Why PhDs Need to Study Creative Writing

To reach audiences outside the ivory tower of academia, one must care about the storytelling as much as the sociology.

It seemed pandemic-appropriate to spend the last few hours of 2021 watching a film about the end of days. I put on Don’t Look Up, the Netflix comedy about a PhD candidate at Michigan State University who discovers a nine-kilometer comet that, in six months, will crash into the earth and cause mass extinction, the end of life itself.

My favorite moment in the film comes about a half hour in. The aforementioned doctoral candidate Kate Dibiasky, portrayed by Jennifer Lawrence, goes on national news to warn the public about the impending, but preventable, apocalypse. She explains, robotically, that she was “monitoring exploding stars to help measure the expansion of the universe” when she discovered a comet—“a big one”—that is “headed directly at earth and it will very likely hit.”

The two reporters—more of the Inside Edition than CNN type—are unable (unwilling?) to grasp the urgency of this discovery, prompting Dibiasky to go from zero-to-unhinged in 2.5 seconds. On live television, she completely loses her shit.

“Maybe the destruction of the entire planet isn’t supposed to be fun. Maybe it’s supposed to be terrifying and unsettling!” She’s screaming now, hands flailing on the anchor desk. She breaks the fourth wall, a last ditch attempt to appeal to anyone who’ll listen. “And you should stay up all night—every night—crying, when we’re all 100% for sure gonna fucking die!” Diabiansky runs off stage in tears.

Dibiansky’s motivations for going on the show are pure: She wants to save the planet. But she’s unable to play by the rules of media appearances, prompting the reporters to make her, not the planet-destroying comet, the spectacle. That said, at this point in the movie, my face is drenched with tears, my belly aching from laughing so hard.

I’ve been an academic for nearly two decades, and so I got exactly what this scene was satirizing. Whether in the sciences or humanities, academics are so specialized in their niche that they often forget how to convey their knowledge to a general public. In fact, in academia, your success is predicated on your ability to be in conversation with other experts, not everyday people. Academics who do produce accessible work are perceived as intellectually unrigorous; they’re dumbing things down.

When we’re doing our PhDs, we are trained to be in conversation with “the literature,” but we’re not trained to contextualize our research within the broader marketplace of ideas, where we’re competing for the time and attention of people outside the ivory tower. One of my friends, a journalist at NPR, once told me, “Whenever I interview an academic, I always have to repeat the same question: ‘Okay, now how would you say that, but to a normal person?’”

A little about me: I’m a sociologist who researches and writes about Filipino Americans, a major immigrant population in the United States (at more than four million and counting). But we’re not a group that garners major attention from mainstream media outlets and book publishers. For example, before the Covid-19 pandemic and anti-Asian hate incidents of 2021 thrusted us into the media spotlight, Filipino Americans rarely appeared in national newspapers. I once did a content analysis of over a thousand articles in the New York Times about Asian Americans; only 6% mentioned Filipinos, even though Filipinos are 20% of the Asian American population. Go into any bookstore in the country and visit their less-than-a-shelf-long Asian American books section—if there even is one. At most, there’ll be one, maybe two, books about Filipino Americans. Happening upon a Filipino American book in a bookstore is like finding a needle in a haystack.

Still, I felt writing about Filipino Americans mattered, and I published a book about my research, The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race, with a small university press. Even though I don’t have a “hot” research topic, a book at a Big Four publisher, and a teaching position at Harvard or Berkeley, I’ve done pretty well for myself. I’ve published essays in GQ and Colorlines about my research and advocacies. I’ve been interviewed by the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, The Atlantic, and NPR (thrice). My book was mentioned by Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker.

In my field of sociology, my colleagues are doing cutting-edge research on educational inequality, political violence, immigration, transgender rights; few pursue these topics for the sake of producing knowledge that’ll stay within the ivory tower. A greater majority of them ask me, for example, how I managed to get my research on NPR. Of course, luck plays a role, but if I had to hypothesize the biggest contributing factor, it’s that I’ve always followed one rule of thumb: Care as much about the sentences and storytelling as you do the sociology.

“Okay, now how would you say that, but to a normal person?”

A typical academic journal article runs about 8,000 words long and can take hours to read (for reference, the average American reads about twenty minutes a day). The diction of journal articles is discipline-specific; for instance, a sociologist’s training wouldn’t prepare them to read an article on literary criticism or econometrics, even though they’re all under the same umbrella of liberal arts. On the off chance someone outside academia wants to read an academic article, they may not have the time or disciplinary expertise necessary to muscle through a piece.

It’s why researchers need diverse ways to tell stories. Models do exist. Eve L. Ewing, a sociologist of education, wrote a book on school closures in Chicago, and she writes poetry and authors Marvel comics. Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote a book on how for-profit colleges exacerbate racial inequality, and she penned an award-winning essay collection and writes op-eds for the New York Times. The writer Jason Reynolds said it best in a conversation with Traci Thomas, host of the podcast The Stacks: “I wanna be able to be read from cradle to grave, and so I wanna create enough iterations of what we call the book, so that it doesn’t matter where you are in your journey—you can pick something up and be like, ‘Yo this is dope.’”

