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31 Military Fiction Writing Prompts

By Brittany Kuhn

Are you writing a  military fiction  novel? Do you need some ideas for your book? The following 31 military fiction writing prompts will help!

General Military Fiction Prompts

1. two recruits at a military academy have a rivalry..

Choose one of the recruits as your primary protagonist and show them battling with their rival from day one. There should be some big event or challenge towards the end of the story that brings the two together and teaches them that they are better together than apart.

2. A soldier’s plane is shot down on the wrong side of the battlefield.

This is a suspense story focused on whether the soldier will survive. Start with them crash landing and show how they fight and struggle to get back to their own side. End with them being rescued.

3. A submarine is hijacked while still in the water.

While patrolling during peacetime, a submarine crew is hijacked by fellow crew members whose aim is to start a war by blaming the destruction of the submarine on another country. The story should be how the rest of the crew work together to stop the dangerous hijackers to maintain peace.

4. A young recruit discovers a dangerous secret while training at the academy.

Make the secret whatever you want but make sure that it involves people at all levels of the military. The recruit is in danger just for the knowledge of this secret. Uncovering the secret would topple the academy itself, so the person must work secretly to discover and expose the details without knowing who to trust.

5. A military hostage and their captor become friends and work together to stop the war.

Start with the hostage being locked away and show the events that lead to their friendship. The hostage helps the captor realize the futility of the war and the second half of the story should be them working together to stop the war, or at least escape it together.

6. When there’s a murderer on a submarine, there’s nowhere to run!

Start the story with the murder and have the lead investigator on the submarine investigate it. End with the investigator ousting the murderer, either by death or by bringing them to justice on land.

7. The rise and fall of a secret government operation during wartime.

This could be as common as trying to create a ‘secret solider serum’ that backfires. Or you could write about something more paranormal, like telekinesis. In either case, show the beginnings of the program, the rationale for it, how it damages the soldiers, and end with it being discovered and abandoned.

8. A disillusioned military officer gets reassigned as a drill instructor for new recruits.

You should start with the event that gets them nearly dishonorably discharged and show them reluctantly take on this new post as a drill instructor. The story is about how learning from the younger crowd, being outside of the war machine, helps them grow as a person.

9. A group of battle buddies hear about a hidden treasure while in the middle of war.

Start with the lead friend roping the others into searching for the treasure. The story is about them working together as a military unit to find this treasure amidst the war happening around them.

10. A new soldier wants to see battle.

Begin with the soldier going through training and really buying into the hype of war. Follow them as they keep trying to go into battle (or for something to always stop it from happening). End with them finally getting their chance to do something heroic in battle but choosing instead to preserve life rather than take it.

11. A deployed military unit does everything in their power to get sent home.

This is more of a comedic story focused on all the antics the military members do so they can get sent home early. Start with them already deployed and deciding they want to go home early. End with them either getting sent home or realizing they really are where they need to be.

12. While deployed abroad, a chaplain struggles with their faith during a time of war.

The conflict of this story is about the purpose of war when the message should be peace. Start with an event that causes the chaplain to start questioning their faith. The rest of the story should be them engaging with other soldiers whose stories further question or prove the faith. The point should be that the chaplain realizes they’re there to help the unit not themselves, regardless of their faith.

13. An ex-soldier is hunted down by the very military they used to serve.

Have your soldier be completely isolated because of the traumas they endured in the war. Because of something they’ve seen or experienced, their home gets attacked and they must use all the military training they acquired to stop the attack.

14. A military unit is lost in the jungle and must find their way back.

During a routine operation, a military unit finds itself lost (or abandoned). The story is them fighting their way through wartime enemies and their own fears to find their way back home.

Historical Military Fiction Prompts

15. a soldier helps start what would become known as the world war i christmas soccer game..

Write a fictionalized account of how the famous soccer game happened during the Christmas Armistice of World War I. Make your protagonist the person who suggests the soccer game and describe how he felt in the battles leading up to the Christmas Armistice. What happened after that night? How were the soldiers changed by the sense of togetherness they felt in that one night?

16. Brothers in the American Civil War fight on opposite sides.

Start with them fighting over which side is ‘right’ and going off to war. Show how both brothers experienced many of the same hardships and personal struggles, regardless of who they were fighting for. You can end it with one brother choosing to support the other one, or you could have one brother die in conflict, maybe even fighting their own brother’s regiment.

17. A young spy aids the fight against Napoleon.

Write a fictionalized account of a French citizen who wants to stop Napoleon from taking over the world. This would probably work best if you chose a period early in the Napoleonic wars, before the Battle of Waterloo (his first loss and ultimately the start of his decline).

18. The Cold War is avoided when a brave soldier steps in.

Similarly, this could be about a soldier who stops an almost nuclear holocaust. Make the story about the soldier trying to convince his superiors to stand down from attacking the other side preemptively. End with the presidents nearly turning the key but deciding not to.

19. A small village decides to stand up to Genghis Khan’s military horde.

Imagine if a village within Genghis Khan’s Asian empire had chosen to stand up to him and his horde. Describe how they prepared to fight against him and whether they won.

20. The Battle for Cleopatra and her Egyptian empire.

This should focus less on Mark Antony and Cleopatra and more on the battle that led to their deaths. Show how Mark Antony fought his way across the Mediterranean to seek refuge with Cleopatra and end with their deaths.

21. Captains from the British navy and Spanish armada act out their rivalry in the Caribbean.

Choose whichever side you want as your ‘good’ side and start with them already in a rivalry. The story is about the many battles and run-ins they have over a period of a few months or a year. End with one side sinking the other’s ship once and for all.

22. A solider in the Nazi military decides to help Jewish prisoners during World War II.

Start with the Nazi soldier making friends with some of the prisoners he is supposed to police. Show how he helps train them to fight against the other soldiers and ultimately helps them escape.

Military Romance Prompts

23. a soldier must fight to save their love..

You can set this in a historical war or a general, unspecified one. What your story should focus on is how the soldier longs for their love during the war and does everything they can to get back to them safely.

24. Soldiers from opposite sides of a war fall in love.

How you bring the two soldiers together is up to you but have them fall in love quite early on. The story is then about how they are trying to overcome their opposing sides to be together.

25. A soldier and nurse find love amid all the death.

Start with the soldier getting injured and waking up in hospital. Have the first half of the story be about them falling in love with each other. The second half of the story is them trying to stay in love once the soldier has returned to war or they have returned home.

26. Two ex-soldiers discover love in their shared trauma.

Have two soldiers meet at a post-traumatic therapy group and bond over their experiences (or their lack of belief in the therapy). Over time, they learn to love each other. But when one gets called back up to fight, how will they deal?

Military Science Fiction Prompts

27. in the battle for earth, who will win.

This is an ‘alien invasion’ story with a focus on the military element. How would the planet coordinate their attacks? Which country’s military would you choose as the main protagonist? You can either start with the invasion or begin with it already in play, but be sure to end with a battle that decides Earth’s fate once and for all.

28. Discovering new planets isn’t always peaceful.

A spaceship lands on a new, uncharted planet and is suddenly, immediately attacked. The story is about who is in the ‘right’: the unsuspecting spaceship or the natives defending their home world.

29. When an advanced race from a distant galaxy suddenly appears, it takes a coalition of planets and their armies to take them down.

Start with the arrival of the advanced race. Focus the conflict on how the other planets learn to work together to stop this threat.

30. Can we stop cyborg soldiers in a futuristic war?

Two opposing sides have independently discovered successful cyborg technology. Your story is about the ‘good’ cyborg soldier trying to stop the ‘bad’ one from destroying society as we know it.

31. Simulations aren’t real, right?

Your story should be based around a recruit who uses simulation technology to learn wartime tactics. Eventually, though, they realize that the technology is less ‘simulation’ and more ‘real life scenarios’ with remotely guided machines. Will they carry on, knowing the damage they are doing is no longer just a game?

A Window into the Class Warfare of Creative Writing

A controversial ranking of MFA programs reveals deeper divisions

Writers -- what with the dismal pay, the groveling for fellowships, and frequent public appearances at bookstores wedged between the children's section and the self-help aisle -- are not known for looking down on other people for being less successful that they are. (They look down on other people for reading those self-help books, sure.)  They generally leave the social Darwinism to the bankers. But if you want to see the result of combining worldviews of a working writer and a stock trader, read Scott Kenemore's piece in Slate today defending the high tuition of a Columbia MFA. Kenemore's direct target is not poor, unsuccessful writers (as compared to the author of six zombie books , some translated into Chinese, such as himself) but  Poets & Writers 's  annual ranking of MFA programs , which ranked Columbia No. 47 this year in an effort, he says, to "shame Columbia into lowering" its pricey fees.

There are two kinds of writers, according to Kenemore. First the sort who Poets & Writers caters to:

Though  Poets & Writers  presents itself as an utterly neutral resource for scriveners of all stripes, the magazine is largely written for and by people focused on the teaching of creative writing as a profession. For this cohort, the Columbia model makes no sense. Why would you take out large student loans if you're just going to publish a few chapbooks (with, say, a print run of 500 copies each), settle into a nice teaching residency at the University of Northern South Dakota making $35,000 a year (less, of course, your subscription to  Poets & Writers ), and achieve tenure based upon your trenchant stewardship of the student literary magazine?

And then the ones who are willing to "brave and persevere in the real world where people" (see above) "often fail":

But--now the unspeakable heresy--what if your goal were … something else? What if your goal were to write a successful book that lots of people read? What if your goal were to become a person of letters whose writing was read and appreciated by those outside of MFA and academic circles? What if you even dreamed of securing thousands of dollars for something you had written?

And where do these future thousandaire writers go? Columbia, of course. A school "for people whose genitals still work," he writes.  Other writers, it should be noted, have problems with the  P&W  list, including 200 creative writing professors who signed an  open letter  criticizing the methodology and, vaguely, the notion of giving any ranks at all in such a field. ( P&W  issued a  rebuttal .) But Kenemore's takedown has no problem at all with ranking things. Especially himself.

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Politics & Society » War

The best war writing, recommended by kate mcloughlin.

