Writing with Pleasure

by Helen Sword, Selina Tusitala Marsh (Illustrator)

An essential guide to cultivating joy in your professional and personal writing

Writing should be a pleasurable challenge, not a painful chore. Writing with Pleasure empowers academic, professional, and creative writers to reframe their negative emotions about writing and reclaim their positive ones. By learning how to cast light on the shadows, you will soon find yourself bringing passion and pleasure to everything you write.

Acclaimed international writing expert Helen Sword invites you to step into your "WriteSPACE"--a space of pleasurable writing that is socially balanced, physically engaged, aesthetically nourishing, creatively challenging, and emotionally uplifting. Sword weaves together cutting-edge findings in the sciences and social sciences with compelling narratives gathered from nearly six hundred faculty members and graduate students from across the disciplines and around the world. She provides research-based principles, hands-on strategies, and creative "pleasure prompts" designed to help you ramp up your productivity and enhance the personal rewards of your writing practice. Whether you're writing a scholarly article, an administrative email, or a love letter, this book will inspire you to find delight in even the most mundane writing tasks and a richer, deeper pleasure in those you already enjoy.

Exuberantly illustrated by prizewinning graphic memoirist Selina Tusitala Marsh, Writing with Pleasure is an indispensable resource for academics, students, professionals, and anyone for whom writing has come to feel like a burden rather than a joy.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction

328 pages, Hardcover

Published February 7, 2023

Reviews

[Rebecca Fung · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book has a great premise, to get people to find pleasure in writing and some of the ideas like the SPACE principles are good. It can be a little repetitive. It is not a deep analysis into why people find pleasure in writing, more of some tips and anecdotes - the author finds pleasure in the tangibility of pen and paper and advises it, and in colour so advises it. I do think some of these ideas can be very helpful as the physical can anchor finding pleasure but it may not be for everyone. It's a good place to start with reflecting on how we can find pleasure in writing for ourselves and reflect on it ourselves, however each journey will be very much individual. I think the book tries to capture that but it's hard to write a process for so many individual experiences.

[Robert Mayer · Rating 5 out of 5]

While this is intended to help scholars and academics find a path to enjoy writing -- particularly about their fields -- I found many of the ideas something I could distill to my own students and into my own creative writing. This is far more of a "big picture" write-up than a focus on smaller details. If you are running out of gas teaching writing or running out of gas just writing, this book is for you.

[Roy Kenagy]

DMPL EXAMINED 2024_01_24 NOT_AUDIBLE

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the idea of SPACE and the aesthetics of writing. Book is more geared to academic writing. I enjoyed some of the anecdotes and examples from students, but I felt they were too frequent.

[Traynor · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars. A real shot in the arm.

[Jamie Irish · Rating 2 out of 5]

While this definitely might be helpful for someone a little earlier in their writing journey (or someone who isn't writing fiction), I personally found it to be very surface-level. It felt like the author was outsourcing to all the interview snippets she collected, instead of making a case herself. It also felt like it could have been a lot shorter and to-the-point.

To each their own - it's certainly not a *bad* book, and if you're just dipping your toe into the world of writing and trying to build a practice, it'll probably be helpful for you. But if you've been in the trenches for a while and were hoping for something to kick you out of a rut (like me), I'm not sure this is the book for you.