Ep. 3. Your Writing Process as Epic Quest: How to Frame the Challenges of Scholarship as Fascinating Plot Twists

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The hero of a quest travels far from home in search of some powerful, significant object. The journey is long and difficult, fraught with mysteries and monsters. But ultimately, the quest culminates in a narrative that matters for the hero’s community. The epic quest plot persists across millennia and cultures because it captures how humans experience the process of life. As this episode of Oracles of Academia reveals, the quest is also how we scholars experience the process of creating new knowledge. Listen to this episode to learn how Margy Thomas, Ph.D., founder of ScholarShape, uses the frame of the epic quest to manage the challenges of academic writing. She focuses on four key features of an epic quest: the hero’s mental image of the object being pursued; the hero’s awareness of the environment and its resources and climate; the hero’s encounters with guides, enemies, and mysteries along the way; and finally, the way the hero’s quest matters beyond itself. When we apply this epic quest framing to our scholarly lives, we can start to see all of the challenges of academic writing as integral parts of our story. In this episode, our Oracle is the question, “What happens if you frame your scholarly life as an epic quest?” (Length: 15:21) Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | SpotifyTRANSCRIPTOracles of Academia, Episode 3. Your Writing Process as Epic Quest: How to Frame the Challenges of Scholarship as Fascinating Plot TwistsIf we're going to do the hard work of creating new knowledge and communicating it to the world, we're going to encounter obstacles, and we're going to come up against our own internal limitations and growth edges.We're going to grapple with the inherent difficulty of creating something that has never existed before, the difficulty of knowing something that no one else knows and trying to persuade people to believe it and care about it.We can't expect to remove these challenges from our scholarly lives, but we can find a way to frame these challenges so that they make a certain sense to us. What we need is a narrative that helps us see each challenging moment as just one part of a larger story. A narrative that helps us navigate our experience with purpose and courage.I'm Margy Thomas, founder of ScholarShape. In this episode of Oracles of Academia, our Oracle is the question, “What happens if you frame your scholarly life as an epic quest?”[OPENING CREDITS] For as long as humans have been telling stories, we've been drawn to tales of heroes who journey far from home in search of some powerful, significant object. The genre of the epic quest is ancient and perennial. For thousands of years, we humans have told stories of heroes who pursue elusive, sacred treasures; who persist through obstacles; who are transformed by their journeys; and whose stories knit together their communities.The epic quest story persists across millennia and cultures because it captures something fundamental about the human experience. It captures how we as individual humans experience the process of life. We're all searching for something. And we're all hoping that our lives will matter beyond ourselves. We each encounter our own combination of mysteries and monsters along the way. I want to highlight four key features of an epic quest and how these four features show up in your scholarly process. When we can apply this epic quest framing to our scholarly lives, we can start to see all of the challenges as integral parts of our story. Different people have various ways to define what an epic quest is, but I find that focusing on these four features that I'm about to share with you gives us a really useful way of navigating the scholarly life. Feature number one: the object of the questThe hero of a quest is in pursuit of something. A long lost friend, a promised land, a hidden treasure. The hero has a mental image of this wished-for object. And as the quest unfolds, the hero returns again and again to this mental image. As the hero thinks about the quest object over and over, this mental image, this idea, gives shape to the quest.The hero's idea of the object shifts over the course of the quest, and in the end, the actual object may turn out to be different from what the hero had imagined. But still, the hero's persistent focus on this object provides direction for the hero on their uncharted course.Your scholarly life is one grand pursuit of an illusory object, whatever you're trying to construct knowledge about.As you move through data and source materials, you are guided by some mental construct -- a research question, a hypothesis, a working thesis -- some idea that helps you imagine the knowledge that you are in the process of discovering or creating. This idea of your quest object focalizes your efforts to discover or create that knowledge. The most compelling object of pursuit is one that feels connected to your identity, your unique history, your point of view. Your quest might even feel like a calling.A quest is long and arduous, but if you can hold always in mind your guiding idea -- whether a research question or a hypothesis or a working thesis, or even just an intimation that some problem needs to be solved -- then you can direct your energy in a really focused way. Knowing what you're really going after helps you not care so much about anything that isn't the object of your quest.Feature number two: the environment of the questA quest occurs within a specific space-time container, an environment. And there's something about that environment that shapes how the quest unfolds. A quest in the desert will likely involve thirst, harsh sunlight, extreme temperatures. A quest at sea probably includes terrifying storms, shifting winds, and eerie calms. A quest through a post-apocalyptic cityscape may entail patching together shelter and weapons using materials salvaged from the vanished civilization.One thing that all quest environments tend to have in common is a certain inhospitality. Few are the quests that can be conducted from the comfort of a sofa. If the journey were easy and uneventful, it wouldn't be a story.Your scholarly life takes place within a particular environment that is conducive to some things and not others. Some resources