War writing extends to all sorts of genres, including blogs and Twitter. Oxford University's Professor Kate McLoughlin , author of Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq recommends some of her favourite books of war writing.

Interview by Beatrice Wilford

Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer

The Iliad by Homer

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

If This Is a Man by Primo Levi

1 Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer

2 the iliad by homer, 3 war and peace by leo tolstoy, 4 catch 22 by joseph heller, 5 if this is a man by primo levi.

Y ou’ve chosen three novels, a memoir and a poem. Which other genres come under the umbrella of war writing?

Does writing about war, in the vein of someone like Hemingway, ever glamorise it? And is there a vein that does the opposite?

Yes. It’s possible to split war writing into pro-war writing and anti-war writing and that can depend on the culture at the time, or it can depend on the individual’s view.

Hemingway obviously thought war was a great thing. Outside war, he liked hunting, fishing and shooting. Killing things was his thing and a war was a natural environment for him. That’s not to say that he thinks that war is an unmitigated good. For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms show the human cost of war as well, and the political cost of war, and the futility of it.

“The blog has taken over from the epic as the war-writing genre of choice.”

I suppose it’s rare to find anything that says war is a good thing without it being questioned at all. But some of the earlier texts celebrate heroism in battle unquestioningly.

How do writers deal with the horrors of war?

There is some incredibly graphic description of what goes on in war and among the most graphic is one I’ve chosen, the Iliad , where there are descriptions of horrific injuries. Another way of describing the horrors of battle is by indirection. Describing, for example, all the people who didn’t get funerals in the First World War—as Wilfred Owen does in ‘ Anthem For Doomed Youth ‘—is a way of conveying death and loss and bereavement on a mass scale.

Is there a clear gender divide in written perspectives on war?

Yes, I think there is. There’s a concept famous among academics who work on war writing called ‘combat gnosticism,’ gnosticism meaning knowledge. It’s the idea that only people who’ve been in combat have earned the right to write about it. And it seems pretty unique to war as a phenomenon. You would think something like childbirth would be similar, but it seems not. It’s war: you have to be in it to be able to write about it according to some people. That has led to there being a canon built up of combatant writing. Especially, for example, the First World War and the trench poets. Of course that has implications for that section of humanity who don’t get to fight in armed combat: women.

I think there are only two armies—the Israeli and the Russian—in which women, even now, can fight as ground forces. That means women have been banished and talk about another angle: the folks back at home, the hospitals, the orphans, the widows, the more sentimental aspects of war. But you get some incredibly feisty women who fight their way to the front anyway, who don’t take no for an answer, stow away, just turn up and who write remarkable reportage—and of course that’s not to overlook the role of the imagination in all of this. Being in war, actually having that combative experience, you might get too close and need more of a detached perspective.

I think the gendering of war writing is about different kinds of experience, but not different kinds of validity of experience.

You’re currently writing about modern warfare. Your most recent book choice is Charlotte Sometimes , written in 1969. How has war writing changed in this time?

The book I’m working on at the moment is called Veteran Poetics . It’s an exploration of certain philosophical ideas—self, experience and storytelling—in the age of modern mass warfare, which I date from 1793 as that’s when the French issued their levée en masse : mass conscription. I think the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars were when war became modern, globalized, industrialised and mass.

I also think that was different from anything that had gone before. Walter Benjamin famously said in his essay “The Storyteller”, “men came back from the First World War, not richer but poorer in communicable experience.” I think he got the date wrong, I think it was actually the Napoleonic and French Revolutionary wars. He conveys this sense of having had an experience that you can’t describe because there’s literally nothing to compare it with, and I think that’s a very modern feeling. I think that’s almost a unique feeling to modernity.

The books I’m looking at for my veterans book wouldn’t necessarily qualify as obvious war writing. The most recent ones are by JK Rowling, her Cormoran Strike series, because they feature a detective who’s a veteran. I trace that figure back to Lord Peter Wimsey and to Dr Watson. I’m looking at how veterancy becomes a means of expressing a certain kind of problem solving, not the forensic problem solving of Sherlock Holmes but the more ‘university of life’ understanding of Dr Watson.

Your first book is Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer.

This book is the first war book I read and it made a deep impression on me. I read it when I was about nine or ten. It’s a book for children , published in 1969. The Charlotte of the title is a twelve year old girl who goes to boarding school and goes to sleep in a dormitory in a bed which has a funny set of wheels on it, and wakes up fifty years earlier in 1918. She has swapped places with a girl called Clare, who in 1918 was sleeping in the same bed. We don’t hear from Clare’s point of view, what she makes of 1969 or 1968, but we do hear about Charlotte, who finds herself in the final year of the First World War .

They swap backwards and forwards night after night. The plot twist is that Charlotte gets stuck in 1918. She and her younger sister are evacuated to a house where the son has gone to war thinking it was going to be a fantastic military heroic adventure, and it turns out it wasn’t. They play with his toy soldiers and the family hold a séance. It made a huge impression on me because Penelope Farmer has this incredibly deft way of making you get a sense of the shock Arthur feels on going to war and finding it was nothing like his toy soldiers and his ideas of bravery.

There is another poignant moment surrounding a teacher in the 1918 school called Miss Wilkins. She’s very bright—a little bit plump, she’s sort of birdy and beady—and Charlotte likes her very much. When she eventually gets back to her own time there’s a Miss Wilkins who’s white haired and a different person altogether, her fiancé died in the First World War. It’s a way of showing how, without being graphic in the slightest, this enormous worldwide conflict had very personal consequences. I think it’s an extraordinary novel and a very thought-provoking one, with many interesting details for children to use to think about war.

What should we tell children about war?

You don’t want to overwhelm children with the seriousness and magnitude of war, but on the other hand there are children who have no choice but to live through war. The children who are told about it are the lucky ones. But I think doing it in this way, having details of the home front, makes it extremely vivid.

There are other fantastic war books for children. Carrie’s War by Nina Bawden is another good example. That also involves an evacuation. It is dear to my heart because my dad was an evacuee. That sense of the impact of war on children comes across very convincingly, very vividly.

As you describe, this book has a very complex temporal framework. How does war alter our experience of time, and how does writing seek to reflect this?

Let’s move on to your second book, the Iliad .

The Iliad is absolutely extraordinary. I read it every so often, and from the beginning it has the most incredible evocation of place, on the beach with the camp fires and Achilles sulking in his tent. There’s such a sense of camaraderie between these warriors. It’s an ancient culture, completely foreign to us now, and yet somehow we are brought to feel their day-to-day emotions. Not just on the Greek side, on the Trojan side as well. There are poignant moments, for example where Hector’s going in to fight and his wife Andromache doesn’t want him to. It’s an extraordinarily vivid account of war and a very graphic one.

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The edition I read it in first, and still read it in, is E. V. Rieu’s Penguin Classics translation. When I’m doing my academic work, I check it against the Loeb Classic edition where it’s very literally translated. Rieu fought in the First World War. He was in the Maratha Light infantry in India and then in the Second World War he was in London in the Blitz, when he decided to start translating the Odyssey . He did the Odyssey first and then the Iliad . This is a veteran in war, translating the great book of war.

How has the Iliad influenced and shaped the genre of war writing?

It continues to inspire. There have been so many writers who have been influenced by it. For an epic, it manages to do both things: it has an enormous scope, but then it really focuses in. To write vividly about battle you need that human interest angle. Monomachia or hand-to-hand fighting comes out in other much later works of war literature, which focus on a single individual and their fate in war.

I’m thinking now of C.S. Lewis in Surprised By Joy . He fought in the First World War and when he got to the western front he said, “This is war, this is what Homer saw.” I’m sure it was nothing like it actually, it’s dubious whether Homer was one single person and it’s unclear whether he could see. But it still carries the weight of all these centuries of cultural baggage.

Having influenced war writing; do you think the Iliad influenced the way people fought in wars?

Book number 3 is War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy . Don’t people only read it for the peace bits? Because the war bits can be quite boring, people say.

The last hundred pages are dull, but if you can stick out the first 1200, then you might as well stick out the last. For the first 1200, it’s a kind of ebb and flow between war and peace, and I think each is equally engaging. When you get to the war parts, Tolstoy is always having the characters think about how they can talk about war. So Nikolai Rostov has these very heroic ideas of going into battle, but then it’s not quite as heroic as he imagined, it doesn’t go as well as he thought, and then when he’s asked to talk about it he realises his listener seems disappointed, so he very quickly slips into a standard heroic war tale. Tolstoy didn’t fight in the Napoleonic wars, but he did fight in the Crimean war, so he drew on his experiences in that when he wrote War and Peace .

Yes, it’s not about the time that he’s writing in. How common is writing written post conflict? What difference is there between this and writing written in a conflict?

That’s true of most of the choices here. Tolstoy is writing in the 1860s about the beginning of the nineteenth century, Homer is writing about an imaginary war, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is published in 1961 and it’s about the Second World War . Penelope Farmer was writing a good fifty years after the First World War . I think people do write about previous wars and partly it’s a way of avoiding contemporary rawnesses.

Let’s move on to Catch 22 , tell me about this book.

This is the great war book of the twentieth century. It’s laugh-out-loud funny. He’s talking about the Second World War , which is thought of as the good war. He picks up on an aspect of war which has gone on since Homer. You have an overarching war strategy which might make sense, but, for the individual, the things they’re asked to do can seem absolutely ludicrous — in this case to fly death-defying, practically suicidal missions. It’s completely illogical, being in the war zone. He captures that brilliantly: through repetition, through completely farcical situations and through extremely harrowing moments as well.

Is comedy antithetical to war, or is it a useful lens through which to look at the experience of war?

Laughter and war are almost natural companions. But I wouldn’t say laughter implies funniness or a lack of seriousness, and nor does comedy. Catch-22 gets you to the point where you can’t apply your reason any more and laughter takes over. It’s the laughter of the absurd which might not be to do with funniness, but is to do with preposterousness or incongruity or disbelief. It’s that kind of, “I can make no sense of this,” laughter and I think evoking it is incredibly skilful.

Another person who does it is Spike Milligan. I love his war memoirs. The first one is Hitler: My Part in His Downfall . Just the title conveys the ridiculous. He is one person who mostly spends his Second World War in Bexhill-on-Sea doing maneuvers.

