(A. C. Niehaus Creative Nonfiction 64, 22–26; 2017
Box 1: Practice makes perfect
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Cultivate the muse
Culture: Cultivate the muse
- Journal name:
- Nature
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- 542,
- Pages:
- 381–383
- Date published:
- DOI:
- doi:10.1038/nj7641-381a
Seth Amman
Molecular biologist Gaia Bistulfi writes novels for young adults.
Writing fiction allows neuroscientist David Eagleman to ask the big questions that science can't yet answer. He had already written several non-fiction books about perception and cognition, and had scripted and presented a television series on the brain. These are ways to disseminate science to the broader public. But his more-recent fiction writing has allowed him to explore and wrestle with the biggest ideas, he says.
“These are the questions that live some distance beyond the cycles of papers and grants,” Eagleman says. Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives (Pantheon, 2009), a collection of stories that explore human identity from the perspective of those who have died, was translated into 29 languages and turned into two operas. “I feel that fiction picks up right where my science leaves off,” says Eagleman, who is at Stanford University, California, and chief executive of Braincheck, a company that uses technology to measure brain function. “I can prove X, Y, Z in the lab, but what happens beyond that? Fiction asks the big 'what ifs', which are the most powerful inroad into everything we're doing.”
Whereas Eagleman's non-fiction articles and books translate his scientific research for a broader audience, his fiction takes him well beyond the field of neuroscience. “To some degree, they're really separate worlds — writing journal articles and writing fiction — and that's fine with me.” He's currently writing a novel, Eon, about the cosmos that spans more than 200 billion years.
Science is a creative process. Researchers must be inventive and ingenious as they design experiments, seek funding and try to publish results. But those who find time to squeeze creative writing into their life at the bench (and the laptop) report that there is a pay-off. Whether they write poems, stories, blogposts or novels, the act of writing creatively can help to unleash the spark that fuels original research.
Little information is available worldwide on the number of researchers who pursue creative writing informally or as a moonlight gig. But, anecdotally, many scientists are drawn to pen creative work. Their interest comes at an opportune time, when consumer publications and platforms such as blogs are increasingly inviting researchers to write about their work or their personal experiences as scientists.
People can start writing creatively through a variety of routes. Some include writing for their institution's website, joining a local writers' group or attending a university course or an outside workshop on creative writing (see 'Practice makes perfect').
Break down barriers
Astrophysicist and author Gregory Benford launched his creative-writing career while a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, in the 1960s. Since then, he has published 31 science-fiction novels and 223 short stories. Now an emeritus faculty member at the University of California, Irvine, he credits his fiction writing for some of the theories he has created as part of his scientific research. “You can devise thought experiments beyond the real and into the possible,” says Benford, who is now an adviser on Breakthrough Starshot, a privately funded initiative to develop a fly-by mission to the Alpha Centauri star system. “Fiction aids scientific discovery and thinking. It makes me a better scientist and researcher.”
Benford's Galactic Center Saga, for instance, a series about a galactic war between mechanical and biological life, led him to study radio maps of the real Galactic Centre, the rotational centre of the Milky Way. He devised a hypothesis about the radiating filaments observed in the centre, and published his first paper on the subject in 1988. “Even today it seems like a viable model,” he says. And it's a two-way street. His 1980 time-travel novel Timescape (Simon & Schuster, 1980) was based on research for his PhD thesis, and imagines an ecological disaster that takes place in 1998. His 1970 story, The Scarred Man, anticipates the computer virus.
For many writer–scientists, creating poems, song lyrics or fiction helps them to unwind and to access and practice a different way of thinking, even if they don't deliberately try to channel their muse into their academic thinking and writing. “When molecular research becomes frustrating, I can recharge my batteries, giving free rein to my creativity,” says Gaia Bistulfi, a molecular biologist at D'Youville College in Buffalo, New York. She writes novels in the young-adult genre and blogs for her young audience about social issues and her life as a writer–scientist. “Fiction writing has helped me reconnect with my community and find renewed purpose for my scientific research as well.”