are abundant in your environment, and others are scarce. Some conditions are predictable, like a climate, while other conditions shift day to day, like the weather. Your environment constrains your quest and creates possibilities for it. Think about your environment. Where do you sit in relation to relevant fields of research and academic institutions and communities who are impacted by your research? What is your environment conducive to? What resources are available here? How is your environment shaped by the current historical moment or the geographic region where you're based? What do you know and not know about your environment? What do you need to find out? How might you adapt your quest to suit your environment? If you can be aware of your environment, then you can better maneuver toward your object. You can steward your resources. You can discern what kind of energy is called for in any given moment. You can give yourself a break for not doing what is utterly impossible to do within the environment where you find yourself.And you can remember that anytime you're in an environment that you just don't want to be, all of that frustration can become narrative tension that makes your story all the more fascinating.Feature number three: the encounters within the questIn an epic quest, there is no map to follow. We have to improvise our route by taking in cues from our environment. Our main source of information are the encounters that we have along the way. Some encounters are with guides who point us on our way. Others are with enemies who try to thwart us. Still other encounters are with sphinxes, who offer us riddles to puzzle over.The trick is to recognize what kind of encounter you're in so that you can respond accordingly. When we encounter guides, they give us critical insight into how the world works and where we are within it. Our guides are the scholars whose work we study. Editors and peer reviewers who offer us perceptive feedback. Colleagues who point us to just the source we need. A guide can even be a child whose perspective helps you see the world with fresh eyes. When we encounter a guide, our posture is one of receptivity. We set aside our preexisting assumptions and absorb everything we can so that we can weave it into our mental model of reality. Our second kind of encounter are with enemies, people who try to hurt us or sabotage us. Your enemy could be a colleague who's committed to twisting your words. A reviewer who rips apart your work without even understanding it. Or a friend who betrays you. The costs of these crimes against you are real. And yet, each enemy encounter can be learned from. We learn who to avoid. We learn patience, and we learn about our own resilience. The key to learning from an enemy encounter is to not just act — not just engage the fight or flight response — but also to reflect. To ask yourself, what does this person teach me about human motivation? About what I want and need? About what I value? About how I'm perceived? About who I am?A third kind of encounter that we have on our quests is with sphinxes. These are people or situations that present us with puzzles or riddles. A question we can't answer. A phenomenon we can't explain. A problem we can't solve. The offering of a sphinx may not make sense to us in the moment, yet we somehow know to carry it with us as we move along on our journey, trusting that the meaning will unfold in time. When we encounter a sphinx, it's a reminder of the infinite mystery.As we move through our worlds, encountering guides and enemies and sphinxes in our search for the objects of our quests, we find that some of these encounters feel exciting. Some feel painful, distressing, even dangerous. Others feel illuminating, revelatory. Each one changes us. Each encounter that we have with a guide or an enemy or a sphinx can help us discern where we are in that moment, and which direction to move in search of the object of our quest. Feature number four: the significance of the questThe fourth defining feature of a quest is that it matters. It has some significance beyond the quest itself. Often, epics figure into founding myths of nations or communities, giving people a common sense of where they come from and what values they share. In other words, a quest is not just about the hero attaining the object. It's also about what becomes possible for the hero's whole community once the hero's quest becomes a shared story. Your scholarship matters, and not just to you. I know that can be hard to remember in the day-to-day, but it's true. As long as your quest is on behalf of someone, it matters.So who is your quest on behalf of? How will your scholarship help them? How does the thought of them give you strength?[Conclusion] I find that when I frame my scholarly process as an epic quest, moments of struggle and pain and frustration all become more bearable. Seeing my work as a quest helps me trust myself and hope in the future, even when I'm in perilous moments. Whenever I wonder how to move forward, how to keep going, I just check in with my four epic quest questions. I ask myself, what's the object of my quest? What's possible and available within my environment? What are my encounters teaching me as I move through this environment? And who does this matter for?So how about you? What is the biggest challenge weighing on you right now in your scholarly life?Maybe you just feel lost. You've been working on your project for so long, generated so many pages, but you can't figure out how to pull it all together. Maybe your biggest challenge is self doubt. You wonder whether you're on the right track, doing the right project. Maybe you're feeling isolated, having trouble finding the friends or colleagues or allies who can support you and go the distance with you. Or maybe your difficulty is securing a place within an institution or the resources that you need to do your work. There are so many different challenges and struggles that we're bound to encounter in the scholarly life. There's no way to engineer our lives to not contain at least some of these challenges. But how might your experience of these challenges shift if you saw yourself as being on an epic quest? Not to minimize the challenges, but to find meaning in them, or at least to gather hope that you can get through this moment, and that in the end, it will all have been worth it.[CLOSING CREDITS]