Catch 22  also has some very visceral descriptions of the horrors of war. How successfully does he convey those experiences and what are their purpose in this book?

He does convey them graphically. He makes it absolutely clear that man is mortal. A character gets chopped in half and there’s someone else who’s horribly wounded in an air accident and you find out the contents of his stomach. It’s literally visceral, his kidneys are there with the tomatoes he had for breakfast. He’s very good at conveying that sense of the absolute mortality and carnality of the human body.

“There’s nothing like war to show the fragility of the human body, its destructibility.”

There’s a recurring character called the Soldier in White, who’s a soldier in the hospital completely encased in white plaster cast. In another scene the characters discover the solder in white is gone and an identical one is in his place. Although his arms are different lengths and his body’s a different length, he’s still encased in white, so there will always be a Soldier in White. People become absolutely indistinguishable from one another, which conveys this sense of man as organic matter. There’s nothing like war to show the fragility of the human body, its destructibility.

There’s the amazing description of the Blitz in Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life . The narrator sees a body that she thinks is clothes on a coat hanger because it’s just hanging there.

I was stunned by Life After Life . I think that idea of the world turned upside down, and particularly the house turned inside out, is quite common. I can only imagine what it must feel like to have an intimate room like the bedroom suddenly on show in the street, and have all your possessions out in the street. It’s the complete opposite of civilized living. Writers use it quite often, “ The Land-Mine ” by George Macbeth described how the war has ripped off the front of houses.

Your final book is If This Is a Man by Primo Levi.

I first read this in my twenties. It was my introduction to the Holocaust . This is when I began to understand what the Holocaust had been. Primo Levi was an Italian Jew and an industrial chemist who was sent to Auschwitz. It is about his existence in Auschwitz. Reading it, horror follows horror. It’s hard to believe that the human frame can survive under such circumstances, let alone survive to write something like this.

There are two moments in it that particularly struck me. Auschwitz is in Poland and it’s winter. The hard labour is extremely difficult and it is very cold and bitter. The prisoners are going to be synthesizing rubber in a factory near to Auschwitz, so there is a chemistry exam. And it’s the most infernal exam in the world. This person who has been reduced to something that is almost sub-human now has to try and remember his chemistry from his degree. If he can remember he will be able to work inside in the warmth, and he won’t die. There’s something about being a scholar and thinking about your knowledge under such circumstances that is very powerful.

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He does get to work in the factory, which probably saves his life. There is a scene in which he is going with a very young prisoner to get soup and suddenly a line from Dante’s Inferno comes to his mind. It’s the Ulysses canto, where Ulysses is saying, “I’m not meant for men like these but men who strive after excellence” and Primo Levi tries to remember it. Trying to remember it is this moment of confirmation that he’s still human. The young man he is with is French and doesn’t see what he’s talking about, but senses that it is really important. Levi doesn’t remember the whole canto, but he remembers enough snatches of it that he’s just about got it. I’d like to say that this proves the enduring, humanising power of literature, but I’m not sure you can. George Steiner has pointed out in his great book Language and Silence that people who read Goethe and listened to Schubert in the morning then went out and did their work as guards at Auschwitz. So I don’t think literature improves you.  Nonetheless, it is a moment worth registering because it is this remembrance that means so much to him and he says, “I would give my day’s soup ration to remember that line.” You’d have to read this account to know how much a day’s soup ration matters.

This makes me think of Elaine Scarry’s The Body In Pain and her idea that if you reduce somebody to just a cipher or symbol of your own power through causing them pain it involves that removal of self. I think it’s a very coherent way of thinking about that loss of humanity–you remove the inner life and you make them simply a body.

Yes, I absolutely agree with that. The writing of this, and similar Holocaust memoirs, is a reaffirmation, it goes back to combat gnosticism. It’s hard for anyone who hasn’t been in that situation to talk about reaffirmation, because it’s hard to imagine just what you would have to come back for.

How does he approach the writing of the truly unspeakable?

He writes with extreme candor and a remarkable lack of self-pity. I think there’s this sense, in theories of representations of the Holocaust, that if you deviate even slightly from the truth then you risk letting in the deniers. And so the place of literature in relation to the Holocaust is a very delicate subject. As readers, we have to be very, very aware of the potential of slipping into sentimentality, or trying to make something good out of it that just isn’t there

Does our knowledge of his suicide in any way alter the experience of reading his writing?

In a way it just makes the bravery of the writing—not only of If This Is A Man but all his other works, which never leave this subject—the more extraordinary. There is something about surviving to bear witness, it is an incredibly brave thing to do. He strikes me as an absolutely heroic person.

You’re writing now about literature and silence, how can silence creep into literature? Might it be the purest expression of a horrific event?

My next project is going to be about literature and silence. It grows out of the last chapter of the book I’m writing on veterans which is called “The End of the Story”. The penultimate chapter is about veterans who never stop talking about the war as a model of literary creativity. And the final chapter is about veterans who won’t say anything or can’t say anything or don’t say anything.

We neglect the silences in literature. I’m interested in the acoustic use of silence in poetry or drama and in things that aren’t said, and how we know they’re not said. It’s terribly difficult if you’re not going to say something or write something in protest, how do you register that? You’ve got to sort of hedge it round with words. But I think we can try and listen to those silences.

And silences, as we know from the two minute silence, are incredibly powerful. I want to try and understand this better, and understand how we can see silences in texts that are there, and also maybe texts that aren’t there, or texts that aren’t as they would have been. It’s looking into the realm of the subjunctive, into the hypothetical, into the not said.

February 12, 2016

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Kate McLoughlin

Kate McLoughlin is Associate Professor of English at Harris Manchester College, Oxford.  Her books include Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq (2011) and Martha Gellhorn: the War Writer in the Field and in the Text   (2007).  She is a former government lawyer, an Associate of the Royal College of Music in piano performance, and a poet: her collection  Plums came out in 2011.

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The Ethics of Writing About War

May 28, 2021 | 0

War fascinates, denigrates, and populates. Its core appeal and its turnoff is violence. It is politically necessary, avoided religiously, and speaks to death like nothing else, save pandemics. It presents challenges to writers because it is as ethical as it is unethical. How we write about war requires constant attention and incessant evaluation. It must not be left to politicians whose reputations and electability depend on it.

Is there such a thing as the “morality of war?” Philosophers have debated this for centuries. For some the notion that morality applies at all once the guns strike up is absurd. “There is no plausible moral theory that could license the exceptional horrors of war. The first group are sometimes called realists. The second group are pacifists. The task of just war theory is to seek a middle path between them: to justify at least some wars, but also to limit them. Although realism undoubtedly has its adherents, few philosophers find it compelling. The real challenge to just war theory comes from pacifism.” [1]

A morally justified war might be a chimera. Today’s philosophers ask, “What could be more intuitive or ethical than the belief that it is morally wrong to kill on a massive scale? Many would argue that there are times when war is morally permissible, and even obligatory. The most famous way of ethically assessing war is to use ‘ Just War Theory’ ; a tradition going back to St. Augustine in the 5th Century and St. Thomas in the 13th Century. Just War theory considers the reasons for going to war (Jus ad bellum) and the conduct of war (Jus in bello). This distinction is important. A war might be ethical but the means unethical, for instance, using landmines, torture, chemicals and . . . drones.” [2]

Philosophy and morality aside, this blog focuses on the writing of it, not doing it, dying in it, or killing while at it. What ethical norms apply to the reporters, journalists, public officials, and op-editors when they put fingers to keyboards about war?

 Journalists, reporters and op-ed writers are ethically restrained by their obligations as professional writers. The Society of Professional Journalists has its own ethical code. [3] They believe “public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. Ethical journalism strives to ensure the free exchange of information that is accurate, fair and thorough. An ethical journalist acts with integrity.” Their code has four underlying principles. (1) Seek Truth and Report It. (2) Minimize Harm. (3) Act Independently. (4) Be Accountable and Transparent.

They follow the first principle by insisting their members be “honest and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.” They adhere to the second by “treating sources, subjects, colleagues and members of the public as human beings deserving of respect. This necessitates a balancing of the public’s need for information against potential harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance or undue intrusiveness.” The third principle is achieved by “Avoiding conflicts of interest, real or perceived and disclosing unavoidable conflicts. They should refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and avoid political and other outside activities that may compromise integrity or impartiality, or may damage credibility.” Last, they achieve accountably and transparency by “being wary of sources offering information for favors or money. They don’t pay for access to news. They identify content provided by outside sources, whether paid or not.

But what about writers who don’t write for a living, belong to esteemed professional organizations, but feel compelled to write about war for entirely personal reasons? Writing in conformance with those four ideals would necessarily require awareness of something unknown to the occasional writer with something to say about the latest war.

Perhaps the ethical norms are embedded in the “what and why” of writing about war. War generates feelings alongside thoughts. It forces us to reveal our emotions, temperament, and convictions. Our writing will reveal what we think about war. Is our thinking clear? Is it systematic? Is it honestly held, or are we dramatizing for effect. Does it reflect conscientious beliefs, or guesses? Is our writing unscrupulous because we know nothing about the pretext of the “war” we are writing about? What if it’s not a war, but merely an exercise in the police power of nations to defend its borders?

None of these questions dictates the “ethics” of amateurs writing about war. They pose inquiry into the what and why we’re writing. Perhaps the largest ethical inquiry is to whom we are writing rather than the what/why of the thing itself. Are we writing publically or privately? Does it matter?

