)?

• Dedicate yourself. You are your own greatest offering. When you dedicate yourself, you offer your full attention and care to a specific person, task, project, value, or cause. This month, try warming up for your scholarly writing sessions with a few minutes of free-writing in response to the prompt, “Today, I dedicate myself to . . . .” Try to come up with a different noun or verb each day, then let your writing flow from there.

As you live the theme of Dedicate this month, what possibilities open up for you that you hadn’t noticed before? How does Dedicate, as a lens, help you commit to what you value and hold onto your purpose as you navigate the obstacles—and receive the gifts—that life sends your way?

Thank you for joining us for #AcWriMoments! We’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a comment to let us know what you’re learning, trying, and discovering this month.

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COURSES & COMMUNITY: Want to dedicate yourself to finding pleasure and purpose in your writing? Sign up for Helen’s 6-week Pleasure Catalyst, which starts on February 3! Members of Helen’s global WriteSPACE community get up to 20% off.

SERVICES & WORKSHOPS: Wishing for one-on-one support as you develop your scholarly project for publication? Learn how Margy’s Story-Argument Foundations Service can guide your every step. For a communal experience, consider booking an interactive, on-site Story-Argument Workshop customized to the needs and goals of your group. Set up a free call today to explore possibilities!

Welcome to 2024!

At a time of year when we’re deluged with reminders of all the fresh starts and new intentions we’re supposed to be initiating, we invite you to do the opposite. Instead of plastering a whole new goal on your vision board, what about committing to doing more of the same?

Specifically, we’re thinking of #AcWriMoments. Back in November 2023, you signed up to receive writing prompts throughout the month to help you enter into SACRED (strategic, artisanal, creative, reflective, embodied, delicious) moments of communion with yourself and your research each day. A regular practice of #AcWriMoments can help us find and maintain courage, clarity, and purpose in our scholarly work.

After November ended, we missed those daily prompts, and we know that many of you did too! So now we return with a fresh twist on the concept.

On the first day of each month throughout 2024, we’ll offer you a unique theme to focus on in your cultivation of #AcWriMoments, along with simple prompts for integrating that theme into your daily life and work. You can return to this Monthly Guidepost again and again, experimenting with different suggestions and practices as you pursue whatever goals and visions you have for yourself that month.

By returning to the same theme over and over—and framing your actions and choices through its lens—you can build a sense of cohesion and structure into a process that so often bewilders us with its messy recursiveness. When we live by a monthly theme, we discover that the intentions we set in our work don’t have to be novel to be effective. They can be as much about renewal as newness. Remember that Janus, the Roman god for whom this month is named, looks both backward and forward.

Theme for January 2024: WELCOME

To WELCOME is to receive with open arms. When you Welcome someone or something into your life, you transition into its presence with a willing heart, ready to see what happens and to make the most of it. We can’t control what life throws at us or how our efforts will turn out, but we can adopt a posture of curiosity and acceptance.

In scholarly work, a spirit of Welcome enables us to receive surprising new information and to update our mental models accordingly. It empowers us to craft scholarship that invites readers in and helps them access new ideas that they may at first resist.

The theme of Welcome fosters generosity, connection, and possibility. As you experiment with the theme this month, try out whichever of these questions, practices, and experiments appeal to you, or feel free to devise your own.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

• What are you leaving behind in 2023 so that you have plenty of room to Welcome 2024?

• What are you looking forward to this year and this month? What are you hoping for? What feels easy to Welcome?

• What feels difficult to Welcome, and what support is available to help you?

• Whom do you want to Welcome into your work? Whether students, fellow scholars, or other audiences, how can you invite them in, guide them through, and deliver on your promise to them?

• Who are your role models for scholarly Welcoming? Think of people whom you admire, whether in person or on the page, for their skill at inviting others into new ideas. What techniques or qualities might you emulate in your own work?

PRACTICES & EXPERIMENTS

• Create a simple altar, wall map, vision board, or journal page to commemorate what you are already Welcoming into your life and work: not something new that you have yet to create or do, but something you can already feel germinating.

