Tag: research

5 Easy Ways to Improve the Joy of Academic Writing

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.

Contact me for an offer

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?

Contact me for an offer

New Season of Creation

Dear readers,

It has been a year since my article “Doing Academia Differently” was published. Writing the article had been a transformative experience. It inspired me to design my workshops Creative Writing for Academics, and it pushed me to start working as a creative entrepreneur, staying in touch with academia, but from a different position.

While the article was finding its audience, and after I had had the chance to experience the power of making space for researchers to explore their writings in new ways, I experienced one of the most severe winters of my life and had to shut down for a couple of months.

Reading Katherine May’s Wintering helped me make sense of that experience. I loved the way she pays attention to nature’s capacity to adapt to extreme colds. From afar, it then may look as if nothing happens. But when we look closely, we see all kinds of activities going on: burgeons have formed on bare branches, still closed, but ready to burst open when spring comes. Hibernating animals breathe differently, lower their body temperature, change their chemical balance.

Nature doesn’t stop when winter comes. It adapts; it transforms.

So did I, breathing through extreme nauseas, dizziness, and complete exhaustion that came with pregnancy. I entered a subterranean kingdom, a kingdom where time and space function differently. A kingdom of silence. A kingdom of untold stories.

The extremes of being in a woman body is full of silences and is such an untold story. An untold story that I may start writing, bit by bit, as I resurface into the world. Revisiting what it means to be a mother; revisiting what I do for work; finding new patterns in search of equilibriums.

What’s coming up:

And so, we are now a year later, as I gear towards a new season of creation.

These are a sample of activities I look forward to, and I hope to meeting you along the way:

New workshop for grant applicants:

  • Thanks to a request from Université Saint Louis Brussels, I’ve developed a new writing workshop for grant applicants. The workshop provides tools to uncover the research proposal’s narrative, one of those tricks that tilt a proposal on top.

Sounds like something for you or for your institute? Contact me!

Creative Writing for Academics:

  • I’ll continue providing series of workshop Creative Writing for Academics, with sessions already book for various institutes at the University of Amsterdam, Nijmegen University, and Queen Mary University of London.

These workshops make space for researchers to explore a diverse and creative pallet of writing styles in their academic writing practice. They are open to all disciplines, and welcome researchers from PhD students to full professors.

Sounds like something you need? Contact me!

New concept emerging: The Writing Lab:

  • I’m brooding on a new concept: The Writing Lab, a space of regular meetings for researchers to explore their writing in new, creative ways.

Sounds like something you want? Contact me!

Social Dreaming and Poetry:

  • Following on previous projects on Social Dreaming, I’ll contribute some of my poems to an artistic exhibition on Social Dreaming held at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London. Details will follow, but I already know that the opening is on November 17, 2022.

Stay in touch!

Regards,

Marie

Doing Academia Differently

Loosening the Boundaries of Our Disciplining Writing Practices

Today is the day that my article has been published with Millennium, Journal of International Studies. I love Millennium for their honesty, for their curiosity, for their openness to invite poems and stories on the page of an academic publication. I love them for having embraced my invitation to loosen the boundaries of our academic writing practices, and to publish work (here: my work) that plays with the boundaries of genre, looking for spaces where that which has been repressed is allowed to speak.

This publication is for me an experience of possibilities. I wrote it with my whole self, speaking and writing with generations of scholars who have invested creative practices within their scientific work. The writing felt like a liberative practice that honoured the legacy of generations of women and men who, time and time again, have revealed an honest story of knowledge production and knowledge writing. As Donna Haraway reminds us:

It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.

Donna Haraway

Writing the article has been a break-through in my own practice, and paved the way for designing my workshops Creative Writing for Academics, as one possible way of enacted the invitation that the article puts forward:

“To allow a more diverse and creative pallet of writing styles in the academic writing landscape, with the aim to recuperate the reparative in both research and writing by allowing the creative to be present, visibly present.”

Marie Beauchamps

You can book a workshop for your research group, institute, faculty, transnational research activities, and everything in-between! Contact me.

In my own story, the article has been a catalyst to transition from working within the structure of the academia to continuing doing academia differently as a creative entrepreneur. My hope is that the stories contained in the article will inspire you to craft your own way of creative practice within your work.

Whether you join a workshop or not, I would be delighted to hear how creativity finds its way in your work. Stay in touch!

Sincerely,

Marie

Here is an antidote to feeling blue about holiday times

It was such a joy to reconnect with friends and colleagues after the holiday. But I was saddened to witness how many of us are filled with apprehension to start the new academic year. The holiday hasn’t been short, but the pandemic weights on everyone’s shoulder, and there is so much to do.

I have an antidote: Inject creative practice into your work.

