30 Days of #AcWriMoments

From Helen Sword and Margy Thomas

and

Oct 28, 2024

(#AcWriMoments collage and photo by Amy Lewis)

Welcome to #AcWriMoments: a collection of daily and monthly prompts for finding courage, clarity, and purpose in your scholarly work.

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

Our Comments section offers a great place for you to connect with our contributors and with each other. Please take an #AcWriMoment right now to tell us who you are and why you’re here.

Day 1: Share an #AcWriMoment

Helen Sword and Margy Thomas

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November 1, 2023

Day 1: Share an #AcWriMoment

The great-great-grandparent of #AcWriMoments is Wordsworth’s concept of spots of time. In The Prelude, Wordsworth movingly describes these experiences as 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.

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Day 2: Choose a name

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November 2, 2023

Day 2: Choose a name

Throughout my pregnancy, the central question swirling in my anxious thoughts wasn’t about health, money, or career. All of those would’ve made practical sense to worry about. But instead, what preoccupied me most was a narrative concern: What would be the baby’s name?

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Day 3: Write like Freddie

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November 3, 2023

Day 3: Write like Freddie

I can’t seem to stop writing about my dog Freddie, a snow-white bichon frise with a sweet disposition and a jaunty tail. He features in my most recent book, on the front page of my website, and even on my company’s “our team” page, where his official job description is “Cuddles Manager.”

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Day 4: Tell a story

Laura Portwood-Stacer

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November 4, 2023

Day 4: Tell a story

Your story might be about an ethnographic encounter, an archival document, a text you’ve closely analyzed, or some other kind of data that you’ve gathered. Imagine you’re relating your story to someone who isn’t familiar with your research yet...

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Day 5: Relieve loneliness through writing

November 5, 2023

Day 5: Relieve loneliness through writing

One of my favorite quotations from C.S. Lewis is this one: “We read to know we’re not alone.” Here Lewis expresses an important truth: Reading connects us with others who either validate our own experiences or challenge them in ways that, at best, are life-transforming; at worst, make us ponder.

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Day 6: Hook your reader

Martha B. Coven

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November 6, 2023

Day 6: Hook your reader

Imagine that the editor of your favorite newspaper, magazine, or blog hears about your academic work and invites you to contribute a piece for publication. It might be a short essay or a persuasive piece like an op-ed.
How would you begin that piece? What would draw the audience in and make them want to keep reading?

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Day 7: Make every moment count

November 7, 2023

Day 7: Make every moment count

Every time I submit a piece of writing to an editor, I hear the same complaint: Your introduction takes too long to get to the point. Essays, chapter, books—they all display my love for long and leisurely invitations to readers.

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Day 8: Trace a lineage

Margy Thomas and Helen Sword

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November 8, 2023

Day 8: Trace a lineage

Where do ideas come from? How do they evolve? How does an idea pass from one mind to another and shape-shift as it goes? When an idea takes on solid form in the world, what’s worth remembering about the traces it bears of previous iterations?

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Day 9: Write with your body

November 9, 2023

Day 9: Write with your body

Breathe, dear writer. Take in a deep inhale. Exhale as slowly as possible. Do that again—inhale to fill up, exhale to slow down. Notice the parts of you necessary for breathing. Your nose, mouth, lungs, belly—your body.

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Day 10: Go short, go long

November 10, 2023

Day 10: Go short, go long

Academic readers can find it hard to give good feedback on sentence length.
If you are getting it wrong, they will use feedback words that recall physical motions. Students who write too many short sentences will be accused of being “choppy.” On the other hand, if your sentences are too long, you might be told you are “rambling” or “wandering.”

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Day 11: Let your words take flight

Sophie Nicholls

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November 11, 2023

Day 11: Let your words take flight

In our everyday language, we often use the idea of flying and flight as metaphor: time flies; she’s a high-flier. We are hard wired to the primal experience of fight or flight. To fly can mean to escape, to take flight from something; and it can also mean that we find our freedom, take off, launch something upon the air, soar through open spaces.

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Day 12: Remember the clues from Younger You

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November 12, 2023

Day 12: Remember the clues from Younger You

What would Child Me do? For me, that’s one of the trustiest questions to ask myself anytime I feel truly stuck in work or in life. My Child Self knows what’s important.

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Day 13: Create your writing alter-egos

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November 13, 2023

Day 13: Create your writing alter-egos

Even the great Sir Paul McCartney struggled with creative block. Luckily for us, he applied his creative genius to solving this problem.