One way to evaluate what, why, and to whom we write about war is to pause and reflect on what a very public person had to say about the ethics of war and the writing of it. Lt. General H.R. McMaster served in the US Army and as the Secretary of Defense. He said,

“Because our enemy is unscrupulous, some argue for a relaxation of ethical and moral standards and the use of force with less discrimination because the ends—the defeat of the enemy—justifies the means employed. To think this way would be a grave mistake. The war in which we are engaged demands that we retain the moral high ground despite the depravity of our enemies. Ensuring ethical conduct goes beyond the law of war and must include a consideration of our values—our ethos. The Law of War codifies the principal tenets of just war theory, especially jus in bello principles of discrimination and proportionality. However, individual and institutional values are more important than legal constraints on immoral behavior; legal contracts are often observed only as long as others honor them or as long as they are enforced.” [4]

A February 2020 article titled “Writing war/ethics: departures and directions,” is not just timely, but directly on point. It is about writing about war. “Thinking through the challenges of writing war/ethics. It reiterates the significance of closely engaging with the production of ethics in and through war and with the mutual implication of war and ethics in each other. How we think and write about war/ethics requires constant attention and re-evaluation; it must not be left to those who think they know how to speak about it.” [5]

I am an author and a part-time lawyer with a focus on ethics and professional discipline. I teach creative writing and ethics to law students at Arizona State University.  Read my bio .

If you have an important story you want told, you can commission me to write it for you.  Learn how .

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/war/

[2] https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/perspective/ethics-of-warfare-heather-widdows.aspx

[3] https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp

[4] https://www.justsecurity.org/37977/mcmaster-ethics-war/

[5] Maja Zehfuss (2019) Writing war/ethics: departures and directions, Critical Studies on Security, 7:3, 258-267, DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2019.1707357  See also, https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080%2F21624887.2019.1707357

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Trench Warfare Creative Writing

One of the creative writing assignments I gave my kids was to write something about World War I. One of my kids wanted to write a letter describing trench warfare on the Western Front during World War I.

To my wife at home, whom I may never see again,

The sun rose into the sky. All was quiet. The sun revealed that the earth was full of cuts and gashes. They were trenches. I was in one of them. Looking around me, I could see bullets everywhere. The earth wasn’t the only thing full of cuts and gashes. There was… I won’t say. I looked out over no man’s land.

All over the ground I saw the dead. Anything out there was smashed and broken. There was a barbed wire we had set up during the night to keep the enemies from charging into our trench. This was now a big tangled heap. From where I was, I could see the enemy trenches. I wondered if they had set up a big tangled heap of their own.

Suddenly a shot was fired, directly at my face. For half an hour, I watched the bullet get bigger, and bigger, and bigger. Like a cow staring at an oncoming train, I just watched it. By the time it was so close I could see that it had a smiley face printed on it. My brain screamed, “Melvin! You idiot! What are you doing?!?”

I brought my head down into the trench, but not before the bullet cut a swath through my hair, right next to the other swath in my hair from the same thing that happened yesterday. Everyone in my trench was jealous of my awesome haircut. Frankly, I don’t know what they’re so jealous of. One of these days it will be my face. I dread the smiley face bullet.

I don’t know why I signed up for this war. I don’t know why we’re having this war in the first place. When I enlisted, I didn’t know what war was like. I didn’t even know they made smiley face bullets. Oh well, another day, another haze of shells. Tomorrow will be my next eyeball fight with my arch-nemesis.

Love, Melvin

Tags: American History , history , modern history , World War I

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Creative Guerrilla Warfare: The Three Rules of Engagement

by Colby R Rice | Jan 9, 2015 | Writing Inspiration & Writing Achievements | 0 comments

guerrilla |gəˈrilə| (also guerilla )

a member of a small independent group taking part in irregular fighting, typically against larger regular forces: this small town fell to the guerrillas | [ as modifier ] : guerrilla warfare .

• [ as modifier ] referring to actions or activities performed in an impromptu way, often without authorization: guerrilla theater .

Guerrilla warfare is a form of irregular warfare in which a small group of combatants such as armed civilians or  irregulars use military tactics including ambushes , sabotage , raids , petty warfare , hit-and-run tactics , and mobility to fight a larger and less-mobile traditional military .

ATTEN-HUT!!

General Writer-Mom here.

So I’ve learned three things after becoming a work-at-home mom who still wants to work (and eventually be a work-not-a-home-mom).

1. Shit ain’t always gonna flow the way you want it to.

SO make with the key-smashing!!

2. You’ll never “have enough time” to work.

Let me repeat myself.

You will never “HAVE ENOUGH TIME” to work.

Because having a day chock-full of these things would be ideal, but it isn’t realistic, especially if you have kids not yet in school or you have other commitments, like work.

So you will never “have enough time”, but you  will have all the time you need to get down to business and to actually write .

Meaning that you will have time to get words on paper…  while  you’re waiting for the bus,  while  feeding the kid,  while  on your daily commute, while in the doctor’s office, and during pretty much any other errand that needs to be run, such as chores or keeping the home in good condition and the use of services like Mold Removal Matawan can help with this.

These words you write will not be perfect words. But they will be words. And that’s all that matters. If you don’t think so, then please watch this video:

3. If you’re a writer (or any other type of creative for that matter, i.e. a filmmaker, painter, dancer, etc), then you’ve automatically been drafted into one of the biggest wars ever known to Earth’s history. And you  must  fight this war to survive.

Yes. I said it.

And the only successful writers are the ones who choose to actually  fight  in this war.

But this is not a war wherein the casualties are human. It’s a war of the mind and soul, where words are the bullets, no-sellers are the bombs, and the ever-scary book review is the happy land mine just delighted to blow you to bits. (Little fuckers…)

The two main casualties on  this battlefield are your soul and passion for writing, which if lost, mean the death of the Writer.

But you need not kneel to death, dear Writer. You can survive this battle. You just have to know how to engage in the art of creative guerrilla warfare.

If you’re wondering what creative guerrilla warfare means, I’ll adapt the above definitions for you:

Creative guerrilla warfare is: a form of irregular creation  in which a small group of crazy artists  such as writers, filmmakers, painters, dancers, and other “inspired” beings use off-the-wall methods– including  creation  ambushes , procrastination  sabotage , inspiration raids , faking-the-funk ,  write -and-run tactics ,  mobility-and-mobile-phone-ninja-warrior-stuff , and just plain ole making shit up —  to get their art made, no matter what the cost and cut, and to fight the larger society that is unforgiving of our cray-cray way of life.

Uh oh. Welp, case in point: it’s 6:38 AM, and I’m smack in the middle of writing this blog. And my baby just woke up. And man, does her diaper smell RANK, lol. Be back soon.

K. I’m back. And it’s 7:40 AM.

You see? It’s been about an hour since I wrote the message above, and now I’m back to finish this blog post. This tactic falls squarely under the “write-and-run” tactic I described above. When I said “guerrilla warfare”, I was dead serious, lol.

Well, hell if I know, lol!

What I do know though is what I’m learning in the trenches, and I’ll share a new lesson with you whenever I learn something that works for me. Mind, these lessons won’t always necessarily work for you, because each of our lives comes along with a whole set of unique challenges. But since we’re all in the same fight, I figured, what the hell? Let’s spread the love, and I hope me sharing my experiences will be of some sort of help. 🙂 So look to the next post (and future ones) for my “insights” on waging #amwriting guerilla warfare.

What about you, then? Do you agree that being a creative is a sort of day-to-day “warfare”? Do you feel that being and staying creative is a fight? If so, what are *your* rules of engagement, and how do you show up on the battlefield? Share your thoughts below! And, of course, in the meantime…

Keep it indie, <3 Colby

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My Writing Students Were Arrested at Columbia. Their Voices Have Never Been More Essential

O n April 30, 56 years after Columbia sent the police in to arrest student protesters who had taken over Hamilton Hall in protest of the Vietnam War—protests the school loves to promote—I was walking my 12-year-old daughter home after her choir performance. We had gone an extra stop on the subway because the stop at 116th, Columbia’s stop, was closed. Instead, we had to walk back to our apartment from the 125th stop. When we got within sight of Columbia, a line of dozens of police blocked our path. I asked them to let us through; I pointed to our apartment building and said we lived there. As a Columbia professor, I live in Columbia housing.

“I have my orders,” the cop in charge said.

“I live right there,” I said. “It’s my daughter’s bedtime.”

“I have my orders,” he said again.

“I’m just trying to get home,” I said.

We were forced to walk back the way we came from and circle around from another block. Luckily, our building has an entrance through the bodega in the basement. This is how I took my daughter up to her room and sent her to bed.

Read More: Columbia's Relationship With Student Protesters Has Long Been Fraught

A week earlier, I had brought some food for the students camping out on Columbia’s West Lawn and had met with similar resistance. Security guards asked whether I was really faculty; I had already swiped my faculty badge that should have confirmed my identity. They asked to take my badge, then they said I hadn’t swiped it, which I had, two seconds earlier, as they watched. They said their professors had never brought food to them before. I didn’t know what to say to this—“I’m sorry that your professors never brought you food?” They called someone and told them the number on my badge. Finally, they were forced to let me through. They said again that their professors had never brought them food. “OK,” I said, and walked into campus. I reported their behavior and never received a reply.

On April 30, after I had got my daughter to bed, my partner and I took the dog down to pee. We watched the protesters call, “Shame!” as the police went in and out of the blockade that stretched 10 blocks around campus. Earlier that day, we had seen police collecting barricades—it seemed like there would be a bit of peace. As soon as it got dark, they must have used those barricades and more to block off the 10 blocks. There were reports on campus that journalists were not allowed out of Pulitzer Hall, including Columbia’s own student journalists and the dean of the School of Journalism, under threat of arrest. Faculty and students who did not live on campus had been forbidden access to campus in the morning. There was no one around to witness. My partner and I had to use social media to see the hundreds of police in full riot gear, guns out, infiltrate Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, where protesters had holed up , mirroring the 1968 protests that had occupied the same building.

In the next few days, I was in meeting after meeting. Internally, we were told that the arrests had been peaceful and careful, with no student injuries. The same thing was repeated by Mayor Adams and CNN . Meanwhile, president Minouche Shafik had violated faculty governance and the university bylaws that she consult the executive committee before calling police onto campus. (The committee voted unanimously against police intervention .)

Read More: Columbia Cancels Main Commencement Following Weeks of Pro-Palestinian Protests

Then, Saturday morning, I got an email from a couple of writing students that they had been released from jail. I hadn’t heard that any of our students had been involved. They told me they hadn’t gotten food or water, or even their meds, for 24 hours. They had watched their friends bleed, kicked in the face by police. They said they had been careful not to damage university property. At least one cop busted into a locked office and fired a gun , threatened by what my students called “unarmed students in pajamas.”

