I’ve spent a sizable amount of time in the last year and half writing. This is par for the course for any graduate student—if you want to share your research with the world, you’ll need to write about it. Since ~May of 2017, however, I’ve also gotten into creative writing by way of writing screenplays and stage plays. This has doubled the amount of writing I find myself doing. I’ve noticed that there’s a really interesting structural connection between academic writing and creative writing, at least in the context of writing for the screen.

One of the most important rules in storytelling is making it very clear what each character’s intention is. In other words, what is it that the character wants? You need to be very clear about this up front, or you’ll have a hard time getting any viewer or reader excited about what the character does next. In the same sense, with technical writing, you need to be very explicit about a problem that exists, and how your research addresses that problem. I’ve read tons of papers in the last year, and while you can write a good paper without being incredibly explicit about the problem up front, you won’t write a great paper this way. The best papers are the ones that give me a fantastic sense for the problem up front, and are very clear about how the research will solve that problem. The researchers will present the challenges associated with doing said research (i.e., obstacles to the character as they try to achieve their goals), and culminates with results of the research (a character experiences growth as a result of their journey). I think this is an interesting way to approach writing academic work, and conversely, a nice structural way to analyze screenplays. It’s definitely started helping me in my work.