It was 2019 when I was asked to give a workshop on creative writing for PhD students at the University of Amsterdam. In retrospect, this was the start of the journey that has lead me to become a creative entrepreneur and to develop a series of workshops, such as Creative Writing for Academics and Storytelling for Grant Applicants.
This blogpost invites you on that journey, providing you with five tips to explore how to integrate creative writing into your academic work.
Curious about the foundation of this work? In my article Doing Academia Differently, I tell the story of what pushed me to explore creative writing as a tool in academic writing.
Tastes like more? I’m offering multi-sessions workshops for academic writers of all disciplines; workshops specifically designed for grant applicants; as well as personal coaching.
The power of creative writing
Creative writing is an effective tool to catch readers’ attention while grounding them into scenes. It is also a tool that helps develop a narrative even though you may think that your work is not a story—it is.
Academic authors who insert creative writing into their texts provide their readers with splashes of sensory experience. They draw their readers into the world that they researched; they take them by the hand, cracking the codes of conventions to help them enter some of the most obscure areas of our brain, of our bodies, and of our societies. Smells come to life; colours become pointers for grounding the reader into a scene; the light signals specific moments in time; shapes arise, taking the form of human and non-human characters.
With creative writing, an author is no longer only telling, but showing what their research led them to discover, and what that means for our understanding of the world. Creative writing endows a text with more space and more freedom for readers to appropriate it. A creative text doesn’t tell the reader how to read; it creates a setting from which subtexts emerge, there for the reader to immerse themselves in an experience.
Tip 1. Ground your reader into a scene
A rule of thumb to get your reader immersed in your material is to ground them into a scene, again and again. A scene is like a zoomed-in photograph; it pauses on a specific moment at a specific place, giving cues for the reader to experience that moment. The broken white colour of the wall, the smell of coffee lingering around, the tic-tac-tic-tic-tac of fingers pressing laptops keys, the moist eyes of the dog looking at you while you write. Scenes transport the reader into another space and time.
A scene could be close to you, a moment during the research process, such as when you open a dusty, classified box in the archive; your first encounter with a respondent; your sensations when arriving nearby the embassy hosting a political refugee. But a scene can also be about something more distant. The setting of a speech, the atmosphere of the parliament, the mood of a crowd, the frame of a report.
Not all your writing needs to be staged as a scene. But inserting a scene regularly will make the reader come with you along your research journey. If you lose them along the way, they’ll find you back at your old woden desk, by the window, or at the river side. Just allow them to be on your side, wherever you are.
Tip 2. Evoke all the senses
Have you written your first scene already? Great! Now, check how many senses your scene evokes. The more senses, the stronger the scene becomes. Was the coffee bitter? Which noise came through? What kind of light shone on the walls? Was the room smelling of wooden floors, or was the building sweating with concrete off-gassing? Was the air crisp, thick, warm? Make your reader taste, hear, see, smell, and touch what you have been tasting, hearing, seeing, smelling and touching. Or even better: steer your reader’s experience by evoking those senses that will make them concentrate on the details you want them to see. Each sensory detail is a tool to attract their attention, paving the way for your theoretical and analytical claim to land naturally.
Tip 3. Keep the language as simple as possible
Academic writers are notorious for throwing expensive words at each corner of their sentences. Sometimes those words have their purpose; they bring in nuances or technical details that couldn’t be mentioned otherwise. Although they have qualities in common, metaphors and metonymies are not the same, and identifying a synecdoche can at times be helpful. But the most powerful texts remain those where jargon has been replaced by everyday language.
Your best ideas will especially land if you can convert them into simple and elegant images.
Take Virginia Woolf’s credo for instance: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” No one can claim not to understand her claim because of the language. And yet, her sentence shelters a powerful criticism of patriarchal societies, which has resonated worldwide for nearly 100 years.
Tip 4. Establish who and what are the characters of your story
While scenes should be cornerstones of your writing on a micro level, your narrative will especially thrive if you establish a conversation between different characters throughout your entire piece. A character can be human: yourself as the researcher, a respondent, a historical figure; but it can also be a non-human actor: a building, a document, a plant, a concept, a theory.
To get you going, here is a list of question that may spark a beginning: how do your characters feel? Are they introvert, extravert, complacent, stubborn, conservative, expanding? How do they make you feel and why? What would you like to know about them that you don’t know yet (think wild, imagine they are human)? Is it easy to communicate with them, why, why not, what do they keep secret? From experience, I noticed that these questions are particularly generative when your charachter is a non-human one.
The point is to establish dynamic relationships between the various characters in your work. As Helen Sword suggests in her fantastic writing guide Stylish Academic Writing, you may want to play around and copy classic plot structures, such as the murder mystery plot where the researcher searches for clues, follows a few hints, and applies their deductive power to solve the enigma. Or such as the Pride and Prejudice structure, where two seemingly incompatible concepts are brought into a single conceptual space, where they flirt, dance, argue and laugh to the point that they will never leave each other ever again. For more examples of possible plot structures, see Helen Sword’s chapter “The Story Net.”
Characters and their relationships will help you create focus into your writings; they will allow you to play around with points of view; and they will help the reader experience the different facets of your truth.
Tip 5. Work on the overall plot of your piece
Every writer experience at some point a writer’s block. I remember working on the introduction of my book and feeling completely lost in the myriads of possibilities to tell why I wrote the history of denaturalization law in the first place. I was saved by applying a very simple exercise: what was the story of that book? What happened? Why? And where was this going next? Instead of writing full paragraphs in all their details, I wrote a two-page sketch of my introduction plot. This allowed me to visualize the structure of the narrative. The rest came naturally.
In the end, every writer is a storyteller. Developing the overall arch of your story will help you find focus and directions, paving the way to insert scenes, sensory details, and character relationships.
Conclusion: From research to communication, and back again
Not only is creative writing an attractive means of communication for reaching a broader audience, but it is also a way to investigate the most complex aspects of our subjects of analysis.
Try it out, and you’ll be surprised by how creative writing doesn’t only change the way you write, but also the way you see and understand your own material in the first place. Five easy ways to start are: 1. Ground your reader into scenes; 2. Evoke as many senses as possible; 3. Keep the language as simple as possible; 4. Establish who and what your characters are; 5. Work on the overall plot of your piece.
As one of the participants in Amsterdam elegantly summarized: “When you are stuck, go and play.” A lesson that is not only valid for writing, but for life in general.
Need some help in starting to play?
