From the author of Stylish Academic Writing comes an essential new guide for writers aspiring to become more productive and take greater pleasure in their craft. Helen Sword interviewed one hundred academics worldwide about their writing background and practices. Relatively few were trained as writers, she found, and yet all have developed strategies to thrive in their publish-or-perish environment.

So how do these successful academics write, and where do they find the air and light and time and space, in the words of poet Charles Bukowski, to get their writing done? What are their formative experiences, their daily routines, their habits of mind? How do they summon up the courage to take intellectual risks and the resilience to deal with rejection?

Sword identifies four cornerstones that anchor any successful writing practice: Behavioral habits of discipline and persistence; Artisanal habits of craftsmanship and care; Social habits of collegiality and collaboration; and Emotional habits of positivity and pleasure. Building on this BASE, she illuminates the emotional complexity of the writing process and exposes the lack of writing support typically available to early-career academics. She also lays to rest the myth that academics must produce safe, conventional prose or risk professional failure. The successful writers profiled here tell stories of intellectual passions indulged, disciplinary conventions subverted, and risk-taking rewarded. Grounded in empirical research and focused on sustainable change, Air & Light & Time & Space offers a customizable blueprint for refreshing personal habits and creating a collegial environment where all writers can flourish.

Helen Sword is a poet, scholar, master teacher, and international expert on academic, professional, and creative writing across the disciplines. Her books, articles, and online tools have empowered writers around the world to write more clearly, confidently, prolifically, and with greater pleasure. 

Born and raised in Southern California, Helen received her doctorate in comparative literature from Princeton University and has lived since 2001 in New Zealand, where she is a Professor of Humanities at the University of Auckland and runs a private writing consultancy, WriteSpace Limited. 

She is the author of books including Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard UP, 2012), The Writer’s Diet (Chicago UP, 2016), and Air & Light & Time and Space: How Successful Academics Write (Harvard UP, 2017) and the creator of popular digital resources such as the Writer’s Diet, an online diagnostic test that is now also available as a free add-in for MS Word; the Writing BASE, an interactive productivity tool; Helen’s Word, a YouTube channel that encourages writers at all levels to “show up and write”; and Zombie Nouns, a TedEd video that has received nearly a million views on YouTube. 

Helen’s current book project, Writing with Pleasure, is under contract with Princeton University Press for publication in 2022.

Helen has been honored with a number of research and teaching awards, including the University of Auckland's 2007 Teaching Excellence Award for Innovation in Teaching, the 2013 HERDSA-TERNZ Medal for a scholar who has made a major impact on the tertiary education research environment of New Zealand, and the University of Auckland's 2017 Research Excellence Award. Her evidence-based writing workshops and presentations have taken her to more than 1oo universities, research institutes, and other organizations in 20+ countries and on every continent except Antarctica. 

Rising to the challenge of having had her travel wings clipped by the COVID-19 pandemic, she now specializes in facilitating experiential online workshops, masterclasses, and retreats that bring together writers from across the globe in a shared virtual writing space.

Research Interests

Academic writing
Research productivity
Higher education pedagogy
Academic development
Modernist literature
Digital poetry and poetics

Source: helensword.com