We live with our feet on the ground and our heads in the sky. Sometimes all we want is to feel the comforting weight of gravity pulling us down to earth. Other times we long to fly.

In my book Writing with Pleasure, I coined the moniker “flying unicorn” to describe hybrid writing tools (e.g. digital notebooks, pen-like styluses, voice-activated software) that play to our modern desire to bridge the material and digital realms. Illustrator Selina Tusitala Marsh used the Procreate app on her iPad — a flying unicorn in its own right! — to draw herself gleefully riding astride that fanciful beast:

Illustration by Selina Tusitala Marsh for Writing with Pleasure

These days, I find myself scanning the skies for a different kind of flying unicorn: a fantasy creature that can bring the healing warmth of social contact to the heady magic of global digital outreach.

Indeed, I’m drafting this post while literally “in the sky,” winging my way home from a 5-week international trip that took me to on-the-ground meetings and workshops in California, Oregon, Colorado, Texas, Germany, and the U.K.

What a delight it was to drink coffee on Balboa Island with WriteSPACE member Karen; to celebrate a successful day of workshops in Fort Collins with Kristina, Kimi, and their colleagues in the CSU Writes program at Colorado State University; to tour San Antonio with Ebony and Molly from the The Collaborative for Learning and Teaching at Trinity University; to meet with Daniel from the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology and with Christelle from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in historic Heidelberg (where I also got to spend a whole week cuddling my new grandson Enrico 🥰); and to catch up with Amy, my wonderful WriteSPACE Events Manager, for a delicious Ottolenghi lunch in London.

But we don’t have to travel across the world to breathe the healing oxygen of human fellowship. As writers, we can celebrate both our roots and our wings: our beautiful handmade notebooks and our whizzy digital gadgets; our local friendships and our online communities.

Those flying unicorns are already dancing and wheeling all around us, if only we know where to find them.

For example, you could lift the ground up towards the sky by inviting a colleague to join you in person for a virtual workshop (perhaps our next WriteSPACE Special Event?)

Or you could anchor the sky to the ground by organizing a conference panel with fellow writers you’ve met online.

Or you could apply for a WriteSPACE Travel Grant designed to help you bring cloud-based resources to local colleagues and to send your earthbound writing partnerships soaring.

Ground or sky? Why not choose both?

I’d love to see you there — and in all the spaces in between!

Write with delight! For exclusive access to live workshops, craft-focused coaching, and premium writing and editing tools, join me and fellow writers from 30+ countries in the WriteSPACE, a vibrant international writing community and resource library. To try free for 30 days, click below and enter the discount code WSTRIAL-BP at checkout.

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What can academic and professional writers learn from the stunning sentences of the best creative writers?

On October 21, I invited Nina Schuyler to join me for a lively conversation and workshop on "Stunning Sentences." Nina is the author of the aptly named book How to Write Stunning Sentences and the popular Substack newsletter Stunning Sentences. She is unrivalled at unravelling complex sentences to show us how they work — and how we can make our own stunning sentences work for us and our readers.

In the first hour of this live two-hour event, I asked Nina what makes for a stunning sentence and why it’s worth paying close attention to intricacies of syntax, structure, and style. In the second hour, Nina offered a hands-on sentencing workshop for paid subscribers to our respective newsletters. To borrow Nina’s own words, we spent time “admiring, mooning over, loving, and learning to write stunning sentences.”

Here’s WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of this special event:

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Nina Schuyler is a master at deconstructing sentences with precision, helping us understand the intricate workings of grammar and syntax. She shared how her passion for perfectly crafted sentences began in childhood. As a young girl, she kept a notebook filled with sentences that moved her — phrases that struck her with awe and sounded like music to her ears. She would record these lines carefully, driven by a yearning to write with the same beauty and skill. Her journey into the world of stunning sentences has been fueled by voracious reading and a deep love of language, eventually leading her to teach style-focused workshops in an MFA creative writing program. Now, after 17 years of teaching, she’s exceptionally skilled at breaking down what makes a sentence memorable and impactful.

In a world where many academic writers suffer from “grammarphobia” (often due to limited formal training), it’s easy to think, Why focus on grammar in my writing when methodology and content seem enough? Does grammar really matter? Nina assures us that it does. Take the principle of repetition, for example. When used with intention, repeated words and phrases can add emphasis, rhythm, and depth to writing, enhancing emotion and making sentences more enjoyable to read.

Nina asks, ‘Why shouldn’t a sentence be anything but pleasurable?’ Grammatical techniques matter because they’re tools for connecting our writing to our reader’s body and senses. Writing with musicality invites readers to feel the rhythm, making each sentence a source of joy. One fascinating tip that Nina shared was about writing in sync with natural breath patterns. The human breath, in English, can hold around ten syllables before needing a pause. By keeping this rhythm in mind, writers can create a harmonious, easy flow. On the other hand, for moments of intense tension or conflict, shortening sentences to fewer than ten syllables can evoke a feeling of breathlessness, mirroring shallow breaths.

You can watch the full two-hour video of Stunning Sentences in the WriteSPACE membership area. Don’t miss the recording of the second hour, in which Nina guides you through exercises for crafting stunning sentences of your own.

A huge thank you to Helen for hosting this wonderful session and to Nina for sharing her knowledge so generously. I look forward to seeing you at the next WriteSPACE Special Event!

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can find the recording of the Special Event in their Video library.  

Not a member? Register to receive an email with a link to the video of the first hour.

Better yet! Join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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