When I designed my workshop Creative Writing for Academics, I noticed how injecting creativity into our research and writing practice yields power. It brings fun and joy into our work. It unleashes energy to write. It connects us with our intimate stories. And it brings us in touch with the profound questions that inspired us from the start.

Yet making space for creativity isn’t easy. And this is why I keep offering these workshops:

To make space for you to experience a moment of writing where hands-on exercises not only boost your writing practice, but also make you experience your research and writing in a fresh, honest, and relational way.

Join us! During this two-session-workshop, you will invite sensory details on the page, turning your research into a vibrant text where data, concepts, and theories become characters who take you on a whole new journey.

Photo by Neil Thomas on Unsplash

Meditation on the Archive

Photo credits Marie Beauchamps
 You take in
 the tables
 the light 
 damped atmosphere 
 no voices 
 but whispers
 the boxes
 rust and dust 
 the smell of 
 old paper
 ancient times 
 coming back 
 after long years of
 just staying 
 un-allowed to 
 speak.
  
 Most people come  
 to find traces 
 of family members,
 genealogy of blood 
 ties is a popular 
 activity, spicing the
 banality of
 existence with 
 ancient roots, hoping to 
 find traces of
 nobility, salvaging 
 a life almost 
 passed with the 
 graciousness 
 of a name 
 to be added to 
 the tree of relatives 
 that no one 
 has known
 —loneliness 
 has many ways to 
 make us move.
  
 You are here 
 to uncover
 but all you feel 
 is burden
 the piles of 
 history
 do not ease
 they confuse
 it’s a fuss
 your hands moist 
 at the beginning
 dry and itchy 
 when you leave.
  
 A train passes 
 outside and you look 
 at traces
 of someone
 who made
 the ministry of justice 
 become 
 the ministry of fools
 Bureau du Sceau
 changed into
 —Bureau des Sots 
 the sounds stay
 but the orthography 
 becomes 
 critique.
  
 You take notes 
 your pencil 
 sharpened
 and you think of 
 the language 
 making up 
 the people —Albert 
 leaving again 
 and again, walking 
 into fugues 
 his urge 
 to travel 
 and come back 
 trapped in 
 the language 
 of medical 
 science, labels of
 multiple 
 personality
 disorder in 
 the order of 
 things. 
  
 And you start 
 to understand why
 genealogy 
 does not lead to
 graciousness 
 but to the existential 
 quest 
 to reconnect 
 what has been 
 disconnected. 

