From Research to Fiction: How David Lydon-Staley Merges Academia and Creativity

Annenberg School for Communication Assistant Professor David Lydon-Staley loves the written word. When he’s not teaching classes or studying how people satisfy their curiosity online, he can be found reading a novel next to his dog, Stacey.

An Irish expat, Lydon-Staley honed his love for literature at Trinity College Dublin, where he studied English and psychology. His interest in psychology led to research projects to understand the minutiae of daily life, specifically how small changes in behavior from second to second affect health and well-being, which he investigates through his lab at Annenberg.

The need to understand human emotion and behavior inspired Lydon-Staley to pursue a Master’s in Creative Writing at Drexel University. 

We recently spoke to Lydon-Staley about his creative practice, the overlap between his creative and academic work, and how his teaching informs his writing outside of the classroom.

How has your background in researching human behavior — especially curiosity — influenced your approach to creative writing?

Because I think about curiosity every day as part of my research, I tend to bring that lens to everything I do, including creative writing. Thinking about curiosity in creative writing feels natural, though. In some ways, you can think about the job of a writer as needing to ignite the reader’s curiosity about what’s going to happen next to keep them reading. As I’m writing, then, I’m usually thinking about what knowledge gaps I’m creating and what questions the reader is likely going to ask at each point in the story. By creating knowledge gaps – What’s going to happen next? What happened in this character’s past to make them act like this? How is this romance going to turn out? – you engender a drive in readers to fill knowledge gaps to overcome a gnawing feeling of deprivation that comes from not having the full picture. You just have to be careful to find satisfying resolutions to the knowledge gaps you’ve created otherwise readers will feel like you’ve cheated them with clickbait. A fun exercise is to read the first page of a novel and count how many knowledge gaps the author has opened. Some gaps will likely be closed in a few pages but at least one will likely remain open and carry you through the entire novel. 

You are currently teaching the undergraduate course COMM 3450: Adolescence and Media. Can you share any specific instances where your academic insights into media representation of adolescents have inspired your creative writing projects?

I don’t know if I would have taken on creative writing as seriously as I am now if I hadn’t started teaching this course when I joined Annenberg. As part of this course, students learn the science behind adolescence and then engage with media, including movies, to analyze the extent to which media representations of adolescence align with scientific understanding of this period. We read, talk, and write a lot about how media representations matter for developing teens and their parents. For example, when children and their parents expect that adolescence will be a time of storm of stress, a self-fulfilling prophecy can occur whereby expectations influence the future behavior of both teens and their parents. Given the importance of media representation, students have the option to write a piece of creative writing inspired by course content as a final project. After spending years talking from a lecture podium about what the world needs to help adolescents flourish, I decided I wanted to contribute to this work more directly, and that’s part of what motivated me to pursue an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. 

In what ways do you find the process of creative writing similar to conducting academic research?

Writing a research paper and a novel feel like very different undertakings. I notice this most when, after a day of being a scientist, I switch over to creative writing. But, both types of writing require creative and analytical thinking. In science, it takes an imaginative leap to move beyond the existing literature and to design a study that will get to the heart of the question you’re asking while working within constraints related to time, funding, and many other realities. In creative writing, the effortless read that comes with a fast-paced novel is undergirded by a writer’s deep engagement with, and analysis of, craft elements. As such, part of my role as a writer is to do a lot of reading to identify what the author is doing on the other side of the page to generate the reader experience.

You recently published a short story in Cleaver Magazine — “PRODIGAL SUN.” Can you share a bit about the inspiration behind that story?

This story started as an exercise in point of view. It’s written from the perspective of someone who sees the world very differently than I do and who inhabits identities (e.g., father) that I don’t. It was inspired by persona poetry, poems written from the perspective of a persona created by the poet. An example is "Skinhead" by Patricia Smith, in which she, an African-American poet, writes from the perspective of a white supremacist. There’s a lot of power in taking someone else’s point of view. One, very reasonable, response to the current political moment is to look around at the world and exclaim our disbelief at how our fellow humans are acting in such hard-hearted ways. If we want things to change, though, it’s helpful to know the logic underlying people’s beliefs, even when, maybe especially when, we see the logic is flawed or we disagree with their beliefs. Inhabiting a persona is one way to do this and is not dissimilar to the tasks a communication scientist takes in surveying people’s beliefs to understand what specific beliefs are driving a particular behavior, identifying what is supporting these beliefs, and then intervening at these leverage points with messaging.