What makes some academic books and articles so fascinating and engaging to read, while others leave you feeling exhausted and confused?
And what’s the secret to arranging all the pieces of a manuscript into a single cohesive whole?
These are questions that Helen Sword and Margy Thomas discussed in a public Zoom conversation in September 2020.
Check out the above recording of this conversation, which includes a peek inside Helen’s technicolor book-in-progress and the backstory on how her approach to structural design changed between Stylish Academic Writing (2012) and Air & Light & Time & Space (2017).
You’ll also hear Margy share how ScholarShape and the Story-Argument model can structure scholars’ time, attention, and projects, leading to more fascination in both the process and product of writing.
Most importantly, you’ll learn how the most powerful secrets of structure are the ones that you already know.
— Helen Sword and Margy Thomas
CONVERSATION HIGHLIGHTS
00:00 - Welcome and why we’re here
01:08 - Margy introduces Helen
02:31 - Helen introduces Margy
04:56 - 33:18 - Margy interviews Helen
04:56 - Where are you in structuring your current book-in-progress, Writing With Pleasure?
06:02 - the book’s big unifying idea and why it matters for scholars
07:00 - how the big idea emerged through Helen’s research process
07:51 - view of the book-in-progress in Helen’s Scrivener dashboard
09:10 - how Helen is using post-its for the book-in-progress
10:25 - structural work feels separate from the actual generating of the prose; the latter feels especially difficult in this project, and Helen is working to reframe the difficulty as a joyful challenge
11:12 - noticing the fractal structure of the book plan; reflection on how formulaic structures can be helpful spaces for creativity
12:29 - how the structural plan has changed since the book proposal
13:10 - “The structure gives the scaffolding for play and pleasure,” especially because we get to design the structure we play within
13:50 - How has your use of color coding evolved over the years?
14:01 - How she was “nurtured” by colorful artwork she grew up with, approached high school essay assignments using color, and color-coded her tenure file
15:52 - Present day: color coding on the Writer’s Diet website
16:54 - “For me, color coding is a way of seeing things: seeing things differently, seeing things with a pair of colored glasses that may be distorting things in some ways but also helping you see other things more clearly.”
17:06 - How did the unconventional, yet coherent structures of your two previous books emerge? How did your approach change between these two books, and how did you grow and learn from one book to the next?
17:43 - Stylish Academic Writing: a symmetrical cover; a Table of Contents that shows the structure of the whole book at a glance; how the structure was difficult to develop because she couldn’t find any models that combined empirical research with practical (yet playful) how-to; a paradigm-shifting 10-page letter from a reader named Janet on her nonlinear reader experience of the book, which then shaped how Helen designed her next book.
22:30 - Air & Light & Time & Space: a structure designed for nonlinear navigation; how the “social” category of emerged from the research process; how Helen hit on the architectural metaphor of BASE (behavioral, artisanal, social, emotional) that provided the structure for the whole book; how the book ended up with a symmetrical Table of Contents, reflecting the symmetrical structure of the book itself, that would be praised in Helen’s most cherished book review as having the functional beauty of an architectural drawing.
27:16 - What connection do you see between structure and pleasure?
27:20 - Attending to the aesthetic qualities of a Table of Contents as a window into the structure of the book as a whole
28:50 - Importance of noticing our own emotional or aesthetic responses to others’ structural and stylistic choices so we can empathize with our reader and provide them pleasurable structures
30:28 - Helen’s free resources and upcoming offers and events
Website: HelenSword.com
Updated Writer’s Diet tool, an add-in for Microsoft Word
Writing retreats, courses, You Tube channel, bookshops, and more
Stylish Writing Intensive: a 2-day program gathering scholars from around the world into a virtual, real-time workshop based on Stylish Academic Writing
33:19 - 58:07 - Helen interviews Margy
33:19 - How scholars’ work lives and projects can be structured by ScholarShape and the Story-Argument model.
33:57 - Scholars need containers for time and attention where they can gather outside of academia-as-usual to imagine and build the future of scholarship around forms of meaning-making that are deeper than academic conventions and institutional norms.
36:09 - The key to creating fascinating scholarship is found in ScholarShape’s BYSA (Build Your Story-Argument) Modules, which lay out the entire Story-Argument model, including its variations across genres and disciplines, using metaphors from nature that humans intuitively understand as making sense.
38:27 - Helen describes bingeing on the BYSA Modules and how they helped her with her current book-in-progress.
39:20 - How a Story-Argument fuses Story and Argument.
41:20 - Helen connects the Story-Argument’s relation of the abstract and the concrete to how she explains the writing process in her books and workshops.
42:18 - Key features of Story and Argument, and their parallels to one another.
44:40 - The four elements of a Story-Argument, based on the four parallels between Story and Argument.
45:32 - Helen points out that the Story-Argument model was, itself, used to create the Story-Argument model.
46:15 - ScholarShape exists not only to support scholars but also to refine the Story-Argument model.
46:35 - Diagram of a Story-Argument: green rectangle, golden thread, white superstructure.
47:20 - the E.A.S.T. acronym (essence, arc, scaffolding, transformation).
48:34 - three structural logics of a Story-Argument arc: space, time, relationships.
51:20 - Helen reflects on how she uses these logics in her own work.
52:50 - Thinking through how the Story-Argument model can help structure our lives as scholars and as human beings.
55:16 - Tarot as a tool for scholarship: its connection to structural rigor and to meaning-making through Story and Argument.
57:42 - That was fun! :) :)
58:08 - 01:12:49 - Audience Q&A
58:08 - What tools, digital and analog, do you use in your structural work?
01:01:42 - Clarification on how to design a Story-Argument to convey one essential idea
01:03:16 - How does the structure of Helen’s upcoming Writing With Pleasure book compare to that of her previous two books?
01:07:54 - Key line from Helen: “To hell with it! I’m going to write about pleasure! ... Finding pleasure in writing, pleasure through metaphor and color and everything else, those are essential skills for scholars. ... The pleasure is the route to the productivity.”
01:08:44 - What are the cognitive benefits of using tactile strategies to work on manuscript structure?
01:12:50 - 01:13:04 - Conclusion
01:12:50 - Shifting from asking “What are the secrets of structure?” to asking “Where are the secrets of structure?”
01:13:04 - How to get more writing tools and resources from Helen and Margy
“To hell with it! I’m going to write about pleasure! ... Finding pleasure in writing, pleasure through metaphor and color and everything else, those are essential skills for scholars. ... The pleasure is the route to the productivity.”
— Helen Sword, The Secrets of Structure, 01:07:54