• Revise a passage of your writing with your reader in mind. What journey do you want to lead them on? How will you invite them onto the journey, and how will you lead them through it? Look for ways to make your readers feel Welcome inside the writing you create for them.

• Develop a simple Welcoming affirmation, for example: “This January, I welcome ____ into my life, and I will practice receiving it in whatever forms it comes to me.” Place the affirmation someplace where you’ll see it often, such as your bathroom mirror or phone screen.

As you live the theme of Welcome this month, what possibilities open up for you that you never could have planned? How does Welcome, as a lens, help you notice the good, (re)connect with your purpose, and move gracefully with the obstacles life sends your way?

Remember that you have the power to Welcome anything and everything, and that Welcoming what is already in your life can be the most transformative practice of all. When we turn a fresh gaze on old ideas, experiences, and struggles, we can harness all the potency of newness combined with the wisdom of having already been here.

Thank you for joining us for #AcWriMoments! We’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a comment to let us know what you’re learning, trying, and discovering this month.

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Want some extra inspiration? Kick off the New Year with 30 Days of Writing with Pleasure, Helen’s free January writing challenge. Sign up here if you’re new to Helen’s newsletter, Helen’s Word, or follow these instructions to opt in if you already subscribe.

Freddie plan(t)s an #AcWriMoment. (Photo by Helen Sword)

Back at the beginning of #AcWriMoments, we invited you into this adventure with a question:

What unique perspectives, experiences, constellations of values, and capacity for pleasure and joy define who you are as a scholar and as a participant in the larger scholarly enterprise?

It’s a question we each could return to many times over the years without ever fully answering. But any time we explore it — including (obliquely) by way of the #AcWriMoments prompts shared this month — we can reconnect with our unique purpose and find the courage to carry on in our scholarly work.

Of the six types of SACRED #AcWriMoments this month, which did you find most nourishing, revelatory, or productive? Was it the Strategic moments, or the Artisanal ones? Perhaps the Creative or Reflective? Or maybe the Embodied and Delicious moments resonated most with you?

Through your thinking and writing this month, what have you discovered about your current project, your larger body of work, or yourself as a writer?

Whatever your responses, we trust that you’ve found a wealth of gentle, yet expansive new ways of approaching your work this month. And we hope that you now feel better equipped to make the kind of intangible writing progress that may not always be measurable but that can, when you pay close enough attention, surely be felt.

For this final #AcWriMoment, consider these three suggestions for planning (or planting!) fresh #AcWriMoments in the weeks and months ahead.

1. Save these #AcWriMoments prompts and create your own.

• Bookmark this page so you can return to the prompts anytime and reuse them in the future.

• Continue your adventure with A Year of #AcWriMoments: Monthly prompts that extend a specific them through an entire month.

• Create your own #AcWriMoments prompts inspired by the ones shared here!

2. Line up your writing resources for next month, next year, and beyond.

• Subscribe to Helen’s Word (Helen’s Substack) for weekly inspiration, wordcraft, and colorful news from the bestselling author of Stylish Academic Writing and Writing with Pleasure.

• Subscribe to ScholarShape (Margy’s Substack) for invitations into your Story-Argument, the body of work only you can create.

• Subscribe to the podcasts, socials, and email lists of the lovely Contributors whose prompts have resonated with you this month.

3. Share a comment on this post and let us know what you’re plan(t)ing for your next #AcWriMoment!

Thank you for participating in #AcWriMoments! The journey doesn’t end here. Please stay in touch and let us know what kinds of topics and questions you’d like us to support you with in future resources.

Helen Sword and Margy Thomas

“Wot knot you got?” “That’s a wot-job knot!” (Drawing by Selina Tusitala Marsh)

Are you doing your dream job? Some of us are. Some of us aren’t. But what if you could find a way to infuse the one thing that “no one EVER has to tell you to do” into the job you’re doing now?