In the mainstream media, the story was very different. The vandalism was blamed on students. Police showed off one of Oxford Press’s Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction . (This series of books offers scholarly introductions that help students prepare for classes, not how-to pamphlets teaching them to do terrorism.)

“I feel like I’m being gaslit,” one of my students said.

I teach creative writing, and I am the author of a book about teaching creative writing and the origins of creative-writing programs in the early 20th century. The oldest MFA program in the country, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was funded by special-interest groups like the Rockefeller Foundation and, famously, the CIA, and was explicitly described by director Paul Engle as a tool to spread American values.

Read More: 'Why Are Police in Riot Gear?' Inside Columbia and City College's Darkest Night

The way we teach creative writing is essential because it shapes what kinds of narratives will be seen as valuable, pleasurable, and convincing. Today’s writing students will record how our current events become history. One of the strategies Columbia took with its police invasion was to block access of faculty, students, and press to the truth. It didn’t want any witnesses. It wanted to control the story.

For weeks, Columbia administration and the mainstream media has painted student protesters as violent and disruptive—and though there have been incidents of antisemitism, racism, and anti-Muslim hatred, including a chemical attack on pro-Palestine protesters , I visited the encampment multiple times and saw a place of joy, love, and community that included explicit teach-ins on antisemitism and explicit rules against any hateful language and action. Students of different faiths protected each other’s right to prayer. Meanwhile, wary of surveillance and the potential use of facial recognition to identify them, they covered their faces. Faculty have become afraid to use university email addresses to discuss ways to protect their students. At one point, the administration circulated documents they wanted students to sign, agreeing to self-identify their involvement and leave the encampment by a 2 p.m. deadline or face suspension or worse. In the end, student radio WKCR reported that even students who did leave the encampment were suspended.

In a recent statement in the Guardian and an oral history in New York Magazine , and through the remarkable coverage of WKCR, Columbia students have sought to take back the narrative. They have detailed the widespread support on campus for student protesters; the peaceful nature of the demonstrations; widespread student wishes to divest financially from Israel, cancel the Tel Aviv Global Center, and end Columbia’s dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University; and the administration’s lack of good faith in negotiations. As part of the Guardian statement, the student body says that multiple news outlets refused to print it. They emphasize their desire to tell their own story.

In a time of mass misinformation, writers who tell the truth and who are there to witness the truth firsthand are essential and must be protected. My students in Columbia’s writing program who have been arrested and face expulsion for wanting the university to disclose and divest, and the many other student protesters, represent the remarkable energy and skepticism of the younger generation who are committed not only to witnessing but participating in the making of a better world. Truth has power, but only if there are people around to tell the truth. We must protect their right to do so, whether or not the truth serves our beliefs. It is the next generation of writers who understand this best and are fighting for both their right and ours to be heard.

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Executive Summary

• The Russian operation in Syria, which started in 2015, has become a main reference for understanding the changing character of war, and one of the main drivers transforming Russian military theory, concepts of operations, organizational structures, and force build-up.
• Russian lessons pertaining to the changing character of war and implications for the theory of victory fall into three categories: new type of warfare, new type of enemy, and the main implications for operational art.
• The notions of “Reconnaissance Strike Complex/Contour” - a combined arms system of systems which links together intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities, command and control, and precision standoff fires - have become a recurrent theme in Russian force build-up. Most military modernization efforts have been grouped around refining the intelligence, command and control, and fire capabilities of the reconnaissance strike complex.
• The Syrian campaign has offered an unprecedented experience in conducting an expeditionary operation. The lessons learned from this experience have given light to a novel concept—the “strategy of limited action.” This strategy is an evolution of the sort of long-range power projection operations by a limited but self-sufficient grouping of combined arms forces.

Introduction

This paper explores Russian lessons learned from the Syrian operation. The paper has two goals: (1) to highlight how this learning process informs the current Russian military transformation, and (2) to illustrate the Russian culture of military innovations. The subjects are interrelated: The operation in Syria became a point of reference for conceptualizing the changing character of war, and one of the main drivers of Russian military transformation. Lessons learned inform the development of military theory and transform concepts of operations, organizational structures, force build-up, and the professional conduct of the Russian military. These transformations highlight the Russian culture of military innovation. 

Before, during, and following the Syrian operation, which started in 2015, the Russian strategic community has been conceptually-intellectually in the most dynamic shape of the post-Soviet era. The community has exhibited a recurring pattern of innovation. First, the community’s theoretical discussions explore a variety of doctrinal ideas related to the changing character of war; military exercises then refine these theoretical insights and introduce them into practice. These ideas then receive a reality check in actual military operations. Finally, the lesson-learning process during and following the Syrian operation takes the concepts from the experience and injects them into the theoretical debate, which furthers the cycle of learning and transformation. 1 This paper highlights the main insights generated by this process.

The paper argues that the insights that this lessons-learned process has produced could be categorized in three ways: (1) conceptualization of new forms of warfare and features of operational art, (2) force modernization around the reconnaissance-strike complex, and (3) the emerging concept of operations known as “the strategy of limited actions.” The paper elaborates on these main insights within each of these categories and then offers the summarizing remarks in its conclusion. Russian lessons about the changing character of war and the implications for the theory of victory in future wars largely fall into three categories: “new generation warfare,” enemy of the new formation, and implications for operational art.

Conceptualizing the Current Character of War

The Syrian operation has enabled Russian practitioners to further refine a notion of new generation warfare (NGW)—a set of ideas about the changing character of war that had been circulating in the Russian strategic community (under the current chief of the general staff) for several years prior to the start of the operation. NGW minimizes the role of the large-scale military operations of the industrial war era and instead combines hard and soft power across military and nonmilitary domains. It capitalizes on indirect action, informational operations, paramilitaries, and special operations forces backed by sophisticated military capabilities, both conventional and nuclear. 2 For experts in Russia, the Syrian operation is probably the most illustrative demonstration of a war waged on the principles of the NGW. 3 The unity of simultaneous and mutually reinforcing efforts—political, military, diplomatic and informational, rather than sequence of these efforts, as usually prescribed by Western military thought— ensured, according to Moscow, the desired outcome of the operation. The political process (both  reconciliation centers arranging ceasefire agreements with local field commanders and village heads) were interwoven in one integrated operation.

According to the Russian political-military leadership, in Syria, Moscow dealt with a serious operational challenge, an enemy of the new formation : a well-organized, effectively trained, and adequately equipped terrorist army. The Russian military brass saw it not as a terrorist group, but as an irregular-regular military armed with modern weapons, and comparable with state militaries. In terms of the employed resources and ability to generate operational effects, Moscow saw this adversary better than militaries of some medium-level powers. 4 Occasionally, Russian experts categorized this new type of enemy as hybrid, which they defined the same way the Israeli military does: a non-state actor armed with state military capabilities, waging warfare along the lines of guerilla principles and driven by the logic of terrorism. 5 Indeed, Moscow’s adversaries were equipped with armor; artillery; communication, reconnaissance and target acquisition capabilities, including electronic warfare; and intelligence and strike unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This arsenal and concept of operations enabled the adversary, according to Moscow, to conduct both maneuverable and static ground warfare of both high and low intensity in urban, desert, and mountain areas, while the terrorist logic of using the civilian population as shields or as targets significantly multiplied its combat effectiveness.

Russian experts emphasized the enemy of the new formation’s ability to rapidly switch back and forth from guerilla and terrorist tactics to those of state militaries, its adaptability to the rapidly changing situation, its aptitude for innovation, and its ability to develop new operational knowledge and disseminate it horizontally. In the Russian view, this type of adversary emphasizes rapidness, surprise, moral-psychological demoralization, and physical exhaustion of the enemy forces, putting the enemy constantly on the defensive through systematic attrition. 6 As long as strategic deterrence preserves military clashes below a great-power direct conventional collision, apparently, Russian military leadership expects this type of adversary to become a prototype actor on the prospective battlefields of the new generation warfare, and has designed its countermeasures and theory of victory accordingly.

Main Features of Operational Art

The operation in Syria has become a main point of reference for new forms of operational art. So far, several of its aspects loom large in Russian professional discourse. First is a demand from military commanders to develop capacity to design, plan, and wage operations while merging traditional forms of warfare with asymmetrical methods of war. 7 Modern militaries have a general tendency to act with plausible deniability through clandestine, “evidenceless actions” (bezulikovye deistviia) while employing nonstate proxies or private military contractors for the purpose of achieving political goals. 8

Secondly, contemporary warfare is characterized by “operational simultaneity,” and it demands decentralized, network-centric management (setevye skhemy upravleniia) . According to Russian experts, because the adversary is engaged concurrently in several phases of a classical military campaign, the traditional sequence of times - first, military effort and then translation of it into diplomatic effects – is not applicable anymore. Thus, network-centric management is more effective than the hierarchal variety. 9

Finally, Russian military leadership has emphasized the importance of combining enemy-centric and population-centric activities. The leadership sees the merging of combat, humanitarian, and reconciliation activities as necessary for success. 10 According to them, the integrated military-social-political infrastructure on the theater of operations makes strategic achievements possible. 11 This approach is likely to become a prototype of prospective Russian operations.

