I recently ran a Writing, Wellbeing and Finding What Works for You day at GCU — a full day event with a very different feel to the workshops I usually run. No slides to sit through, no presentations, no pressure to perform. Just researchers, a bit of space, and some questions worth sitting with. Here’s a reflection on how it went and what I took away from it.

The idea behind the day

I’ve been thinking for a while about the emotional side of academic writing — the stuff that doesn’t get talked about in workshops on structure or argumentation. The inner critic. The avoidance. The feeling of opening a document and then immediately finding something more urgent to do. And I was asked about this type of support in one of my 1:1 sessions.

Writing is a deeply personal thing. We all arrive at it with histories — shaped by supervisors, by reviewers, by teachers who left a mark, by experiences of being read and judged. And yet we rarely create space to actually look at that relationship honestly.

That’s what this day was designed to do. Four sessions, all participant-led, all doing-based rather than listening-based. With a collaging session to close the day.

Session 1: Explore Your Writing — the BASE framework

We started with the BASE writing habits framework as a way of mapping where people are as writers right now. BASE stands for Behavioural (your routines and habits — when, where, and how often you write), Artisanal (your craft and confidence in your own voice), Social (how you engage with others around writing), and Emotional (how writing feels — the pleasure, frustration, anxiety, or joy it brings).

Participants completed a self-assessment and got a BASE profile — things like The Rock (high across all four), The Lone Wolf (strong everywhere except social), The Well (loves writing but struggles with routine and confidence), and so on. There are sixteen profiles in total, each with a name and a shape, and — more usefully — a set of prompts for what to build on and what to work on.

What I love about this framework is the built-in message that higher isn’t better. The profiles just describe where you are. There are no good or bad writers here, only honest ones. That framing matters.

The small group discussion that followed — what shapes your writing? what conditions help? who has left a mark on how you feel about it? — was genuinely rich. People shared things they rarely say out loud in professional settings.

Session 2: Dealing with Your Inner Critic

Most researchers have one. The voice that says: this isn’t good enough. You don’t belong here. Everyone else finds this easier than you do.

Session two was all about that voice — not to silence it permanently, but to stop it running the show. We did a two-part story completion activity. In part one, participants wrote for five minutes without stopping, letting the critic speak: every time I sit down to write, I hear a voice that says… No editing, no pausing, no sharing unless they chose to.

In part two, they rewrote the same scene — but this time with a kinder, more honest narrator responding. What does the critic miss? What do you know to be true about your writing that the critic refuses to acknowledge?

The discussion that followed was one of the highlights of the day for me. People talked about where the voice comes from — specific feedback, specific people, specific moments. And there was real recognition that the inner critic is not a character flaw. It often develops as a protective response, a way of anticipating criticism before it arrives. Naming that seemed to help.

Session 3: Connecting with Your Writing Through Collage

This was the session I was most curious about — I love creative methods but I’m never sure how this lands with the participants.

The rationale is straightforward: sometimes words are not the right tool for exploring your relationship with words. Collage and visual making offer a different route into the same territory — one that often bypasses perfectionism and self-censorship. The inner critic struggles to keep up when your hands are busy.

Participants chose from three prompts: what does my writing life look like right now? What do I want my relationship with writing to feel like? What gets in the way — and what helps? Most decided to structure their collage to reply to all three. They had two hours in total, moving through settling in, making, sitting with what they’d made, and then a gallery walk where collages were laid out and people moved around them.

I was genuinely moved by the gallery walk. People were quiet with each other’s work. They recognised things in someone else’s collage that they hadn’t been able to say in words. A few people looked at their own work for a long time. That stillness felt important.

I want to be clear: no artistic skill is required or expected for this kind of activity. This is not arts and crafts for its own sake — it is a legitimate reflective method. And research in researcher development increasingly recognises that creative and embodied approaches surface things that structured frameworks alone cannot.

Session 4: Finding What Works for You

The final session was short and deliberately low-key. Five minutes of individual reflection on three questions: one thing I now know about myself as a writer; one thing that gets in my way that I want to address; one thing I am going to try in the next two weeks.

The sharing that followed was voluntary, and people leaned in. What struck me was how often the individual felt shared — the thing someone thought was specific to them was actually in the room across several people. That’s always what happens when you create enough space for honesty.

We closed with a line I’d put on the final slide that I want to keep coming back to: the goal is not to find the perfect conditions for writing. It is to write well enough, often enough, in the conditions you actually have.

What I took away

Events like this remind me why I do this work. Creating space for researchers to slow down, be honest with themselves, and connect with others around shared experience — that matters. It doesn’t always translate neatly into a learning outcome or a competency. But it changes something.

Have you been to a writing and wellbeing event before? Or is the emotional side of writing something you’ve been wanting to explore? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Please get in touch if you would like a copy of the slides or want to discuss how to run something like this at your institution.