Let me tell you my story. I was the first Pacific Islander (Samoan and Tuvaluan bloodlines) to be selected as Poet Laureate of Aotearoa New Zealand. My academic research focuses on marginalized Pacific literary voices, so I wanted to offer a positive, vibrant counter to negative stereotypes about Pacific Islanders in the media. But I couldn’t be the kind of traditional Poet Laureate that everyone expected me to be.

Instead, I took the one thing that no one EVER has to tell me to do – doodling, scrawling, playing with line and picture-making – and created a children’s book character called Mophead, who gets teased as a child for her kinky hair but later grows up to be the Poet Laureate.

When the children at the schools I visited asked Mophead for advice on their knottiest problems, I turned their questions around and encouraged them to be “led by line” to their own solutions. Now drawn lines infuse my academic work as well as my children’s books; I interweave spoken, written, drawn, blood, and land lines to create decolonial spaces in which to read Pacific Literature. Doodling, in other words, has become part of my job!

Today’s prompt is inspired by my latest Mophead book, Wot Knot You Got? Mophead’s Guide to Life:

Do Mini-Mophead’s graphic exercise (have fun - you don’t have to be an artist!) and draw yourself in your dream job. Then freewrite in response to the following question: “How can I infuse my scholarly writing with the one thing that no one EVER has to tell me to do?”

Wot Knot You Got? Mophead’s Guide to Life will be published on December 1 by Auckland University Press. You can find all of my Mophead books here: www.mophead.co.nz.

Selina Tusitala Marsh, poet, scholar, and graphic memoirist

See all Contributors’ bios here

Image by Christine Martell, Visuals Speak (used under license)

Is there something you are avoiding writing? Maybe it seems a bit “out there” or “weird”? 

You may not use the word “weird”. You might say something like…

• “No one really cares about this topic.”

• “No one is going to read this journal article.”

• “I’d love to write about X, but no one will give me a job/tenure/funding if I do that.”

When you tell yourself that your research is weird, you don’t give it the time, energy, and respect it deserves.

If you decide you have to write “safer” things, you’ll struggle to stay interested and you won't produce your best work.

Being an academic means being enthusiastic about some narrowly defined topic.

The research and writing you want to do is interesting and important. It may feel risky to publish it. However, it’s hard to assess the risks properly if you don’t even let yourself write a draft. 

Use today’s #AcWriMoment to explore what feels risky in your work.

Try freewriting, mind-mapping, or other creative approaches.

When the voices in your head start, turn their comments into challenges!

• “You think that’s weird? Well, I haven’t even touched on …” 

• “You think they’d take my Real [Insert discipline here] Scholar™ card away for that? Well, there’s more..”

Your goal is to explore what you really want to say.

Working on something that you may never publish may feel like you are squandering precious writing time.

I encourage you to do it anyway. Experiment. Just for this session. Allow yourself to write something you are intrinsically motivated to write, even if you’ll never share it with anyone. 

You can assess the risks and potential benefits of sharing it later. Then decide whether to revise it into a form you can share.

Enjoy your writing!

Would it feel safer to take this kind of risk if you knew you were writing regularly? Join the Academic Writing Studio for coworking, group coaching, and more.

Jo Van Every

See all Contributors’ bios here

Some days it feels like we’re writing in zigzags! (Photo by Marialuisa Aliotta)

Imagine the following: You realise the time has finally come for you to sit down and write up (your thesis, paper, book, whatever). So, you open your editor and finally make a start.

You write the first sentence, then you pause, you read it, and you decide you don’t like it. So what do you do next? You delete it… and start again. You write a sentence, you pause, you read it… and guess what? you still don’t like it! and so you delete it. Again. You think to yourself, let’s try again… you write a sentence, you read it, you don’t like it…

Does it sound familiar? I must confess it happens to me lots of times. I guess this is because I am a perfectionist and I would want to write a perfect sentence straight away. Unfortunately, this type of writing (I once heard a colleague calling is zigzag writing) can be a recipe for disaster.

You may end up spending a lot of time just to find yourself with two or three sentences at the end of the day.

If zigzag writing is a problem for you, a better approach may be to draft quickly and ... edit slowly.