Reconnaissance Strike Complex: A Recurrent Theme in Russian Force Build-Up

Russian military fought using the Information Technology Revolution in Military Affairs (IT-RMA), a combined arms system of systems which links together intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities (ISR), command and control (C2), and precision standoff fires. The Russian lexicon defines this phenomenon at the strategic-operational level as a reconnaissance strike, and, at the operational-tactical level, as reconnaissance-fire complexes or contours (RFC and RSC). 12 Flaws in the Russian military, which had been highlighted during the war in Georgia, were addressed by the use of IT-RMA: the deficit of precision-guided munitions (PGMs); an inability to wage network-centric warfare (NCW) due to the low level of command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR); and low capacity to wage combined-arms warfare. The aim of the Russian reforms since then has been to rebuild the conventional military and to advance it toward the ideal type of RSC. The General Staff saw the operation in Syria as a testing ground for refining its ability to integrate the ISR, C2, and fire systems. 13

As Russia continues to enter a precision regime, the main challenge for reforming ISR has been providing targets for accurate fires. Most of the lessons related to ISR have focused on how the Command of Special Operation Forces (KSO), 14 the UAV fleet, and Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS) constellation generate a bank of prepared and real-time targets. All branches involved in the operation have employed an unprecedented (in terms of types and numbers) fleet of reconnaissance, strike, and radio-electronic suppression UAVs. The Russian high command envisions the UAVs as an integral part of all future combat activities for all services. 15 The GLONASS constellation supported the feeding of targets to sea, air, and ground-precision systems, and improved the accuracy of the strikes with unguided munitions. Russian experts demonstrated an awareness of the system’s limitations and have recommended that the Russian military leadership prioritize further refinement. 16 The biggest obstacle in Syria was the ability to rapidly close sensor-to-shooter loops and hit small, maneuvering targets in longer ranges while decreasing the scale of indiscriminate bombings. 17 Future modernization in the ISR realm is likely to set its sights on these tasks.

The C2 architecture during the Syria operation consisted of three layers: the highest-level operator was the Group of Combat Management within the National Defense Management Center (NTsUO) in Moscow; 18 the Command Post of the Grouping of Forces in Khmeimim, the tactical-operational directions was the lowest -level operator. This architecture aimed to tailor procedures from the strategic to the tactical-operational levels across diplomatic, military, and humanitarian domains, and to maintain constant situational awareness. It enabled rapid decision-making and decision execution, adaptation to the changing trends, orchestration of the activities according to a unified operational plot, and uninterrupted control from high command. Combat management of troops on the tactical-operational level rested on a unified mobile field C2 system, enabling automatic collection and analysis of the information, a constant intelligence and operational data flow, a better battle damage assessment, combat planning, fire management, and logistical-rear support. 19 According to Russian commentators, this unified tactical-level C2 system reduced the time needed for organizing combat activity and accelerated the combat management tempo between 20 and 30 percent. Given the favorable assessment of its modus operandi, this C2 architecture and the automated systems supporting it are likely to be preserved in future practice and procurement programs. 20

In terms of fires, although the proportion of the Russian PGMs used in Syria was probably less than five percent, 21 the General Staff saw it as an entrance of the Russian military to the precision regime club. 22 Its C4ISR systems, in the Russian view, multiplied the utility of nonadvanced unguided munitions, 23 and made their effectiveness comparable with that of the precision strikes. 24 The intent to wage modern warfare using forces that function as mobile and self-sufficient RF and RS complexes has been the main takeaway from the Syria operation; it is likely to inform future exercises and weapons modernization programs. 25 According to the Russian military leadership, the rearmament program should aim to produce self-sufficient groupings of forces equipped with sea-, air-, and land-based precision, standoff, C4ISR, and REB capabilities in strategically important theaters. 26 Promotion of robotics; digitization and intellectualization of the battlefield fire control, 27 which Moscow sees as a force multiplier, are other takeaways informing procurement plans. 28 Presumably, the State Armaments Program pays special attention to the quality and quantity of the PGM arsenal and the C4ISR systems supporting it, including UAVs and satellites, as its main enablers in all the branches, using the lessons it learned from Syria. 29 This emphasis is second only to modernization of the nuclear triad. 30

About the Author

Dmitry (Dima) Adamsky is Professor at the School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at the IDC Herzliya University, Israel. His research interests include international security cultural approaches to international relations; and American, Russian, and Israeli national security policy. He has published on these topics in Foreign Affairs, Security Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, Intelligence and National Security, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, and Cold War History. He is the author of Operation Kavkaz (2006), The Culture of Military Innovation (Stanford University Press, 2010), and, with Kjell Inge Bjerga, Contemporary Military Innovation (Routledge, 2013). His latest book, Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy (Stanford University Press, 2019) is about religion, politics, and strategy in Russia.

Russia Strategic Initiative (RSI)

This program of research, led by the GCMC and funded by RSI (U.S. Department of Defense effort to enhance understanding of the Russian way of war in order to inform strategy and planning), employs in-depth case studies to better understand Russian strategic behavior in order to mitigate miscalculation in relations.

The Marshall Center Security Insights

The George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, a German-American partnership, is committed to creating and enhancing worldwide networks to address global and regional security challenges. The Marshall Center offers fifteen resident programs designed to promote peaceful, whole of government approaches to address today’s most pressing security challenges. Since its creation in 1992, the Marshall Center’s alumni network has grown to include over 13,985 professionals from 157 countries. More information on the Marshall Center can be found online at www.marshallcenter.org .

The articles in the Security Insights series reflect the views of the authors and are not necessarily the official policy of the United States, Germany, or any other governments.

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A Mouth Holds Many Things: On the Magic of Hybrid Writing

Dao strom enters a state of slippage.

I am walking along a shoreline. A shoreline is a place, a geography, where two elements—water and sand—meet. We call this place of meeting a line, but it is also the continual erasing of line. How water writes, erases, rewrites. Its own delineation of: the encounter. The shape of how these two realms meet a constant Inconstant. Fluctuation of. Demarcation. Is it water’s tendency to- ward a constant inconstancy that insists on this snaking of lineage—this lineal snaking? Is it water the agent of erasure, even: self- erasure? Or is it the sand’s nature—of both yield and subsume— that refuses, resists, the holding of line? Resists inheritance of the notion line makes record? Surely we know sand is an unreliable canvas. Is ambiguity of canvas. A mutable, shift ing substance of page that does not wish to be page. Together sand and water conspire. Repeatedly evolving and eroding the writing of their own betweens— which is to say: what is a boundary? But a temporality of attempt. At holding anything. (All writing begins as boundary.) I am walking along a shoreline. Line that refuses lineal nature.

I begin here, with this image and attempt to send text across the page evocative of the shape of water, because this is how the hybrid journey begins for me: a realization of the transmutability, the very tenuousness, of boundaries that separate, that supposedly demarcate realms otherwise as distinct as ocean and land. My own arrival into the realm of hybrid writing was, like this tracing of a shoreline, not a direct, not a fixed or predictable path. Here are the facts: I had written and published two books of fiction—the genre that had thus far identified me as a literary author; I had, since my early 20s, also been writing songs on the side; I had an undergraduate background, a naive once-ambition, in filmmaking. I was trying to write what I believed might be another novel, a long-form book. But, images wanted to invade, and a straightforward throughline, characters with character arcs, plot, all those conventional narrative devices, continued to evade me. Instead, interiority and some esoteric, intuitive rhythm wanted to lead—an inner music vying to come through. I was aware of an elliptical nature, an unwieldy energy, at the subtle-beating heart, or twisted gut, of the story I was seeking to tell, that kept balking, digressing askew of the more normative, straight-paved roads expected of a “novel” or “memoir.” The story I was seeking to tell had to do with Vietnam, with my own mixed-cultural family and parental legacies, with the usual diaspora and refugee lineages of war and exodus and inherited traumas, but for whatever reason I could not wrangle those lines—in my case, thorny vines—into a shape that was a legible or “traditional” enough format to be sellable. (“Not to belabor the point, but if you would just write in a more traditional format,” my New York literary agent had once said to me.) But it was not that I was not trying; it was not even that I was trying, intentionally, to be difficult or experimental—it was just that as a writer I am limited: I could not lie, I could not pretend, I could not but follow the impulse of the art itself through which, in truth, I was wrestling with ghosts—and ghosts do not respect walls nor the notion of voicing through a single or same body, consistently.

And so, something in the work kept twisting—defying shape, container, resolution, or closure; the book that wanted to be needed to twist even further afield, needed to buck the leather constraints of “book” itself. I garnered rejections for this manuscript I was trying to write, I was gently released from obligation to my literary agent, also rejected by other agents and publishers. I found myself wandering a hinterland I had no map for—personally, creatively, professionally. In truth this was a very lonely period. At the time I knew no other writers who were trying to work across disciplines. I had no mentors; no community; no assurances that any of it was a very good idea. (No doubt, there existed examples of multidisciplinary artists and experimental writers, but I hadn’t yet encountered them along the path I’d thus far taken.) I kept working, through the isolation and self-doubt, the discovery and alchemy of those 7+ years it took to find—to forge—my way through that first hybrid project, which I eventually arrived at describing as a “memoir in image + text + music.” I found a small press publisher, lost them too (the press folded), made some new friends with whom I formed a loose publishing collective; I did all of my own editing, layout, design—learned the production line—and essentially published my first hybrid project on my own. If I had not taken it into my own hands as such, I am certain it would never have been permitted to enter the world in the form(s) it inhabits.

& what is writing? It begins with cutting. Etymologically: a verb; describing an action. To tear, scratch, carve : line—immaterial motion—impressed into or upon something material. Stone; clay; leaf; pulp; fibers. This tradition of the human and mark-making. & why do we—must we—write? The implement, the stick, the chisel; the discovery of puncture as tool for claim or record. To arm the self or the tribe against forgetting, perhaps. To endeavor to step outside of, outlast, Time. Contained within this tear ( tear ), however, always too an impulse toward ownership. To draw boundary between or around— whether an object, geography, observation, memory, or the ineffability of experience. There is something we wish to keep, somewhere we desire to belong to, that we nonetheless know we are destined —doomed—to lose. From its inception writing was always a preparation. For loss.

And I am talking about writing, but I am also talking about hybridity. As a kind of writing born out of such losses and knowledge of losses. A writing assembling itself amid/despite the vacuum of interstices, ambiguity of middle-grounds, tangle of intersections. A writing of refusals (to write); a mutability of voice. Ebbs and flows and many, repeated obliterations. A writing that construes itself of edges. Poly- vocalities of entry and egress. Assemblages of disassembly. Multi- plicities. Duplicities. Many -cities.

Let’s return to water. I’ve always had a thing for rivers—I grew up along rivers that flow through the Sierra Nevadas of northern California, where—back in the 1850s—men who had come to mine gold from those rivers dug so much, they changed the course of those waterways. Rivers disrupted; re-formed. And, in the land where I was born, on the other side of the globe (from where had traveled with me those boundary-refusing ghosts), the patterns of rivers there too were heavily influential. Seasonal floods and deltas having cultivated a people who had learned to live in rhythm with the riverine vicissitudes of water; a myth that the first mother of our country’s people wept the rivers into being, and those rivers then had wed her (and thus us) to the sea. A river sends tributaries—many mouths—to the sea. And as this book knows: a mouth holds many things .