This resonated deeply: I write not only for other academics—I write for Filipino Americans, whether they’re from Daly City or Des Moines. I write for Filipino Americans, whether they grew up proud or ashamed of being Filipino. I write for Filipino Americans, young and old, whether they were born in this country or migrated here as adults.

A follow-up question I often get: How do you manage to follow these tenets when you exist in an industry that incentivizes the rigor of your research, but not the readability and resonance of your prose among public audiences? My answer is that, when I took a mental health break from academia, I skipped academic conferences for a couple of years and instead took creative nonfiction writing classes.

I didn’t always see the value of formally studying creative writing. Part of it had to do with my socialization as a PhD student. In graduate school, professors often assigned multiple books and journal articles to read for each class session (hundreds of pages of reading a week, per class). Once, a professor had us read Distinction, a 700-plus-page book by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose sentences I had to re-read, like, three times to decipher the main point. This was while I was also taking courses on advanced statistics and quantitative methodology. I wasn’t a statistics buff at all, but I sometimes found more solace calculating probabilities than powering through paragraph-long sentences. Numbers were clear; jargon was not.

And so, we learned very quickly to read for function, not the experience. We mastered how to skim readings so that we could mine the main argument. When it came time for comprehensive exams, my reading list included upwards of 150 to 200 works that I had to familiarize myself with and synthesize. Then, on exam week, I had to swiftly channel my knowledge of these works to write three twenty-page essays, showcasing my expertise on American race relations, US colonialism, and immigration policies. Months after my comprehensive exam, I ran into the professor assigned to grade it. I nervously asked him if I passed. He said I did, but the look on his face told me that he probably spent no more than an hour, if that, reading my essays.

In the final years of the PhD, as we prepared for the academic job market, we were told we had to publish peer-reviewed articles in academic journals in order to land a tenure-track job. Funnily enough, there were no actual courses in how to publish; we just had to figure it out ourselves. (Thankfully, my former department now offers a course on publishing.) In the academic peer review process, reviewers—usually super busy with their own research and teaching—spend just a few hours (sometimes just one) assessing whether a piece is publishable or not. Sometimes, that decision is shaped not by the rigor of the project, but rather the idiosyncratic research tastes or methodological inclination of a particular reviewer. And because we skim, the review process incentivizes scholars to frontload their findings in the first pages of their articles while couching them within an academic framework.

I mimicked this approach when I was trying to publish The Latinos of Asia. The book was based on my dissertation about the way Spanish and American colonialism shaped the racial experiences of Filipino Americans in Los Angeles. However, while writing the book’s first iteration, I kept thinking: Would a Filipino college student be able to understand this? Better yet, would my parents be able to understand this?

The answer was no. In truth, I wanted to write the book that I should’ve been able to read in college. As Toni Morrison put it: “If there’s a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written, then you must write it.” So when I finally secured a publisher in 2012, I told my editor that I wanted to write a “Malcolm Gladwell-style” book (please don’t judge me!). By that I meant I wanted it to be jargon-free, so that you didn’t need an advanced degree to read the book.

My book editor gave me my first lesson in creative writing. “You gotta get the reader to want to turn the page,” she said. This advice was antithetical to the logic of article writing, where the key takeaways of a research study are laid out in the opening pages, like spoilers to a movie.

“You gotta get the reader to want to turn the page.”

As I revised the book, I opted to remove the sociological jargon. I also inserted my own family’s stories in some of the chapters to serve almost like case studies—demonstrating theory made practice. One of my professors warned me that my book read “too personal” and “not academic enough.” In the months before the book’s publication, I was scared shitless about the risk I was taking by not writing in academic language.

My anxiety dissipated, however, once the book was published in 2016. Filipinos from all over the country—from high school seniors to senior citizens—emailed me about how much the book resonated with them. College students reached out to share they were pursuing thesis and documentary projects inspired by the book. A choreographer reached out to tell me one of his shows was inspired by the book. A curator hosted an exhibit of Filipino and Latinx artists because she’d read the book. My book won zero awards from my discipline’s professional associations, but the emails I received from these Filipinos were reward enough for me.

The job of the sociologist is to use research to accurately render the human condition. But because it’s a discipline built on studying social problems, “the literature” that centers people of color, queer and trans people, and other marginalized communities also tends to focus on trauma. The field too incentivizes trauma-driven narratives: Sociologists don’t get six-figure research grants, fellowships, and tenure-track jobs to study joy and laughter within marginalized communities.

But the reality remains: Alongside trauma, we experience joy; we laugh. Queer life isn’t just about the Pulse shooting. Black life isn’t just about police killings. Immigrant life isn’t just about deportation. Traditional sociology, in my experience, couldn’t capture the full humanity of the communities I was part of; by design, academia constrained that storytelling. Which is why, out of personal necessity, I turned to creative writing. I wanted to write another kind of literature.

Creative writing has freed me. Memoirs were my blueprints to help navigate systems of power. Fiction helped me reimagine my future when the present felt unbearable. Poems shepherded me to—and through—unknowable things. Ultimately, creative writing has made me a better sociologist; the tools it offers me—dialogue, sensory detail, rhythm, pace, the speculative—means I can render the beautifully messy contradictions of the human condition, especially for those who are systematically dehumanized. Like Kate Dibiansky, I’ve found that research can save lives, so long as the rhetoric in which it’s packaged resonates with those who need to hear it the most.