Bistulfi has published four novels (as Gaia B. Amman), which explore social issues such as eating disorders, sexuality and drug abuse. For years, she wrote peer-reviewed papers on molecular biology, but she says that it wasn't until she started writing novels that she gained the voice and courage to extend her neutral scientific writing to penning opinion pieces. She sent a Correspondence article to Nature ( Nature 502, 170; 2013) calling on scientists to reduce, reuse and recycle lab waste. “I would have never thought to do that before my experience as a novelist,” says Bistulfi. “Fortified by my writing experience, I gathered the courage to express my thoughts in a format that did not require standard deviations and graphs.”
Whereas writing fiction appeals to some scientists, others find non-fiction — such as blogs, essays or books — about their own research or research field to be the most accessible genre. Beth Shapiro, an evolutionary molecular biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, had been at the bench for 13 years before deciding to try her hand at popular scientific non-fiction. She wrote her first book, How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction (Princeton Univ. Press, 2015), because she wanted to communicate to a non-scientific readership the differences between the science fiction of de-extinction and what was technically feasible — and what might become feasible in the future. Shapiro also wanted to show how emerging genetic tools could be used to enhance beneficial traits in existing animals to help them survive in a changing climate. “I enjoyed the freedom to write a popular book,” she says. “It was a relief from writing a journal article. And I think it made me a better writer.”
Penning the book helped her to write manuscripts more clearly. “I had to be able to communicate complex ideas in a simple way, but without cutting corners or leaving out the important parts,” she says. “This translates to academic publishing. Nobody ever complained that a manuscript was too easy to understand.” Another benefit is that researching the book deepened her understanding of the field well beyond her specific research. “It forced me to dive into literature that is tangential to my everyday research but critical to understanding different components of de-extinction,” says Shapiro.
Personal perspective
For those who want more immediate reader interaction, blogging is popular. Hanneke Meijer, a palaeontologist at the University of Bergen in Norway, is one of a team of researchers that contributes to Lost Worlds Revisited, a palaeontology blog for The Guardian newspaper in London. “I enjoy telling people what my research is about,” she says. “I like the exposure it gives my research, and it's a way to highlight my field. Blogging is a nice way of showing people there's a lot more to palaeontology than dinosaurs and mammoths.” Between researching for her blogposts and writing them, Meijer says she has learnt to think more broadly as a scientist and to step back and ask herself, partly for her readers, why her research and the broader field are important to the public.
Kris Krüg/PopTech
Evolutionary biologist Beth Shapiro is a published science non-fiction author.
Meijer likes to weave some of her own experiences and perspectives into her posts, which she cannot do in her papers. Personalizing them provides a 'hook' into the story, she says. She adds that it helps to make the post more interesting and allows non-scientists to relate more closely to research and to palaeontology itself.
If all of this sounds as though it takes a lot of time, it does. “I work all the time,” says Bistulfi. And the time sink isn't the only downside of moonlighting. Published work, particularly if it is not connected to one's research, can raise eyebrows among colleagues and superiors. And, like many aspects of research itself, writing can be a lonely pursuit. But many maintain that it becomes a compulsion. “Once you do something you love,” says Bistulfi, “it doesn't feel like work.”
Some researchers weave their work into their writing. Clinical epidemiologist Anne McTiernan co-wrote Breast Fitness (St. Martin's Press, 2000), which explores the connection between exercise and a lowered risk of breast cancer. She then started Grandma Doc, a blog that discusses health care and her life as a researcher, physician and grandmother.
“Once you do something you love, it doesn't feel like work.”
McTiernan decided to build the blogposts into a larger, more cohesive body of work. Thus began her coming-of-age memoir Starved: A Nutrition Doctor's Journey From Empty to Full (Central Recovery Press, 2016), which delves deeply into her childhood struggle with both anorexia and obesity, and her adult life as a medical practitioner and researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. McTiernan says that writing the book has helped her to excavate long-buried emotions that give her insight into her patients' struggles and improve her research. “When you're writing a memoir, it puts you in touch with feelings,” she says. “It has reminded me how difficult it is to have weight issues. Now I really feel for those patients in clinical trials who have been trying to lose weight.”