Which is to say: the theme of multi- plicity is also a story of erosion. Evasions; evolutions. De- stabilizations. Dispersals; de-centerings. (Dia-sporas.) The ground troubled, re- written. A river breaks from its main vein, because water possesses ability to circumvent obstacles through frag- menting—simultaneously multiplying a nd dividing—itself. In order yet to keep to its initial course. Which was always simply to follow gravity and rejoin the sea, that primeval one-body made of and fed by all the mouths and streams. I see multimodal writing employing a similar tactic. Of breaking apart to bring together.

We are divergent and we are confluent. Most of us arrive here on our own, singly, singularly. We arrive each of us to our particular patch of wet, shifting sand of our own peculiar accord, or chords, let’s say, idiosyncratically learned, then voiced.

Because the path of learning, of discovering, the hybrid realm was not, for me, one guided by mentors or models, especially initially, I followed no one, exactly; no one led or invited me. As is often wanted on the topic of lineage, I could cite the seminal works and names that have held space in this realm—Cha, Adnan, Vicuña, Rankine (et al)—but, in truth, those writers’ works did not come into my knowing until after I had made most of my journey through my first hybrid project, somewhat blindly, fumblingly, feeling as if I were navigating through a hinterland without a map. Yes: they were waiting for me, eventually, when I was ready to find them, and so honored to find them, and began then to also discover my contemporaries working in kindred, liminal spaces. In actuality: I learned from other so-called aspirants—other, current hybrid authors publishing via small presses, lesser-known—at the same time I was discovering the works of what we might call the masters—or mistresses—in the field: an albeit relatively short lineage of hybridexperimental works by women of color working predominantly in English. I feel it important to observe that an initiatory part of this journey, one’s commitment to it, may require (or at least did for me) a dive into the unknown, and willingness to abandon reliance on canonical thinking, canonical measures and validations and examples, as guideposts. At some point the markers stop—you venture into the open grasses of an open field, alone.

And for many of us, this learning, this tracing of invisible trails through overgrown grass, does not occur inside classrooms or existing structures. It arrives rather like a call on the wind we don’t know where it is coming or calling from, that we hear (or feel) from our seat at a desk in a room, perhaps… and it requires us to turn our attention out the windows. Something beyond the glass beckons. A new fracturing of the light, a refracted strange sotto voce sound, new registers of echoes (…)

<We are divergent and we are confluent.> <We are collective without being majority.> <We are multiple without being conglomerate.> <We are scattered <<through/across>> : we are amongst.>

& what kind of writing is it seeks to destroy itself even as it builds itself? & why this performance—under- grass tactic—of divergence / di- versions? this method of the many faces?

& what if I describe the mechanical arms of writing as a technology sutured to our natural limbs, but that we were not born with, and so we learned how to operate them, navigate their inherited (dys)- functions channeled via our [true] [off- center] mouths?

& what if I claim ocean as my literary form, sea as my preferred genre (if I must name one)? May I cite water as my container / conveyor of choice, through which I may allow the unmediated flows of that immaterial substance we call voice ?

To comprehend that one thing can be multiple things at once and still be wholly that one thing; and that multiple things—separate—can simultaneously be the same thing. To understand there is no direct line for arriving at simultaneity or multivalence. To understand hybridity as a way of saying we are neither this nor (completely) that; at the same time we are this and we are that, maybe even that other that, too. And it’s all subject to change. We might dissolve or evolve any boundaries. And we won’t stay put where you think you’ve safely placed us, named us, tried to corral us. There is—necessarily—no formula to repeat us, our arrivals or our formations. Such positions and territories are not always supported, condoned, understood, or even accurately perceived by either the heres or theres one may have strayed from. Hybridity as a challenge to the dominion of identities. Hybridity as a state of slippage, unwilling to capitulate, an accepted tenuousness of being

__________________________________________

From A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection , edited by Dao Strom and Jyothi Natarajan. Available now via Fonograf Editions. Image still from Dao Strom’s music video for “Jesus/Darkness”; filmed by Roland Dahwen, edited by Kyle Macdonald, 2022.

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Creative Writing Program Marks Three Decades of Growth, Diversity

By Luisa A. Igloria

2024: a milestone year which marks the 30 th  anniversary of Old Dominion University’s MFA Creative Writing Program. Its origins can be said to go back to April 1978, when the English Department’s (now Professor Emeritus, retired) Phil Raisor organized the first “Poetry Jam,” in collaboration with Pulitzer prize-winning poet W.D. Snodgrass (then a visiting poet at ODU). Raisor describes this period as “ a heady time .” Not many realize that from 1978 to 1994, ODU was also the home of AWP (the Association of Writers and Writing Programs) until it moved to George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

The two-day celebration that was “Poetry Jam” has evolved into the annual ODU Literary Festival, a week-long affair at the beginning of October bringing writers of local, national, and international reputation to campus. The ODU Literary Festival is among the longest continuously running literary festivals nationwide. It has featured Rita Dove, Maxine Hong Kingston, Susan Sontag, Edward Albee, John McPhee, Tim O’Brien, Joy Harjo, Dorothy Allison, Billy Collins, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sabina Murray, Jane Hirshfield, Brian Turner, S.A. Cosby, Nicole Sealey, Franny Choi, Ross Gay, Adrian Matejka, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Ilya Kaminsky, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Jose Olivarez, and Ocean Vuong, among a roster of other luminaries. MFA alumni who have gone on to publish books have also regularly been invited to read.

From an initial cohort of 12 students and three creative writing professors, ODU’s MFA Creative Writing Program has grown to anywhere between 25 to 33 talented students per year. Currently they work with a five-member core faculty (Kent Wascom, John McManus, and Jane Alberdeston in fiction; and Luisa A. Igloria and Marianne L. Chan in poetry). Award-winning writers who made up part of original teaching faculty along with Raisor (but are now also either retired or relocated) are legends in their own right—Toi Derricotte, Tony Ardizzone, Janet Peery, Scott Cairns, Sheri Reynolds, Tim Seibles, and Michael Pearson. Other faculty that ODU’s MFA Creative Writing Program was privileged to briefly have in its ranks include Molly McCully Brown and Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley.

"What we’ve also found to be consistently true is how collegial this program is — with a lively and supportive cohort, and friendships that last beyond time spent here." — Luisa A. Igloria, Louis I. Jaffe Endowed Professor & University Professor of English and Creative Writing at Old Dominion University

Our student body is diverse — from all over the country as well as from closer by. Over the last ten years, we’ve also seen an increase in the number of international students who are drawn to what our program has to offer: an exciting three-year curriculum of workshops, literature, literary publishing, and critical studies; as well as opportunities to teach in the classroom, tutor in the University’s Writing Center, coordinate the student reading series and the Writers in Community outreach program, and produce the student-led literary journal  Barely South Review . The third year gives our students more time to immerse themselves in the completion of a book-ready creative thesis. And our students’ successes have been nothing but amazing. They’ve published with some of the best (many while still in the program), won important prizes, moved into tenured academic positions, and been published in global languages. What we’ve also found to be consistently true is how collegial this program is — with a lively and supportive cohort, and friendships that last beyond time spent here.

Our themed studio workshops are now offered as hybrid/cross genre experiences. My colleagues teach workshops in horror, speculative and experimental fiction, poetry of place, poetry and the archive — these give our students so many more options for honing their skills. And we continue to explore ways to collaborate with other programs and units of the university. One of my cornerstone projects during my term as 20 th  Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth was the creation of a Virginia Poets Database, which is not only supported by the University through the Perry Library’s Digital Commons, but also by the MFA Program in the form of an assistantship for one of our students. With the awareness of ODU’s new integration with Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) and its impact on other programs, I was inspired to design and pilot a new 700-level seminar on “Writing the Body Fantastic: Exploring Metaphors of Human Corporeality.” In the fall of 2024, I look forward to a themed graduate workshop on “Writing (in) the Anthropocene,” where my students and I will explore the subject of climate precarity and how we can respond in our own work.

Even as the University and wider community go through shifts and change through time, the MFA program has grown with resilience and grace. Once, during the six years (2009-15) that I directed the MFA Program, a State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) university-wide review amended the guidelines for what kind of graduate student would be allowed to teach classes (only those who had  already  earned 18 or more graduate credits). Thus, two of our first-year MFA students at that time had to be given another assignment for their Teaching Assistantships. I thought of  AWP’s hallmarks of an effective MFA program , which lists the provision of editorial and publishing experience to its students through an affiliated magazine or press — and immediately sought department and upper administration support for creating a literary journal. This is what led to the creation of our biannual  Barely South Review  in 2009.

In 2010,  HuffPost  and  Poets & Writers  listed us among “ The Top 25 Underrated Creative Writing MFA Programs ” (better underrated than overrated, right?) — and while our MFA Creative Writing Program might be smaller than others, we do grow good writers here. When I joined the faculty in 1998, I was excited by the high caliber of both faculty and students. Twenty-five years later, I remain just as if not more excited, and look forward to all the that awaits us in our continued growth.

This essay was originally published in the Spring 2024 edition of Barely South Review , ODU’s student-led literary journal. The University’s growing MFA in Creative Writing program connects students with a seven-member creative writing faculty in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.

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‘What’s Next?’ for Anton Dela Cruz: From Creative Writing to Ethical Leadership at UVA Darden

By David Buie-Moltz

As the University of Virginia Darden School of Business prepares to graduate its Class of 2024, Anton Dela Cruz is set to move from a multifaceted career in operations to a strategic role in healthcare consulting. His time at Darden has fueled significant personal growth and a shift toward ethical leadership and community involvement.

Raised in Westchester, New York, Dela Cruz’s academic and professional journey is a testament to his resilience and adaptability. Initially enrolled in an engineering program at Cooper Union, he discovered a stronger pull toward the sciences and nature, leading him to study creative writing at SUNY Purchase. “I realized I was more interested in pure science and studying nature than the design process of engineering,” Dela Cruz explains.

