By Jessica Lien

Writing happens everywhere in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

It happens in obvious places—in English workshops, journalism classes, and rhetoric courses—but also in mathematics, physics, film, and research across disciplines. Faculty, staff, and students write for different reasons and different audiences, but they often encounter the same challenges: getting started, finding the right words, taking creative risks, and figuring out what to do when the work gets difficult.

Those different perspectives also mean there is no single way to write well. 

Across CLAS, writers have developed strategies shaped by their disciplines, experiences, mentors, and sometimes their own trial and error. 

Here, writers from across CLAS share the advice and practices that have stayed with them—and helped them keep writing.

Create a signal that it’s time to write

“I went through a phase where I would pour a cup of my ‘dissertation tea’ before I sat down to write. It was just peppermint tea in a fancy mug. Starting a writing session with a physical ritual, like lighting a candle or wearing a fancy sweater, can help strengthen the ‘writing time’ signal in your brain.”

Elizabeth Crawford, visiting assistant professor of rhetoric, Department of Communication Studies

Give your writing a soundtrack

“My own advice is to find some ambient music that you find interesting enough to set the mood, but know well enough to zone out to. For me, this means I’ve listened to the songs Spotify’s ‘La French Touch’ and ‘EDM House’ playlists more times than an Ibiza DJ, but they’ve greatly helped me in my summer writing projects.”

Casey DeRoo, associate professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy

Get something on the page

“Start with the easiest writing. That was a revelation to me—what, it doesn’t always have to be ... complicated?! Describe things in simple language, make notes, play with flow charts, sketch things out, use voice-to-text—getting words on a page is half the battle.”

Deirdre Egan, associate director, University of Iowa Writing Center

Write for one person

“I think a lot of writers get stuck in a place of self-doubt where they think, ‘Where is this even going? Will anyone want to read this?’ Once, when I was feeling stuck in this way, my husband (also a writer) told me that it helped him to imagine he was writing for just one person. It worked—writing with just one person in mind made it easier to sift through the tangle of possibilities, and choosing specifics to appeal to one individual actually made the piece more coherent and universal. I think of this advice anytime I find my mind circling, wondering where to go next.”

Tracy Meginnis, Writing Certificate and Student Publications coordinator, School of Journalism and Mass Communication

Write something low-stakes first

“Writing begets more writing. When I’m stuck on my big project, I sometimes start the day by writing a short letter to a friend. Something quick and casual, 10 minutes max. I get my mind in writing mode with something fun and low stakes.”

Elizabeth Crawford, visiting assistant professor of rhetoric, Department of Communication Studies

Talk with the people you might overlook

“The best story you’ve never heard could be anywhere around you. Talk to everyone: the janitor, the clerk, the fast-food employee. This advice helped me find unique stories that I had never thought to look for. The most interesting people I’ve ever talked to have been the most unassuming.”

Jake Mayer, student success and engagement coordinator, School of Journalism and Mass Communication and Communication Studies

Make every word earn its place

“The writing advice that particularly stuck in my mind was, ‘Very is the least very word there is.’ This was written feedback from a fellow classmate on a workshopped fiction piece that I submitted to a creative writing summer workshop back in 2003. To this day, that mantra motivates me to find more precise language in my descriptors to elicit an emotion or visual in a person’s mind.”

Claire McGranahan, director of collegiate communications, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Remember who helped you get there

“This might not be very unconventional, but I often advise people to be as generous with acknowledgements as possible and keep notes on this throughout a project. It’s easy to forget someone who provided an early spark after you’ve spent years laboring toward the final product. There is little harm in thanking someone for a small contribution, but forgetting someone whose input may have been essential can lead to an unpleasant misunderstanding.”

Ryan Kinser, professor and DEO, Department of Mathematics

Get comfortable with failure

“A piece of advice I heard early on that I have passed along many times over the years has to do with failure. It’s come in many forms, but boiled down sounds something like: Be eager to fail. Writers are often perfectionists, and acclimating ourselves to failure is the only way we grow. We must become friends with failure so that we are able to try and try and try until we become adept at something. Success requires experimentation, often years of letting go of the results of our efforts. Failure is essential. Every book I’ve written has been terrible until it got good, usually somewhere near the end of my years spent writing it.”

Melissa Febos, director, Nonfiction Writing Program, and Roy J. Carver Professor in English

Learn to live with uncertainty

“By far, the most useful writing advice I've ever received was from my undergraduate fiction professor and now lifelong mentor, novelist Charles Baxter who said, 'The hardest part of being a writer is not the long hours of learning the craft but learning how to survive the dark nights of the soul. There are many such nights, far too many, as you will discover. Part of the deal of having a soul at all includes the requirement that you go through several dark nights. No soul, no dark nights.'

Every time I am up at three a.m. to finish a piece of writing or find myself unable to sleep, worrying and reconsidering my life choices, I think of this quote and laugh and remember I am part of a long tradition of writers, all of whom worked in uncertainty, in doubt, and amid the fire of various obsessions and compulsions. I have always lasted long enough to write the next book or story or script, just by remembering I have the kind of soul that made me want to do this work more than I want to do anything else.”

Dean Bakopoulos, DEO and chair, Department of Cinematic Arts

Sound like you

“Be authentic. Take the pressure off of yourself to be a certain type of writer, and allow your unique personality to emerge. Everyone has their own writing style, so let yours come through without feeling like you have to emulate anyone else or adopt a narrative voice that feels unnatural to you.”

Cinda Coggins-Mosher, professor of instruction, rhetoric, Department of Communication Studies

Write the journey, not just the proof

“A mathematical proof uses a series of logical steps to lead a reader toward a conclusion—but think of it  more as a journey, a story, rather than documented steps. A proof takes a reader from one understanding, one place in a story, to another, and then another, and not always in a linear narrative. It’s an epic tale, with the author and the readers as the protagonists. A model is a character study, and the following simulations are the larger story arc. We can’t be overt about all this, but keeping it in mind can help us get the writing we seek.”

Bruce P. Ayati, professor, Department of Mathematics