Osmo Pekonen, a mathematician at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, finds a connection between maths and poetry. “The art of poetry is a matter of condensing meaning into a single beautiful and striking line, and a mathematical formula does the same,” he says. Like poets or philosophers, mathematicians explore the realm of the spirit, whereas physicists, chemists and others deal with matter, adds Pekonen, who writes poems, reviews, essays, and books about poetry and poets.
He has organized an annual international conference called Bridges on the link between maths and poetry, and is book reviews editor for The Mathematical Intelligencer, a magazine published by Springer that explores the human side of maths. “Like a new mathematical theory, creative poetry can encompass an entire world in a condensed form,” he says. “Mathematical rigour and poetical fantasy inform each other in my thinking. Mathematics seems to represent structure while poetry carries the spirit.”
Although creative writing poses its own challenges, researchers who dive into it say that it makes their life, including their work, more rewarding and diverse. “My science-fiction writing and my research continue to inform each other,” says Benford. “To me, it's absolutely essential to life balance that I have writing on the side.”
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Blog post: From scientist to combining science and novel writing
CAREER COLUMN
Write fiction to discover something new in your research
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In the final month of my Australian Research Council fellowship at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, I published papers about sex-crazed marsupials, wrote grant applications and finished The Breeding Season, an as-yet-unpublished novel.
Yes, I wrote a novel — fiction founded on my science research. The story takes what I know about reproductive conflict in wild animals and explores it in humans. It’s the hardest and most gratifying thing I have ever done.
I never expected to write about science in this way, mainly because I thought science and art were mutually exclusive. I learnt to avoid bias and passion, and to present my data as if seen through a microscope from a careful distance. Science is objective. Art, by contrast, is all about perspective, subjectivity and the confused experience that is life.
But creative writing can make scientific communication more powerful. We remember stories because our brains are wired to: we find them more interesting and are more likely to retell information if it’s presented as narrative rather than exposition. In fact, papers written in a more-narrative style might be published in higher-impact journals and cited more often (A. Hillier et al. PLoS ONE 11, e0167983; 2016).
I’ve spent the past five years collecting data on ageing in northern quolls (Dasyurus hallucatus), small marsupials whose males essentially copulate themselves to death. As a scientist, I analyse, interpret and present the data with objectivity, according to the conventions of my field.
But I don’t want to put distance between myself and my work, or between my work and the public. I want to show that the questions these animals face are universal — for example, how much time and energy to expend in making babies, and what that investment means for every other aspect of life. These issues define the choices we make about when and whether to have children, how to balance our careers with our families and how to spend our finite lives.
This is messy stuff. It’s complex and complicated in ways not easily explored in a paper.
Last year, I published an essay called ‘Pluripotent’ (A. C. Niehaus Creative Nonfiction 64, 22–26; 2017), which examines the role of stem cells in the context of my experiences as a mother, researcher and cancer survivor, but also, metaphorically, as a woman in science. Creative writing can bring difficult concepts to life.
For me, compressing science into academic journals simply isn’t enough. I’m frustrated by the need to reduce my ideas and experiments to publishable pieces while simultaneously ensuring that they are broadly relevant. I believe that the most exciting things happen at the fringe, the overlap, the moment we look at the same question through a different lens altogether. New ideas happen outside our comfort zone.
My research shows that among northern quolls, males and females lead different lives because of variations in how their bodies balance reproduction and longevity. How would these differences affect a reproductive relationship between humans? Their careers? Their ambitions? Isn’t this what many of us really want to know?
In writing quoll biology into my novel and a short story, I discovered that artists and writers seek truth as much as scientists do. They embed facts with experiences to give them context and meaning. And stories deal not only with what is true, but also with what is possible. Through fiction, I may discover something about sex and death that my research did not tell me.
Where to start? Take a workshop in creative writing, curate an online gallery of inspiring images or invite writers to your next symposium. Stories are there in every book, movie and conversation — so notice them, and harness their energy to share your work.
Nature 557, 269 (2018)
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