He began an MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of South Carolina, where he shares he was the program’s only person of color and navigated coming out as queer. Although he left the program unfinished, it marked a significant chapter in his development. He then joined The Free Times , an alternative weekly in Columbia, South Carolina, where he managed ad production during a tumultuous change in ownership. “This experience tested our team but also brought us closer together. It made me think deeply about what it means to lead and make ethical business decisions,” he notes.

A turning point in Dela Cruz’s journey was when he listened to a Darden admissions podcast featuring Professor Ed Freeman , the renowned father of stakeholder theory. This encounter solidified Darden as the ideal platform for him to merge his ethical values with his career aspirations.

At Darden, Dela Cruz has excelled academically and as president of Pride at Darden , enhancing visibility and support for the LGBTQ+ community. Supported by the need-based AccessDarden and a merit scholarship, his Darden education has been integral to his professional formation.

His roles, ranging from IT-managed services to consulting in project management and executive coaching, have further shaped his leadership philosophy. “I was supercharged by a good boss and manager who made me feel like I could do the work,” he says.

Looking forward, Dela Cruz is eager to join Guidehouse’s Healthcare Segment. “The decisions made in healthcare consulting have high stakes as they directly impact patient care and access,” he observes, underscoring his commitment to ethical leadership and social impact in a critical sector.

This is part of a four-part series, “What’s Next?” Discover how Darden shapes the future of its graduates and read about other remarkable stories from the Class of 2024, including those about Kate Grusky , Yonah Greenstein and Sharon Okeke .

The University of Virginia Darden School of Business prepares responsible global leaders through unparalleled transformational learning experiences. Darden’s graduate degree programs (MBA, MSBA and Ph.D.) and Executive Education & Lifelong Learning programs offered by the Darden School Foundation set the stage for a lifetime of career advancement and impact. Darden’s top-ranked faculty, renowned for teaching excellence, inspires and shapes modern business leadership worldwide through research, thought leadership and business publishing. Darden has Grounds in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the Washington, D.C., area and a global community that includes 18,000 alumni in 90 countries. Darden was established in 1955 at the University of Virginia, a top public university founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819 in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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Molly Mitchell Associate Director of Content Marketing and Social Media Darden School of Business University of Virginia [email protected]

New Effort Expands National Presence for Prison Education Program Founded at Darden

Stakeholder: How Ed Freeman’s Vision for Responsible Business Moved From Theory to Reality

‘What’s Next?’ for Yonah Greenstein: From the Basketball Court to the Boardroom at UVA Darden

‘What’s Next?’ for Kate Grusky: A Journey of Purpose and Philanthropy at UVA Darden

‘What’s Next?’ for Sharon Okeke: A New Chapter in Investment Banking and a Journey of Growth at UVA Darden

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The challenge of being a creative person once you’ve created a person

A very tired parent’s tips for writing a book while also doing all the other things.

Eight or nine years ago, an old friend called seeking advice. She was trying to write a novel, but she was also a new mom with a full-time job, and she was exhausted. I, who had breezily published a couple of books by then, offered my best wisdom. You have to push through, I told her sternly. You have to take your own writing seriously, or nobody else will. Set aside two hours every night. Put on the coffee and push through the exhaustion. You can and will do it.

Years passed. Then I, too, had a baby. Then I, too, set out to write a book while also being a mother with a full-time job. And somewhere in the middle of this endeavor, I called my friend and asked whether my advice had been as bad as I was beginning to sense it had been. No, she told me cheerfully, it had actually been much worse. The callousness of it had shocked her, she said, until she decided that I simply hadn’t known any better and that, when I did, I would apologize.

God, I’m so sorry.

My first post-baby book came out today, and I have been thinking, almost nonstop, about the relationship between creativity and motherhood. I used to love reading articles with titles such as “The daily routines of 10 famous artists,” until I realized that Leo Tolstoy may have finished his masterpieces by locking his study doors to ensure uninterrupted productivity, but, like, what were his 13 children doing while he was in there? Did anyone check in on Mrs. Tolstoy? For the women I know, there is no setting aside a few hours at the end of the workday. The end of the workday is the beginning of the parent day. The end of the parent day is never, because 2-year-olds wake cheerfully at 5 a.m., and strep throat comes for us all.

Where, in this schedule, was the life of the mind? TikTok would not stop showing me videos of mothers showing off their “realistic beauty routines,” but what I really wanted were realistic creativity routines: the mothers who didn’t give a crap about heatless curlers, but had somehow composed a cello sonata while working five days a week as a dental hygienist.

In my bleariest days of early parenthood, I met a woman at the playground who had just finished doing something extraordinary (Triathlon? Solo art exhibit?), and when the rest of us asked her how she’d found the time, she shrugged and said, modestly, “Oh, you know.” But the point was that we didn’t know, and we were desperate for her to tell us. (Live-in grandparents? Adderall?)

The bigger point is that we weren’t really trying to figure out how to compete in triathlons. We were trying to figure out how to be people.

When you have a baby or a toddler, reminding yourself that you are a full person with your own dreams and needs can feel both completely vital and completely impossible. But being a full person is a sacred legacy to give to a child. My own mother is a folk artist. When I was growing up, she made Ukrainian eggs in the frigid concrete sunroom, a space heater at her feet, and her works were shown and sold at galleries around the Midwest. I knew then, and I know now, that my mother would die and kill for me. But I also knew that she loved other things, too. She had loved those things before she ever knew me. She had secrets and wisdom to pass on.

Her work had nothing to do with me, yet it was a gift. It paid for my brother and me to go to summer camp. It went on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, and we visited it, as well as the Seurats and the Hoppers, and ate granola bars. When my mother dies, I will carefully unwrap the tissue paper surrounding the astonishing works of art she gave to me over the years, and I will sob.

I want that for my own daughter. I want her to know that motherhood doesn’t have to atrophy personhood; it can expand it.

And in wanting that, desperately, I came up with a routine that allowed me to maintain a grip on the parts of me that were me before I was a mother. A realistic creativity routine, if you will.

I write between the hours of 10 p.m. and midnight, unless it turns out that I write between the hours of 2 a.m. and 4. I write 300 to 400 words every time I am on the Metro; I write 30 to 40 words each time I pick my daughter up from day care, in the three-minute gap between when I ring the outer bell and when a teacher’s aide comes to let me inside. I write badly. I write very, very badly, vaguely remembering a quote I’d once heard attributed to author Jodi Picoult, about how you can always edit a bad page, but you can never edit a blank page.

Does it look like the routines of Tolstoy, or Virginia Woolf, or anyone else I may have once read about in an article about the routines of famous artists? It does not. But the bad pages get edited, and then they get good.

Pursuing creativity as a working mom means, in other words, letting go of any romantic notions of what creativity means or looks like.

It means not waiting for inspiration to strike, but instead striking inspiration, bludgeoning it upside the head and wrestling it to the ground. Inspiration is a luxury, and once you realize that, you can also understand that the ability to create something through sheer force of will — without inspiration, without routine, without time — is a far more creative act than relying on a muse.

If my old friend called me now, I think that is what I would say to her. That, and:

You will not be Mark Twain, summoned by a horn when it’s time to eat the dinner someone else has prepared. You will not be going on Tchaikovsky’s vigorous two-hour walks through the countryside or spending the morning shopping for inspiring objects like Andy Warhol.

But you will create something. Not by pushing through the exhaustion so much as living alongside it, and then peering beyond it, and then stopping, and then starting, and then having superhuman discipline, and then eating a whole package of Oreos, and then finishing something beautiful at 2 a.m. and sneaking into your child’s room to see another beautiful thing, and then thinking about how the things that make us the most tired are the things that give us reason to create at all.

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2024 english and creative writing honors thesis presentations.

Please join the Department of English and Creative Writing for this year's English and creative writing honors thesis presentations, Tuesday, May 28 - Thursday, May 30, 2024, in Sanborn Library.

Please join the Department of English and Creative Writing for this year's English and creative writing honors thesis presentations, Tuesday, May 28 - Thursday, May 30, 2024, in Sanborn Library. These presentations will also be available virtually. Please register at dartgo.org/engl-cw-honors .

Tuesday, May 28, 2024

12:30 p.m. Introduction   12:45 p.m. Elle Muller Haunted Halls and Misnamed Monsters: Displacement and Erasure in Hrólfs Saga Kraka and Beowulf   1:00 p.m. Kennedy Hamblen Soft Mechanics: Hallucinogenic Media from De Quincey to Burroughs   1:15 p.m. Jea Mo Letters from Hanseong Street   1:30 p.m. Elizabeth Lee Grooves of Enactment: Bob Dylan's Planet Waves and the Philosophy of Recording   1:45 p.m. Isabella Macioce Everything Is a Love Poem   2:00 p.m. Ophelia Woodland Landmarks: A First Approach

Wednesday, May 29, 2024

1:00 p.m. Introduction   1:15 pm. Eliza Holmes The Madwoman Reimagined: Narration and the Diagnostic Process in Victorian Gothic Fiction   1:30 p.m. Maria Amador The Museum of Everyday Life   1:45 p.m. Kat Arrington Please Watch Me When I'm Alone So I Don't Stop Existing   2:00 p.m. Elijah Oaks A Paralytic History: Narratives of the Late South   2:15 p.m. Edgar Morales Out in the Field, There Are No More Fences   2:30 p.m. Zhenia Dubrova What Remains: Stories

Thursday, May 30, 2024

10:00 a.m. Introduction   10:15 a.m. Grace Schwab Counsel and Consequence: Intergenerational Models of Womanhood in the Novels of Jane Austen   10:30 a.m. Arielle Feuerstein "Remember who the enemy is": Liminality as a Tool for Revolution in The Hunger Games   10:45 a.m. Laurel Lee Pitts Good Neighbors   11:00 a.m. Heather Damia In a Woman's Hide: Supernatural Gender in Shakespeare's History Plays   11:15 a.m. Jiyoung Park Post Office 4640   11:30 a.m. Michaela Benton Wounded Lives: Trauma, Survival, and Slavery in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Octavia Butler's Kindred .