Drafting quickly involves going with the flow of thoughts, ideas, and concepts that come to mind. Fix them down on paper (or on your computer) without worrying about structure, grammar, punctuation. If you realize you need to add a reference or a figure, just use a place holder ([ref], [insert figure]), but do not stop your train of thought (or your thoughts may be gone forever).

Then, once you have produced some content, take a step back. Look at your text and take the time to make sure your content is presented in a meaningful order; group together similar ideas and concepts, re-arrange some text if needed and generate new one to create better links between paragraphs or sections.

Iterate until you feel your text flows.

Separating out drafting from editing is sometimes necessary because these actions involve different parts of our brains: drafting requires *creative* skills, while editing requires *analytical* skills. This is also the best way to make progress with your writing.

Interested in trying it out? Here is what to do:

1. Identify a specific topic you want to write about and briefly plan what you want to say.

2. Set a timer for 15 minutes and write without stopping (it’s a lot harder than you think!) or re-reading what you have just written (in fact, you can reduce your editor window to one or two lines only).

3. When the time is up, stop writing, take a few minutes' break, then repeat step 2.

At the end of these two bursts of writing, you should have enough material to start working with it. Now spend time (in fact as long as you need) to critically revisit your text.

If you wish to go deeper into the different steps of academic writing, check out my book and my blog for more tips and tools: 

• Mastering Academic Writing in the Sciences: A Step-by-Step Guide by Marialuisa Aliotta

• http://marialuisaaliotta.wordpress.com

And if you need more support, feel free to get in touch to explore ways in which I can help: 

• https://academiclife.coachesconsole.com

Marialuisa Aliotta, author of Mastering Academic Writing in the Sciences

See all Contributors’ bios here

Professor Rainbow comes to town, with thanks to Jillian Hess from Day 13, “Create your writing alter egos”
(Notebook scribblings and photo by Helen Sword)

Color helps us think, and color brings us joy. That’s a winning combination for any writer!

Looking back over my own scholarly life, I can see that my wordcraft has always been suffused with color:

• In high school and college, I used Crayola crayons to highlight patterns of imagery in the literary texts I studied — marking up Hamlet’s soliloquy, for example, in Burnt Orange (to be) and Indigo (not to be), or Dylan Thomas’ “Fern Hill” in Periwinkle, Forest Green, and Goldenrod: “And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows / In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs / Before the children green and golden / Follow him out of grace . . . .”

• As an early-career academic, I sublimated my pre-tenure stress into a shopping spree at Staples, loading up on colored file boxes and folders to organize my contributions to Research (blue), Teaching (green), and Service (yellow).

• Later, as a scholar of academic writing, I developed a diagnostic tool called The Writer’s Diet, which uses color-coded highlighting to help writers recognize patterns of excess and clutter in their prose.

• And don’t even get me started on all the different ways that I’ve used colorful analog tools such as paper, notebooks, markers, stickers, washi tape, and post-it notes to organize information and illuminate key ideas. Nor has the digital realm escaped my color mania. (Did you know that you can change the default colors in Track Changes to make your editorial suggestions look like willowy green branches or cool blue rivers rather than bloody red slash marks?)

Once upon a time, I regarded my passion for color as a quirky manifestation of my Younger Self: creative, irreverent, but certainly not scholarly. Most of my academic publications, after all, took the form of black letters marching with military precision across stark white pages — no fuchsia fonts or chartreuse curlicues anywhere in sight.

In recent years, however, as I’ve learned more about the neuropsychology of color, I’ve come to understand writing in color as a sophisticated intellectual and emotional strategy, not just child’s play.

Feel free to adapt this prompt to suit your own ways of seeing, thinking, and finding joy in writing:

Today, write in color — whatever that means to you.

Are you looking for more creativity and color in your scholarly life? Step into the WriteSPACE, a vibrant international writing community with members in 30+ countries. You’ll get premium access to resources, workshops, and tools designed to help you hone your wordcraft, sharpen your style, and coax your writing gently but firmly out the door! Click here to try free for 30 days.