                                        Amsterdam | London, Autumn 2019

Poem of the researcher

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

Somewhat lost in the literature on affect, I decided to switch gear and try to grasp “affect” in free poetic writing. The idea was not to craft a high quality literary poem, but to allow a different register to guide me in the process of understanding affect. My departure point was to make affect the main character in the poem. The rest followed. Here it is.

~~~

Affect is the voice that dares bring the illogical into the frame; that dares make claims with no arguments.

Affect tells the story of the unsaid and is there to contain.

Affect is a space of silence ready—or unready—to open up.

Affect knows the body just as well as it knows the interspace between bodies.

Affect knows the guts; it knows blood pressure; it knows muscle tension, and the nervous system.

Affect knows the touch of a skin against another skin. It knows the release; it knows the abandon—both may be confused but affect knows the difference.

Affect knows when it knows, and affect lets go when it doesn’t.

Affect colours the voice.

Affect reads the ungraspable, and signals it knowing in return.

Affect transmutes.

Affect travels.

Affect repeats.

And affect transforms.

Stories are dangerous, said the Judge

Photo by Robyn Budlender on Unsplash

It was an afternoon in early summer 2019, in Amsterdam. We were celebrating our teaching program’s fifth anniversary, just as much as I was saying goodbye to those colleagues who had been my community for the past four years. Sipping a beer and laughing at students’ jokes, I was chit chatting with a colleague who happen to be a judge at the Dutch supreme court—one never just happens to be a judge, but one happens to have a colleague who is a judge at the supreme court. My colleague judge was asking me about my new research project that had just started in London.

“I’m writing about denaturalization law,” I answered.

I’ve been writing about denaturalization law for years now, so that has become my primary reflex answer. Judges do know what is at stake in denaturalization law—they know the stakes of the principle of equality before the law; they know what is at stake when depriving someone’s of their citizenship rights; they also know that security is a tricky topic that can sometimes bring democratic ideals into shaky grounds. I saw in his look that he was interested and that he understood why such a topic was worth years of research. That look changed slightly when I added: “But denaturalization is more a tool to write about something else. What I really do is to show that law and politics are driven by affect and emotions. And then I also want to make the argument of fiction as methods of inquiry and communication within the academia…”

Where most of my academic colleagues up to now had reacted positively intrigued—who wouldn’t want to see creativity come back in an institution of knowledge and education?—I sensed that my colleague judge had his doubts about it.

“Stories are dangerous,” he said, pausing. “Stories are a huge problem in law, making it very difficult for judges to know where to draw the line—a line that they do have to draw.”  

I agreed. Stories are dangerous. But the point is, stories are as old as human communication. So, I told my colleague judge that my starting point was precisely to see the dangerous potential of stories. In fact, it was when studying such a repressive measure as the deprivation of citizenship, studying the logics that has justified practices of denaturalization throughout history, that had made me realize the power of imagination when it becomes captured in language. Repression is indeed based on stories. Stories drive people to do the most horrific things imaginable. Wars; Slavery; Genocides. These are based on stories. Stories make people believe that some people are better than others. Worse, stories make people believe that some people are more human than others.

The arguments in stories are no rational arguments. Instead, the arguments are anecdotes, figurative language—metaphors in particular—framing…all ingredients needed to make a good story.

Stories are nothing new in law and politics. They’ve always been there. And yes, they are dangerous.

So, we better learn acknowledge their presence and learn to recognize them.

“You’re very right,” said the judge.

I’m certainly not the first to claim that law and politics are intricately related to storytelling. For instance, Ronald Dworkin is famous for understanding the law by means of the chain novel metaphor. Central to his law philosophy, the chain novel metaphor represents law as literature, but then literature of a specific kind. It is a collective work, for which novelists write in chain, each continuing the chapter of the previous writer. This means that each writer must interpret the work of their predecessor, as well as add their perspective on the story unfolding. It is no free writing though: in Dworkin’s vision of law as a chain novel, each writer must respect the logic and the chronology of the work as a whole. No postmodern experiments, not poetical interludes—at least, not in the guidelines.

What I like about Dworkin’s vision of the law as a chain novel is that it makes salient how the law is “doing language,” to speak in Toni Morrison’s terms. “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may the be measure of our lives,” she reminds us in her Nobel Prize Speech. When seeing the law as a chain novel, we must pay tribute to the work of interpretation that goes hand in hand with working with the law. And we must acknowledge the creativity involved for laws to be drafted in the first place. 

Yet there is another layer to acknowledging the stories that make our laws and drive our politics. Uncovering stories is one thing, writing stories is another. But they go hand in hand; they are the two sides of the same coin. If stories yield power, they are also empowering, and perhaps even more so when they are stories about power relations, of those power relations that require a story to uncover them.

More than any academic text will ever be able to do, stories yields the potential for readers to relate to the complexity rooted in the politics of law, or in the law of politics. Elizabeth Dauphinee’s book The Politics of Exile is a wonderful example. Her “meditation on the aftermath of the war on Bosnia” does a tremendous job at plunging the reader into the context of the war and its atrocities. No academic text could have made us experience what is at stake in circumstances of life and death, such as when a man deserts an army. Dauphinee’s creative text does. It is a page turner in which the narrator makes us feel the soldier’s line of flight. But The Politics of Exile does more than that. It also makes us feel how complex it is to write on the aftermath of war in the first place. Because, how could one possibly write about the aftermath of war when not having experienced war in the first place? Can war be known to those who have not experienced it?

Dauphinee’s work makes us feel the existential negotiations of a writer who feels the urge to expose power in its most destructive form. Just as it makes us feel the writer’s anxiety when negotiating their ability and responsibility to find truth. The voice examining the aftermath of war necessarily needs to remain plural, and open for radical transformation. Creative writing is indeed a great tool to achieve such complexity without having to name it complex.

More than any juridical comment will ever be able to do so, stories allow for people like you and me to understand what is at stake in norms of belonging and repression. Stories empower the dispossessed to connect, to speak, to speak-back. Stories are paranoiac as much as they are reparative, to speak in Eve Sedgewick terms. They are paranoiac because they seek the (com)plot behind our governing norms. But a good story is always stronger than its plot, yielding layers of connective emotions that make us practice our job at being human. And that is what makes them reparative.

Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash

Welcome

Welcome to my blog!

A researcher and writer at the crossroads, I love to run the extra mile to uncover the political stories of our pasts and futures.

I’ve created this blog as a platform for crossing genres and languages. It is a space to share the bits and pieces of research that often find no way out; the bits and pieces that lead to the bigger story, whether mine, or yours.

The blog is part of my research project titled “Mobilising Affects: Withdrawal of Citizenship and Politics of Security” that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 839538. The project takes place at the School of Politics and International Relation, Queen Mary University of London.

In a nutshell, my research project focuses on the mobilization of affects in politics of security and the withdrawal of citizenship. I draw on historical cases as the basis for evaluating possible consequences of intensified withdrawal practices for regimes of citizenship today. I combine archival research with working affect across the social sciences and art practices.