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Day 14: Smudge your lines

November 14, 2023

Day 14: Smudge your lines

In creativity research, the value of intuitive, playful, and unpredictable studio methods is well accepted. There are times when conventional approaches to writing and the values of proof, explanation, predictability, analysis, and linear argument may constrain, rather than enable, creative research.

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Day 15: Linger over good writing

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November 15, 2023

Day 15: Linger over good writing

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

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Day 16: Imagine your writing is worth the wait

November 16, 2023

Day 16: Imagine your writing is worth the wait

Time as a circumstance has an outsized influence on our thoughts about our writing. In fact, academics risk becoming so preoccupied with thoughts about time that they lose sight of their real focus, which is the quality of their work.

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Day 17: Pose questions to keep yourself curious

November 17, 2023

Day 17: Pose questions to keep yourself curious

We all hit roadblocks in our writing when we are not feeling inspired or motivated to keep going. Consider drafting a set of questions for yourself that you can respond to in order to get your writing juices flowing again.

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Day 18: Walk with poetry

Hussain Shah Rezaie

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November 18, 2023

Day 18: Walk with poetry

I wrote these verses a few months ago when the hope of ending my decade-long limbo as a refugee ignited within me, with my sponsorship to New Zealand in progress.

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Day 19: Find your happy penguins

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November 19, 2023

Day 19: Find your happy penguins

What do penguins have to do with productive writing? Everything!
When we come to our writing in a positive frame of mind, we are likely to write more skilfully, creatively, and with greater enjoyment than when we arrive at our desk burdened by anxiety, anger, or doubt.

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Day 20: Dialogue with a character

November 20, 2023

Day 20: Dialogue with a character

Think of a fictional character you know well. Tell that character about your work, or your problem, in your own written words. Then write down their reply, and continue to create a written dialogue between the two of you until it feels complete.

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Day 21: Plan a journey

Jane Rosenzweig

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November 21, 2023

Day 21: Plan a journey

Many years ago, I was fortunate to take a playwriting class with a prolific and well-known British playwright. After reading the draft of my one-act play, he told me that it read as if I had set out to write Little Red Riding Hood, but the only thing I knew about my play was that it was about a girl in a red cape (!).

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Day 22: Turn your self-judgments into writing mantras

November 22, 2023

Day 22: Turn your self-judgments into writing mantras

When you sit down to write, does your mind bring up a stream of nasty, judgmental thoughts that stop you in your tracks? It happens to everyone! I’ve found that the best way to counter these self-judgments is to create positive associations with writing that help you feel good while you’re doing it.

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Day 23: Spark a thank-you chain

Helen Sword and Margy Thomas

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November 23, 2023

Day 23: Spark a thank-you chain

As many of us learned in early childhood, saying “thank you” for a gesture we appreciate can be a simple yet powerful act of connection. Our thank-yous cement our bonds with one another, making explicit the positive effects we have on each other and expressing that we see each other and are seen in return.

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Day 24: Trust when it's ok not to write

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November 24, 2023

Day 24: Trust when it's ok not to write

I’d just opened my laptop when my niece floated in and flopped down on the couch. She’d been sleeping in my office for a week, which meant I’d been working from my bedroom floor, hunched over my laptop.

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Day 25: Receive the offering in front of you

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November 25, 2023

Day 25: Receive the offering in front of you

Walking home from the grocery store the other day, I got caught in the rain. Thanks for nothing, weather app! As I trudged along in the downpour, exchanging sympathetic glances with cyclists and fellow pedestrians, my thoughts started churning.

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Day 26: Write in color

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November 26, 2023

Day 26: Write in color

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

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Day 27: Straighten your zigzags

November 27, 2023

Day 27: Straighten your zigzags

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. And again. Does it sound familiar?

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Day 28: Write what you're avoiding

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November 28, 2023

Day 28: Write what you're avoiding

Is there something you are avoiding writing? Maybe it seems a bit “out there” or “weird”? When you tell yourself that your research is weird, you don’t give it the time, energy, and respect it deserves.

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Day 29: Do what no one has to tell you to do

November 29, 2023

Day 29: Do what no one has to tell you to do

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?

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Day 30: Plan(t) an #AcWriMoment

Margy Thomas and Helen Sword

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November 30, 2023

Day 30: Plan(t) an #AcWriMoment

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?

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Thank you for being part of #AcWriMoments! To help others discover this resource, please forward this message to friends and colleagues and encourage them to sign up too. 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! 🙏

Helen Sword and Margy Thomas

See all Contributors’ bios here

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