Writing with Pleasure

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.

'Intrinsic motivations like joy and fascination can and should propel our writing—all the more so when extrinsic rewards seem few. In this generous, generative book, Helen Sword offers us ample encouragement and insight on how, even in difficult times, we can dare to seek delight.' – Margy Thomas, founder of ScholarShape

'At last, a writing guide that doesn't scold or ridicule, but treats the challenge of writing well as a form of pleasurable mastery.' – Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, author of The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

'Sword is the prophetic voice crying out in academia's wilderness: "Write with pleasure! It can be done! Come and see!" Through enviable prose, enticing poems, and elegant illustrations, readers see the pleasure, feel it, apply it to their own writing and, when all is read and done, cannot resist repenting.' – Patricia Goodson, Texas A&M University

'Helen Sword has been helping me improve my writing for more than a decade. In Writing with Pleasure, she finally taught me how to love it—and keep loving it. If you want to make writing a painless habit, this book is for you.' – Inger Mewburn, Australian National University

Writing with Pleasure—itself a pleasure in the reading—opens exciting vistas onto the great expanse of writing: the aesthetics in the written, the corporeality of the writer, the emotions felt for and from writing. This original and inventive book charts new territory for anyone who writes and for everyone who researches writing.' – Daniel Shea, Heidelberg University, Germany